No, reader, I cannot release you from this spell. I am not its source. Until that great witch, greater than Thisbe, the one who cast this hex over the Earth, is overthrown, the truth can be told only in her terms.
Thou hadst best be prepared to prove that claim in time, Mycroft. Meanwhile, since thou insistest on thy ‘he’s and ‘she’s, be clear at least. I cannot even tell whether this Chagatai is a deep-voiced woman or a man whom thou mislabelest, obeying that ancient prejudice that housekeepers must be female.
Apologies, reader. And I know it is confusing too that I must call this Cousin Carlyle ‘he.’ With Chagatai, however, your guess is wrong. It is not her job which makes me give her the feminine pronoun, despite her testicles and chromosomes. I saw her once when someone threatened her little nephew, and the primal savagery with which those thick hands shattered the offender was unmistakably that legendary strength which lionesses, she-wolves, she-bats, she-doves, and all other ‘she’s obtain when motherhood berserks them. That strength wins her ‘she.’
“Of course, Thisbe Saneer,” Chagatai repeated. “I should have placed you at once. Big name in smelltracks. You invented something major, what was it? Using some kind of neutral smell that can make a quick transition from a negative emotion smell to a positive emotion smell to make scene changes crisper?”
“That’s it exactly. They call it Thisbe’s Rinse.” The witch glowed here, for such compliments are rare as diamonds for this virtuoso whose art aims for the audience not to notice its existence. The smelltrack is as indispensable as the soundtrack, supporting the emotion of the scene with a vocabulary of scents coded to happy, sad, despairing, aroused, but the music you remember, never the smells, which aim to be too subtle to be named, like the scent which makes you feel at home when you return to the neighborhood where you grew up, even if the house is gone. Smell, science tell us, reaches the brain more directly than any other sense, and if you’ve ever watched a film with a stuffy nose you have surely found it as emotionless as if on mute.
“Thisbe’s Rinse, that’s right.” Chagatai was glowing. “Orland Vives called it the biggest breakthrough in moviemaking since Griffincam.”
“Orland and about four other people. You must be a real movie buff.”
“More a movie trivia buff. I can’t watch movies. Modo mundo.”
There was a conversation stopper. “Oh.”
“I didn’t kill a Utopian or anything,” she added quickly, waving her hands as if to erase her last words. “This is a different sort of modo mundo.”
They tried their best but couldn’t leave it there. “I thought the modo mundo sentence only existed for people who kill Utopians. They invented it. That’s the point.”
“Sorry, this is always hard to explain.” I can envision Chagatai clearly here, reaching to scratch her silver-sleeked hair, remembering the butter on her fingers just in time. “I wasn’t legally sentenced to modo mundo, just, the effect is the same. It’s not that I’m not allowed to read or watch fiction, it’s that I can’t.”
“You can’t?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
She tried to hide by returning to her roast, layering a paste of spice and onion on the buttered meat. “Well, five years ago I wanted to impress a date who was into old books, so I took a very valuable old manuscript from T.M.’s library without asking and, through a long series of mishaps, about half of which were my fault, it was ripped apart and eaten by rats.”
“What? How?”
“The full story is longer than it is interesting. Anyway, I had no excuse, and I was afraid I’d be thrown out and T.M. would demand their money back. Instead T.M. imposed modo mundo.”
“They can’t do that!” the Cousin cried again. “For losing a book? That’s gross manipulation of the law, like making someone a Servicer for breaking a tea set.”
“That could happen with a sufficiently valuable tea set. But no, it’s not a legal sentence, T.M. just did it.” Chagatai tried to snap her fingers, but onion butter made them slick. “Just like that.”
“Just like that?” Thisbe repeated. “How?”
The Blacklaw sighed. “Look, I can describe it to you, and it’ll bother you when you read or watch fiction for the next week or two, but then it’ll wear off, since it’s different when I say it from when T.M. said it. Is that okay with you? It will wear off.”
Carlyle looked to Thisbe. “Um, sure. Go ahead.”
“Next time T.M. came home I explained what happened. We were in the study and they were reading, and I remember they put down their book and turned around and looked at me while I was talking—that’s unusual, by the way, actually turning toward me or anybody, it’s not their way. They looked at me and said: ‘Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God.’ ”
Carlyle and Thisbe waited raptly. “And?”
“That’s it. Just, the way T.M. said it, from then on when I would try to read a book or watch a film, all I could see was humanity struggling in vain against a cold and arbitrary God. Or being unfairly helped by a saccharinely indulgent God. Or being toyed with by an abusive toddler God. I hated it. I can physically read a work of fiction but it’s agony, even the lightest comedy. Histories and biographies are nearly as bad. That’s why I watch light things like the Oscars. It’s hard to read God into the Oscars much.”
Even describing this to me Carlyle’s fists clenched. “People aren’t supposed to talk about religion like that.”
Chagatai took the steaming strudel from the oven. “Well, it’s sure learned me not to step out of line again. That manuscript was irreplaceable. T.M. would’ve been within their rights to chuck me out and leave me to die, but they didn’t. Modo mundo makes sense too, once you think about it a long time.”
Can you imagine Carlyle scowling here? “Not to me, it doesn’t.”
“I said once you think about it a long time. The Utopians’ idea with modo mundo is that, if you killed a Utopian, you destroyed their world, their nowhere, their ideas, their fiction, since they all invent stuff even if they don’t all publish. You destroyed a potential other world, so you get banished to this one and don’t get to go to any other worlds anymore. I think what T.M. was trying to communicate was that destroying a manuscript is effectively the same thing, destroying somebody’s creation, the remnant of the world they created, even if they’ve been dead a thousand years.” She took a saucepan from the stove and drizzled a trail of honey-scented glaze over the strudel before pouring the rest across the roast. “I’d never thought so seriously about the manuscripts before, but I sure take good care of them now.”
Strudel could not placate Carlyle. “They can’t just go around exploiting and manipulating people’s views of God like that.”
“That’s what my sensayer says too, but you know what?”
“What?”
“That one line of T.M.’s has made me think a lot more about theology than my sensayer has. A sensayer is, what, a couple hours a month? This is all day.”
“A sensayer doesn’t do it against your will!” Carlyle shot back. “A sensayer doesn’t do it to hurt you or punish you. A sensayer’s trained, a sensayer’s careful, and a sensayer would never…” He caught himself.
“What?” Chagatai sprinkled a mixture of cornmeal and fine-ground sausage over the honeyed onion butter on the roast, the last step before rolling the whole concoction like a scroll. “A sensayer would never…?”