The Boundless Sublime (16 page)

The kitchen was tiny. It had obviously been the break room for the old food distribution company – the kind of place that just had a fridge, a sink and an urn. The urn had been ripped from the wall, but an ancient fridge still hummed and ticked in the corner. A set of shelves that had probably once held instant coffee and grimy mugs were now lined with baskets full of fresh produce from the garden, and big oversized tubs filled with various nuts, grains and beans.

A woman stood at the bench, chopping heads of cauliflower into small florets. Her head barely reached my shoulder, and she was as thin and delicate as a bird. She had brown skin and a mass of glossy black hair in a thick braid snaking down her back.

‘Newton,’ said Lib. ‘This is Heracleitus. The new sublimate.’

The woman cast an appraising eye over me. Despite her diminutive stature, I found myself shrinking under her gaze. She was obviously not a woman to be trifled with.

‘You can finish the cauliflower,’ she said with a trace of an Indian accent, nodding towards a knife block on the bench.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Lib.

I selected a knife and began to chop, trying to get my cauliflower florets the same size and shape as Newton’s. She moved over to the opposite bench and began scooping cups of dried lentils out of one of the plastic tubs and placing them in a large bowl to soak, sprinkling them with several handfuls of salt.

‘Newton,’ I said. ‘I have a friend here. Fox. Do you know where he is?’

Newton’s stern face took on an unexpected softness. ‘You know Fox?’

I nodded eagerly. ‘He’s why I’m here. I’d really like to see him.’

‘Fox is deeply loved here,’ said Newton. ‘He is very special.’

‘I know he is.’

I saw Newton’s eyes narrow slightly as she considered me. Was she trying to warn me about something? Or was she just protective of Fox?

‘It’d only take a moment,’ I said. ‘I can come right back and finish the cauliflower.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Newton, her expression tinged with what looked like pity. ‘I’m afraid Fox is busy today.’

I turned back to my cauliflower, disappointed. Busy doing what? I glanced over at Newton, and attempted to make conversation.

‘What are we making?’ I asked.

Newton was silent for a moment before answering. ‘Lunch.’

I left it at that.

After the cauliflower, I cut up several bunches of kale, then a ton of zucchini. Bored, I studied all the shelves and surfaces, and realised there was no oven, no cooktop, no microwave.

‘Don’t you ever cook anything?’ I asked.

‘Never,’ said Newton. ‘Cooking realigns the molecular structure of food. Nitrates become nitrosamines, which are carcinogenic.’

‘But … everyone cooks food. If cooked food was bad for you, surely we’d know.’

Newton snorted. ‘That’s what they said about cigarettes.’ She put down her measuring cup and turned to me. ‘We
have many rules here, for food. Each one is based in pure science – chemical truths.’

‘So what are they?’ I asked. ‘The rules?’

‘First and foremost, nothing grown beneath the ground. The earth is aphotic, full of lead and other poisons, and all root vegetables are contaminated. The Cultivation team ensure that none of our produce touches the earth. Vegetables that fruit low to the ground, such as zucchini, melons and pumpkin, are placed on hessian bags to protect them from the soil.’

I opened my mouth to point out that all plants had roots in the soil, and wouldn’t any so-called contamination affect them, no matter how far the actual vegetables were from the surface? But then I thought better of it.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What else?’

Newton ticked things off her fingers. ‘No roasting, grilling, boiling or frying,’ she said. ‘No nightshades – that’s tomato, eggplant, capsicum, potato. And no grains, except for quinoa, chia, millet and buckwheat. Dairy, meat, sugar and gluten are poisons.’

‘What about alcohol?’ I asked, curious.

Newton shuddered. ‘Fermented foods and beverages are rotten. They corrupt your body from the inside. Food should cleanse and purify the body, not torture it.’

‘Explain the salt thing,’ I said. ‘People keep telling me it’s a cardinal element. What does that mean?’

‘Sodium is the most necessary element,’ said Newton. ‘Daddy will explain it all to you in the fullness of time.’

‘But what does cardinal element mean?’ I asked. ‘My whole life I’ve been told to cut down on salt.’

Newton’s lip curled in a sneer. ‘Nonsense. Misinformation. It’s all part of the conspiracy.’

Uh oh. ‘The conspiracy?’

‘They want to keep you a toxicant,’ said Newton. ‘Sluggish,
biddable. They don’t want people to reach their full potential. So they deny you the basic ingredients you need to survive. And worse, they trick you into believing that what you’re doing is healthy.’

‘They? Who is they?’

Newton’s eyes shifted from side to side, as if she were checking the room for spies. ‘Daddy will explain that too.’

And she wouldn’t say any more on the matter. She set me to chopping a huge bunch of parsley. I chopped and chopped, piling the vegetables in enormous bowls where Newton transformed them into a feast. She made almond meal and kale felafel, dressed the cauliflower florets with a pumpkin seed and coriander pesto, stuffed cabbage leaves with chestnuts and zucchini, and threw together a snow pea, apple and walnut salad.

I soaked millet for dinner, then set to work scrubbing the kitchen floor.

It was hard work. Really hard. Harder than I’d ever worked before. I was dizzy with hunger, and wished I’d eaten more of my quinoa porridge.

‘What time is lunch?’ I asked.

Newton looked up from her bench. ‘Daddy says that time is a human construct designed to trick our bodies into ageing.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Okay. When is lunch?’

‘When the bell rings.’

‘When will that be?’

Newton shrugged. ‘When you hear it.’

