I mention this mental phenomenon not only to linger on a pleasant recollection, but as a bridge to your thoughts on obscuration. The connections the mind makes are powerful, mysterious, and difficult to untangle. Your observation about the language of valuation surprised me (hardly the first time you’ve done that, Ms. Storer), and after rereading an obscuration text through that lens, I can see what you mean, and it makes perfect sense. The greatest challenge of obscuration has always been the incomprehensibility of consciousness and cognition. The neurons in the brain are virtually innumerable, and the number ofconnectionsis exponentially more. When you consider how those connections create the many factors that affect our behavior, it becomes apparent that a ritual could never adequately address it in any linear or algorithmic manner. To act on a human brain would be as complex as attempting to act on the entire ocean at once.
This got me thinking about the meteorological rituals developed in Europe during the Enlightenment. Have you read about Guillaume Poirier? He’s mostly a historical footnote now, but Poirier constructed a system of arcane mechanicals that purported to influence weather patterns. It was ultimately abandoned for being unpredictable and impossible to verify, and of course the practice was later banned as overreaching. But there’s a similarprinciple at work: a valuation, an accounting if you will, of the vast, complex atmosphere such that it could, in theory, be acted upon. (Aconteris the Old French word he uses, origin of the Englishaccounting,which also meant “a reckoning.”) Poirier’s writing is worth a look, as I suspect you could employ his framework to create animageof the subject’s brain. A representation, a simulacrum, a magicalunderstandingthat serves as a filter through which the desired effect could be applied.
Lots to consider, lots to discuss, and no better avenue than over dinner. I know Abyssinia well and have made a reservation a week from today at one of those discreet tables you mentioned. I’m sure waiting that long will test your impatience, but I’d like you to get a draft of a ritual completed before we dine, so we can discuss your work and, hopefully, celebrate your progress. I’m certainly not expecting something functional, but I’m hoping you’ll be able to impress me. So let us say (as long as 8 that night works for you, and regardless of what other diners and eavesdroppers might perceive)…
It’s a date.
Ellsbeth
Ellsbeth had stayed up all night reading before, but she had never done it previously with such singular focus, an attention that forewent the need for food or bathroom breaks, that meant she hadn’t realized her laptop was running so hot and pressing so deep into her leg until she stood and saw the purple imprint it left on her thigh. She was working in bed, a habit she’d picked up as an undergrad when she needed to focus. Her usual daily routine was a commute to coffee shops and college libraries, where she could set up a workstation with a notebook and an overpriced latte. But there was a problem with that: She was always aware of an invisible observer, of a sense of “performing” being a graduate student while she was in public. Her facial expressions became more contemplative when she gazed off distracted mid-sentence; she sipped at her latte with quiet sighs; she nibbled at the end of her pen in a way that she would never do if she was alone.
When she was in her bed, her only focus was the work.
Rawlins had said he hoped she could impress him, and so that was exactly what she was going todo.
Someone had uploaded the pages of a translation of Poirier to an online library for free, and though the resolution was low, by zooming in and raising the brightness of her laptop screen, Ellsbeth didn’t have too much trouble making out his sentences. The text itself was lengthy and dense; most of it involved storm systems and long-antiquatedstrategies for open sea navigation (rituals that would be no more helpful than a compass, and farlesshelpful than a working GPS), and Poirier was not a natural writer, prone to lengthy digressions and sentences that lost track of their own subject halfway through.
But sometime around two in the morning, when Ellsbeth reached a section on rituals to create rain, the hairs on her arm began to stand at attention. She wiped the sleep from her eyes and pulled a pillow behind her back so she could sit up straighter, and she opened an empty Word document to take notes. She read, and she wrote, for the next four hours straight. She was only half aware of the jovial celebratory sounds of whatever party the Banestooth Club was throwing down the street, and then the sound of the party ending and its participants dispersing a few hours later. She did not notice the sun begin to rise; it was only when a bird began chirping a mechanical trill startlingly close to her window that Ellsbeth blinked away from her computer screen and realized how long she had worked without moving.
Trying to develop a new arcane ritual sometimes felt to Ellsbeth like attempting to put a puzzle together when most of the puzzle pieces were swollen with damp and had lost their color from sitting in the sun for too long. She tried to hold as much of it in her mind at one time as she could, pulling at one thread and then another, and hoping the entire thing wouldn’t fall apart. It was around 3 a.m. that she began to see the outlines of the ritual begin to take shape.
Rawlins was right; Poirier was the key to it all. People had attempted and quickly given up at attempts at obscuration because they assumed the answer was writ magic but stronger—hammering another’s mind into obedience through brute force. But that approach was all wrong. It wasn’t strength that obscuration required but finesse, an ability toseeand understand another person’s mind. Once that was accomplished, the path unfolded itself in front of Ellsbeth miraculously, as if she were in a car speeding down a darkened highway with headlights throwing light onto the road. One step at a time, one piece of the ritual feeding into the next. It came together. It became complete.
Maybe she was delusional with lack of sleep, but she almost wanted to burst out laughing.
It wasn’t justtheoretically possible;it wasdoable.
Ellsbeth began writing as quickly as she could, her handwriting a manic scrawl. When she finished, she attached it in a PDF to Rawlins, in an email without a subject line. Ellsbeth turned out the lamp by her bedside, but she didn’t even bother to close the curtains to the sunlight of the already lightening dawn before she fell into a deep sleep.
