questions (or rather, answered them, but only with gratuitous derision), he divided his time between measuring and studying whatever object she’d worked her magic on, and hourly emailing his bosses at the shadowy government entity regarding our progress. Apparently the Maxes had delivered glowing reports on the results of Erszebet’s first spell and it seemed the bosses wanted everything she did to be as attention-grabbing as she herself now was.
Erszebet, in these interviews with me, was not illuminating. Here follows almost verbatim, as I can remember it, the gist of an early attempt:
(Upon the occasion of Erszebet taking my sweater into the ODEC with her and changing it from green wool to lavender polyester, which took much longer than we expected—an entire afternoon—and left her strangely exhausted. NB: Yes, Tristan had specific reasons for such peculiar and frivolous-seeming instructions.)
MEL: Can you explain to me how you did this?
ERSZEBET: Pah. I found where you were wearing lavender polyester and brought that here. It was hard to find. There are not many opportunities to find you owning polyester.
MEL: The physicists would say that in some parallel reality to this one in the multiverse, there is a Mel wearing a lavender polyester sweater.
Erszebet makes her dismissive face, and shrugs to make it clear she doesn’t give a fuck care what physicists would say.
MEL: What we want to understand is, how does it end up here, in this reality, and what happens to the original sweater?
ERSZEBET: I summon it here and get rid of the other one.
MEL: How, though? By what mechanism?
ERSZEBET: The same way you do anything. You do what causes the desired result. If you want something to burn, you set it on fire, if you want something to be wet, you pour liquid on it. If you want something that is upstairs to be downstairs, you send someone to collect it. It is exactly the same. Except it is more complicated to calculate what to do—for example, in that metaphor, what route to tell the servant to take upstairs, how fast to move, and so on.
MEL: But can you explain technically, mechanically—not metaphorically—what you are doing and how you do it?
ERSZEBET: Pah, if you don’t understand a perfectly simple explanation, then you are too stupid to understand a more technical one.
MEL: Fine. Can you at least explain to me why some people can perform magic and others can’t?
ERSZEBET: This is like asking why doesn’t a blind person know what blue smells like.
. . . and thus went all interviews. There are transcripts of two dozen such on that original laptop. They are probably now either archived or expunged. If I don’t escape from 1851 within the next three weeks, I will never know which.
FURTHER, ERSZEBET WAS capricious, and she knew she held all the power. We were demanding something of her (quite a lot of something, to be fair), while there was nothing we could offer her in recompense. Her greatest desire was fulfilled by circumstance: as a nineteen-year-old bombshell, she would never be re-incarcerated in the retirement home. She had other desires, but expressed them only erratically at first. Most significantly, on our twelfth day in seclusion, when we had stopped for lunch, she announced she wished to go to Hungary “to spit upon the graves of my enemies.”
“We don’t have the budget,” said Tristan, and took a bite of his tuna sandwich. He had said nothing about it, but his mysterious revenue stream seemed to be drying up. Deliveries of liquid helium were fewer and further between, and seemed to involve his spending a lot of time in exhausting phone conversations. He kept having to call Frank Oda in to help debug the ODEC, which I could see he felt bad about, since Frank wasn’t getting paid. And he kept pressing our Lukes and our Vladimir into service doing things that, to judge from the looks on their faces, weren’t in their job descriptions. Tristan had always suffered from a certain ADHD-ness, which was alternately charming and exasperating. His phone had lately been going off every few minutes, which made this even worse. He’d programmed it to produce different ringtones and vibrate-patterns for different incoming callers, so he could tell without even looking at it who was bothering him. One of those was a snatch of John Philip Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March.” It was typical American patriotic bombast, military parade stuff. Overlaid on that was a whole different set of associations based on the fact that it was the theme song for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Every so often I would hear it coming out of Tristan’s phone. When it did, he would drop what he was doing and visibly snap to attention and take that call without delay, hurrying off to a quiet part of the building and saying “Sir!” and “Yes, sir!” a lot. Obviously, this was the ringtone he’d assigned to his boss. What I didn’t know, and what I was dying to ask, was its meaning. Was “Liberty Bell March” just a snatch of patriotic music to him, or a wry allusion to an absurdist British comedy show that had been canceled before he had been born?
We were in the office just outside the ODEC, at the small table where I usually interviewed Erszebet. I had been about to suggest we repair outside to stroll down to the Charles, perhaps even drive to Walden Pond for some fresh air and sunshine (it was Memorial Day weekend in New England and we were living, working, and sleeping in a basement under fluorescent lights. I mean really, WTF.). Often I still wonder how things would be different now if I had pressed for such a constitutional. Surely in some other—better—universe, Mel made that suggestion, and so the trio left the building and was not there when General Schneider arrived.
But in our universe, the trio stayed in the basement, having this conversation:
“If you cooperate with us,” Tristan continued, swallowing his bite of tuna salad, “we can probably get funding, and then if you really want to go spit on the graves of your enemies, we can discuss it.” And then, putting down his sandwich, eyes lighting up: “Wait a minute! We can get our own funding. If you can change water to salt water . . . why not change—”
“—lead to gold,” she said with him, with an adolescent groan of disapproval. “Or anything to gold. That is the most unoriginal suggestion in the world. From the dawn of magic this is the first thing people ask of witches.”
“And?” prompted Tristan.
“We don’t do it,” she said. “Obviously.”
“Why not?”
“Ask the Fuckers.”
“What!?” Tristan and I exclaimed in unison. Erszebet had many disagreeable traits, but use of vulgar language was most certainly not one of them.
She was taken aback by our reaction. “The Fuckers,” she said. “You know. The Fuckers.”
Tristan and I looked at each other as if to verify we’d both heard it.
Erszebet laughed in a way that suggested she wasn’t really all that amused. “You people have such dirty minds. It is a perfectly normal German name. Maybe you spell it F-U-G-G-E-R just to be polite.”
“Oh,” I said, “Fugger, as in the old German banking family.”
“As in them, yes.”
“So, back to where we were,” Tristan said, shaking his head. “You’re saying we should ask some old dead German bankers why you don’t change lead into gold.”
“They are not all dead,” Erszebet corrected him. “If you go down to the financial district, you can
