Oscillations

Fern stopped tinkering with the round button of her oscilloscope. She removed her heavy headset and glanced at the window in her back, where the shadows of dark oaks were dancing under the crescent moon.

Nothing.

She frowned, replaced her headset and dove back into the fluorescent waves of her screen. 

Another knock on the window. 

Fern took off her headset and stepped away from her computer.

She slid up the windowpane and ducked her head outside. Her messy hair shivered in the wind as she looked at the gutter and blackened tiles under her window. Nothing in sight, not even a bat or a stone, although she would have sworn something had tapped the glass.

“Dropped your keys?” a clear voice asked behind her.

Fern startled so violently that she hit her head against the English Ivy hanging from the ceiling. A female shadow was lulling herself back and forth on the floor, her face illuminated by the orange lava lamp at the center of the living-room.

“The door was open,” she said with a shrewd smile. 

Fern stepped backward, maintaining eye contact with the stranger, and grabbed her letter opener.

“Have no fear, Fern. I’m Elsa, your new friend.”

The woman laughed and her smile unveiled metallic teeth. 

“If I wanted to hurt you, I would have done it when you were looking outside." She shrugged one shoulder. "Is that how you think? No wonder it's taking you so long to write a new genius piece of music."

Fern's thumb caressed the blade of the letter opener in her back.

“You don’t seem too pleased to have me around,” Elsa sighed as she crawled back up. She brushed her skirt with her hands full of opals and straightened her long ivory earrings. “I didn’t want to disturb you. I just wanted to say hi to the great and grand music professor.”

Elsa approached Fern with her shrewd smile and tapped her shoulder with a CD.

“You should listen to this. It will bring up memories.” 

She patted Fern's back and walked across the living room to the entrance door. She disappeared without a sound, leaving Fern confused in the dim space.

Fern sat back at her computer and pushed the CD in. “Elsa F.” the only folder on the CD read. Inside that folder, a single file. Fern pushed her heavy headset back on and adjusted the tuning as she pressed play to listen to the only track it contained. 

Alternative electronic music. 

Produced with an oscilloscope.

Familiar.

Those notes were all too familiar.

Fern pinched her lips.

Without those notes she would have never been nominated to teach in the best music college in the country and certainly never become the most accomplished music composer of the decade.

Fern rummaged through the boxes where she kept her archives to document the memoirs she was planning to release in a few months. She tracked everything: her sources of inspiration, creative process, interactions, the number of walls she ran into and insights she caught.

If she had indeed used anything remotely similar to the work of that Elsa F., she would have written it down there.

Her fingers moved mechanically through the folders and scrapped notes. Browsing and searching. Meanwhile, in her head, imaginary newspapers covers appeared, splashing her face with damning allegations of plagiarism and fraud. An anonymous journalist voice commented on her fallen potential, under the ashamed eye of her dean, while her students marched and protested with yellow signs and red faces in front of the court, they would...

Damn. 

There it was. 

The list of pieces she had researched to compose her famous piece. And there she was, on the 26^th line. Ballad through the Horizon by Elsa F. 

How could she be so stupid? How could she blatantly copy such a stupid piece?

Fern smashed her headset against her desk.

A purple smoke invaded her, from the feet to the chest, and the mini-kitchen, brown sofa and sophisticated sound machines around her started to spin. The smoke thickened in her chest and Fern ran to the bathroom.

She gripped the edge of the toilet and coughed, holding her messy hair backward. Her Chinese noodles came out and she wiped her mouth, shivering. In the sink, she splashed her face. In the mirror, she saw her pallor.

As if a chunk of her had been carved out.

As if she saw herself for the first time for who she was.

For the first time in a while.

Her bare shoulders slid down the immaculate cold tiles of the bathroom wall and, as she planted her forehead into her palm and her elbows into her folded knees, she swallowed one of the pills her doctor had commanded she ditch.

She gulped a handful.

A sob came out.

And a couple of others.

*

Fern's bike slalomed between the fuming cars and buses of the noon traffic. Her mind was still blank from the morning and her stomach still wrenched from the night. The castle she was building for herself would soon be smashed and she could not let that happen.

She gripped the handlebar of her bike more tightly as she reached the almost vertical slope that lead to the campus. Those gestures she had done, everyday, for the past four years with the same pace and the same confidence, but on that day even looking ahead was a struggle.