Rawlins
Rawlins sipped the bitter dregs of a Styrofoam cup of coffee as he sleepwalked his way through the CotAA Faculty Mixer, one of many in the endless stream of social obligations that academia foisted upon him. This event was held monthly, though this would be the last of the year taking place in the courtyard behind the department offices before the cold drove them inside; even now, in late October, they were pushing their luck. Glazed donuts and travel carriers of burnt coffee were set up on picnic tables while the professors “mingled” and “networked” with one another, a few colleagues from other schools, and university administrators. Attendance was mandatory, though the utility of the events was mainly reserved for the younger faculty, who were perpetually campaigning for tenure and funding.
Rawlins was buttonholed by Pierre Braier, a prematurely balding adjunct instructor at a nearby state school who had wanted to “pick his brain” (a phrase Rawlins despised) about how to tailor one’s scholarship to maximize career prospects. Rawlins was tempted to tell the man that if people didn’t seem interested in his work, perhaps his work simply wasn’t all that interesting, but, fortunately or not, Braier seemed much more intent on unloading his frustrations than actually listening to feedback.
As Rawlins nodded absently, his eyes drifted. Across the garden, Professor Gallway was holding court, regaling some of the younger visiting faculty with stories of his travels. As if sensing Rawlins’s gaze,he looked over, and Rawlins looked away, not wanting to invite another conversation after this one. He found himself contemplating an oak tree—and perversely imagining how Ellsbeth would look if she were bound to it, and what he might do to her there. He tried to shake off the thought; the last thing he needed was to get hard in the middle of a work function.
Braier was still talking at him, it seemed. Rawlins gave the man some pat advice about how to “play the game” and excused himself, stopping at the coffee table to refill his cup and checking his phone, mainly to discourage anyone else from coming up and talking to him. He swiped through notifications and paused on a new email without any subject line. From Ellsbeth. Intrigued, glancing around as though someone might look over his shoulder, he opened the message. The text was short—Look forward to your thoughts!—and he went straight for the PDF attachment.
Reading arcane mechanicals work on a phone screen was far from ideal, and Ellsbeth’s obscuration ritual was particularly challenging—sixteen pages dense with written instructions and diagrams, so he had to zoom in and scroll with his finger to read it. As he scanned the work, at first he felt perplexed, wondering if Ellsbeth had veered off entirely in the wrong direction. But then he started to understand the strategy she was attempting—using Poirier’s system to “account” for the mind of the subject, and then conducting the ritual in such a way that it could be rendered latent in the medium of a clay compound, to be used later by touching the target. Reading through the ritual was like watching someone move around puzzle pieces without clicking any two together, so it seemed like they were making no progress—until suddenly they wereallin the right place and fit perfectly. There was not a single wasted step; Ellsbeth had apparently mastered his feedback and lost her tendency toward overcomplication. The ritual was stunning in its elegance. His heart rate quickened with a rush of excitement, not just at her achievement, but at the possibility oftrying it.Of testing out this new form of arcane influence.
Then self-consciousness came upon him suddenly as he glanced up and realized he was standing to the side of the coffee table, hunched over his phone screen with an expression of delirious wonder. He probably looked psychotic, and he tried to adjust his face to appearmore casual—worried his expression might somehow betray that he was reading a recipe for a highly illegal and dangerous strain of magic. He tried to calm himself, but he knew that simply by reading these words, he was taking another step down a dangerous path.
The faculty mixer suddenly felt oppressive; he needed to get out of there, to go back to his office and peruse the ritual on his computer, where he could take his time with it, understand it properly…and more important, figure out what todohere. He headed for the doors leading back inside the building, hoping he had stayed long enough that his attendance had been noted, but his absence would not be missed. But Lennox clocked his passage and broke from her conversational circle to intercept him on the steps.
“Tad, can I have a word?” she asked, her expression inscrutable. He felt a moment of panic, suddenly afraid that she might know what he had just read, but he simply gave her a tight smile and stepped aside to where they would not be overheard. “It’s about Ellsbeth Storer,” Lennox said flatly, then raised her eyebrows in a manner that felt accusatory.
Rawlins’s stomach dropped; an adrenaline rush of fear flooded his veins. He fought to keep his expression neutral while his mind raced, wondering if they had been caught, and how had he been so foolish, and how had it happened? Had someone walked by and overheard them in his office? Stumbled upon them in the Practicum? Was this in response to rumor, which he could deny, or was there actual evidence that would get him fired? Was Lennox coming to him early so she could warn him to stop, or was he about to be publicly humiliated and ruined? Did she somehow know about the email he had received just minutes earlier?
The whirl of thoughts created a moment of deer-in-headlights silence, which Lennox mercifully broke. “You haven’t submitted her thesis topic to the department. Those were due two weeks ago, and it’s your responsibility, as her adviser, to keep her on track.”
Relief washed over him, and his shoulders softened. He swallowed, finding his voice. “Right, sorry about that. I’ll get on her about it.”
He paused, awaiting a signal that there was nothing else to say, but Lennox evidently regarded his reply as exasperatingly vague. “Well, whatisher topic?” Lennox asked.
“Sorry?”
“I understand if she’s behind, with the late start and all, and I don’t want to be insensitive about that business with her sister. But if I’m going to wait indefinitely for a précis to approve, at leasttell mewhat to expect.”