She rose up from her saddle, still, and bent forward, as usual to accelerate. But that time, her pedal spun in vacuum, as if the chain of her bike had been disconnected from its wheels. The handlebar slipped off her hands and her feet of her pedals. Her bag weighted down on her and her helmet choke her throat as gravity called her and her ambitions back to where they belonged.

At the bottom of the slope.

Her body hit the tar with a deaf sound and her laptop smashed her nose.

Her skinned cheek burnt but she couldn't move her hand to sooth it.

A hand shook her shoulder and Fern barely managed to open her eyes.

“Are you okay, Professor?"

It was that student who was always late on lectures, she recognised her voice.

"Is your arm okay?”

Fern needed to throw up again but she couldn't open her mouth.

“Your arm, Professor. Is it okay?” The student reached for it as it was twisted under her professor's body.

Fern pushed her student's arm as she tried to crawl back up. Her elbows gave in and she collapsed, falling deep and fast into a wide cotton bubble.

*

“How many fingers do you see?”

“I want to go home.”

“Professor, please. How many fingers?”

“Let me go.”

“The doctor will be with you in a second.” The old nurse said blocking Fern’s legs with her elbows. “You are not going anywhere, Miss.”

“Don’t you know who I am?”

“I know. But the rules are the same for everyone. Will you stop moving!" The nurse shook her head with a stern look. "Now, please fill in as much as you can from this form. I’ll be right back.”

As the nurse left, Fern hoped off the bed and walked over to the window that overlooked the lawn. A group of students were basking in the sun but she couldn't stay here any longer. She'd rather ridiculise herself in front of them than waste precious minutes to come up with a plan to save her career.

She grabbed a paperweight from the nurse's desk and smashed the window with it. She dragged her broken leg up the wall and controlled herself not to throw up as she saw how high that floor was.

She closed her eyes and let herself fall out of the window.

She heard cries and screaming from the lawn where the students were and felt rose spines sink into her wounded palms as she crashed into the soil.

What happened afterwards?

She had no idea.

How did she walk back home?

She just did.

*

Leaning against the tiles of the bathtub, in underwear, Fern cleaned her wounds with red betadine and a tiny smirk as she imagined the nurse's face as she would try to reach the phone she had just unplugged in her living-room.

Fern gripped the sink tight to stand up on her quivering legs. She had a new scar, the mirror informed her. Right there, across the nose, underneath the one carved by a kid with a stone in primary school. This one would also take time to heal. 

But that didn't matter. What mattered was what to do with that Elsa.

Fern let the water run into the tub as she fetched a linen bag, a pair of scissors, tape, a sharpie and rubber bands from her tiny closet. 

She cut the bag into four equal squares and wrote down four what-to-do-with-that-Elsa options on four different slips of tape. One option per slip. She stuffed the four bags with tiny stones from the bamboo plant on the shelf and added an option in each bag. She sealed them with a rubber band and threw them into the bath water.

She snatched the first bag that surfaced back up and ripped it open, curious to see what it would command her to do.

Get her.

Fern smiled.

*

Mariela shielded her eyes from the sun as she pressed the cloth stronger against the glass of her lodge parlor to remove the stains. 

She went back in for the next steps of her morning ritual: kefir with kiwi and obituary column in the local newspaper.

A knock on the door of the lodge made her startle and Mariela glanced over her shoulder without turning back. 

Again that messy head from the third floor. 

“Hi,” the woman with messy hair said with a voice that broke into the air.

Mariela didn’t reply. She took a sip of kefir and gave a quick shake to her newspaper. Her eyes scanning from above her glasses, low on her nose, she skimmed through the article about Kimberly G. who had disappeared a month ago, after a finger of hers was found inside a poke bowl in the trash of the nearest fast-food chain.

“I said hi.”

“And I didn’t reply.”

“Do you keep track of the people who visit this building?”

“Who do you think I am, the police?” Mariela said without turning back.

“For some reason, I thought you were a retired detective.”

Mariela rose an eyebrow. That messy kid from the third floor was probably less messy than she seemed. Mariela had dropped out of secondary school, but she would have for sure been a great detective. She had all the skills required for that. Especially observation and good memory for people’s faces. 

“Mhh…” Mariela prompted, waiting for the kid to provide more examples of how she had been impressed with her.

“You’re really observant and you have a good memory for people's faces.”

Mariela wriggled her polished toes in her sandals under her desk and turned around, leaning her wrinkled cheek against her closed fist.

“I was actually expecting you to show up with a new scar.”

“How did you know?”

“I know everything.”

The messy head smiled and came closer to the parlor. 

“So, I had a question for you, Mariela. Given you know everything.”

“Yes.”

Fern asked her if she had seen anyone enter the building the night before with opal rings and long ivory earrings.

“No.”

“Her name is Elsa.”

Mariela turned around and started to circle names in her newspapers with her red pen as if alone. 

"I know you know," Fern said.

Mariela's hand started to circle the names in the obituary column much faster.

"Mariela, you -"

“Roxane is the name you’re looking for.”

“Is that her name?”

“Roxane, I said. Now leave me alone. I’ve got stuff to do.”

Mariela rose up from her chair and dragged her hunched body to the door of her apartment, adjacent to the lodge. She heard the glass of the parlor break behind her and, as she turned around, she found the messy head was facing her with fierce eyes.

“Dios mios …”

“You tell me who that Roxane is," Fern said pushing Mariela into her own flat and locking the door behind them. 

Before Mariela could open her mouth, Fern grabbed her by the neck and pressed her palm against her mouth. Mariela wriggled her legs and arms and slowly surrendered as Fern held on stronger to her. 

Fern removed her hand from Mariela’s mouth and pushed a chair in her direction. 

“You're crazy.” Mariela said, panting as she grabbed the back of the polished wooden chair. “Those scars on your nose, those bandaids... Who are you?”

“I ask the questions.”

“Oh, stop that silly game, you idiot!” Mariela said throwing an invisible ball to her face. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here with you naughty kid.” She put her wrinkled hand on her hand, as she gasped for more air.

“Who’s Roxane and how did she get access to my room?”

“How would I know?”

"Because you're the concierge on this building for God's sake!" Fern said springing up from her chair.

Mariela looked away as if to avoid a curse. Her eyes rolled down as she thought and with a grave face she looked back at Fern. 

"Get that box over there. There, by the piano. Under the plant. Yes that one. Take it and leave me alone.”

Fern walked over to the piano and opened the box, hoping to find pictures of herself and of Elsa or that of Roxane, anything. Anything remotely telling. But inside was only a rotten contact book.

“These are the names of the people who have inhabited this building at some point. Before I came. Roxane was the concierge at the time. Now get out of my sight.”

“Where can I meet Roxane?”

“She’s dead. But she forgot this when she moved out and I kept it.”

“How -”

“Out, I said. You and your ugly bandaid.”

*

Fern shut the door of the lodge and walked back up to her room flipping through the pages. Thirteen Elsas had inhabited the building since its construction. 

Fern sat down at her desk and tried to decipher the writing on the book that described each of them. But she couldn't read a thing.  

She rushed back downstairs to Mariela’s lodge but it was empty and the glass of the parlor she had broken had just been replaced. 

Fern picked up her shoe to break it again.

“Hey! What are you doing?"

The bald guy who fixed everything in the building was standing in front of her indignant, with his toothless mouth open and his dirty blue overalls.

"I just fixed this glass. What do you want?"

“I need to speak to Mariela. I’m worried for her,” Fern said. “Elsa is after her.”

“Who?”

“Elsa. The woman who broke the window of her lodge this morning.”

The man's double chin quivered and he dropped his toolbox.

“Mariela invited me over to give me this book her friend had passed on to her when she became the concierge. She said I should look after it but as she was ready to tell me why, someone broke into her flat and jumped on her. I tried to immobi-“

“Did Elsa do that to your nose?”

“She did."

“That's insane. May I see the book?”

Fern showed it from afar, without getting close the man.

“I wanted to ask Mariela a last time what to do and I wanted to make sure she's in a safe place. Do you know where she is?"

The man collected his toolbox from the floor and bit the inside of his jaws.

"I have to leave the town because of this story and I don't even know why. Elsa has seen my face, can you understand?"

The man sighed and shook his head. 

“I can." He paused and looked up at Fern. "Come with me.”

Fern hid her smile as she followed him through the grassy patio that lead to the adjacent building, where his workshop was. He asked her to wait near the entrance as he rushed in. He came back with two keys: one for his car and one for his wife's family cabin in the woods, on the other side of the county. 

“That Elsa will never find you there but it will take you time to reach the cabin.”

"How about Mariela?"

"You'll find everything what need to know in the cabin".

"What I need to know? Are you aware of anything?"

"Roxane was my mum."