I tried to turn back to what I was doing, but I had too many questions.

‘Why is the water so disgusting?’ I asked.

‘It’s not disgusting,’ said Newton with a disapproving shake of her head. ‘It’s elutriating. Pure.’

‘It doesn’t look pure.’

Newton sighed. ‘The water that comes from taps in houses is full of poisons. Aluminium sulphate, chlorine, ammonia, fluoride. Why do you think they add all those chemicals to your water?’

I shrugged. ‘Fluoride is for our teeth. I guess the other stuff is … I don’t know. To keep bacteria out or something?’

Newton raised her eyebrows. ‘
Or something
,’ she repeated. ‘You’ve never really thought about it, have you? Why is that? It’s not because you’re not clever – you’re definitely intelligent, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. No, those chemicals drug you. They keep your brain in a haze of dopey contentment, so you won’t ask any dangerous questions.’

‘More conspiracies?’ I asked.

Newton looked at me with grudging respect. ‘You learn fast.’

It sounded crazy, but she was right. I’d never wondered what went in our water before. I’d always assumed that water was … empty. That it was all the other stuff we had to worry about. Sugar and salt and artificial sweeteners and pollution and pesticides.

‘So why the egginess?’ I asked. ‘And why so warm?’

‘We only drink rainwater,’ said Newton. ‘To avoid the toxins. Heating the water to precisely thirty-seven degrees elutriates it of airborne toxins.’

‘But Lib said warm water was dangerous.’

‘On the skin, yes. But cold water is equally dangerous to the inner body.’

That logic sounded dubious to me. ‘And the egginess?’

‘Sulphur is added to the water once it’s heated,’ said Newton. She showed me where the canister of powdered sulphur was kept, and the silver spoon used to measure it out. ‘Sulphur is a cardinal element.’

There was that phrase again.

‘So … what’s in the water bottles that you hand out?’ I asked. ‘It isn’t the sulphurous water, is it?’

‘Of course not. But it contains a minute amount of sulphur that cannot be discerned.’

‘Why do you hand them out?’

Newton shrugged. ‘People get thirsty,’ she said.

After an eternity, a bell rang for lunch, and Newton and I handed our huge bowls of salad and platters of vegetables over to the members of Domestic who were in charge of serving meals. Then I lined up with my plate like everyone else. I looked around for Fox, but couldn’t see him. Perhaps he was still helping Zosimon. I sat down next to Val and a bunch of people I hadn’t met, who all smiled kindly and murmured a greeting. Val nodded to me in recognition, and I suddenly remembered the weird moment from the previous morning at the Red House, when he’d shaken his head at me. But hunger took over before I could think about it, and I got stuck into my meal.

Unlike breakfast, lunch was more like the meals I’d had at the Red House, tasty and filling and fresh. Conversation buzzed, and I let it wash over me, too shy to join in. Beside me, I noticed Val slipping snow peas into his pocket. Maybe he didn’t like them.

I couldn’t see the children anywhere and decided they must eat meals somewhere else. I made a mental note to ask Fox about them later on, when we got an opportunity to talk.

From what I could tell, Zosimon didn’t attend any of our meals – I guessed he wanted to maintain his air of arcane mystery.

After lunch, Maggie came up to talk to me in the courtyard. ‘Heracleitus, hey?’ she said, slinging a casual arm over my shoulder. ‘I like it.’

‘Does everyone get a new name when they join?’

Maggie nodded. ‘But we shorten them to make it easier. You’ll probably be known as Hera.’

‘So Maggie isn’t your real name?’

‘It’s Magnus,’ she said.

‘Magnus is the name that Zosimon gave you?’

She nodded again.

‘So what’s your real name?’

‘I’ve had lots of names over the years,’ Maggie said. ‘If you mean the name I was born with, it’s Jiao. Jiao Wei Qin. But I left that behind a long time ago.’

‘What are the long versions of everyone else’s names?’

‘Lib is Libavius. Val is … Valentius, I think. Stan is Stanihurst. Fox is Furicius. We’re all named after alchemists.’

‘Alchemists?’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘Like, turning lead into gold? The Philosopher’s Stone? Isn’t that all a bit Harry Potter?’

Maggie chuckled. ‘You should talk to Fox about Harry Potter. I tried to tell him the story, but I couldn’t remember what all the characters were called. He was totally into it, though.’

I smiled. Fox
would
like Harry Potter.

‘Just—’ Maggie paused and gave me a funny look. ‘Keep it quiet, okay? You and Fox. I know you guys are close, but it’s probably better if you don’t broadcast it to the world.’

‘Why?’

Maggie looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s just how things are here.’

I felt a prickle of uneasiness. ‘But what do you mean—’

She cut me off. ‘The alchemy stuff – it’s metaphorical, right? The lead refers to the prison of the body, and gold is
pure actuality. Or something. I don’t know. I always zone out when Zosimon talks about it.’

‘
The prison of the body
?’

Maggie chuckled. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. When he talks about casting out the lead inside you, he doesn’t mean casting off your body in a literal sense. This isn’t a suicide cult. It’s more about learning to control your body, instead of letting your body control you. Ridding the body of addictions and toxins. That sort of thing.’

‘Right,’ I said. That didn’t sound so bad. ‘So the Reuben sandwich thing was just a story? A metaphor?’

Maggie pursed her lips and titled her head from side to side in a
maybe
gesture. ‘You’ll get used to all the rhetoric,’ she said. ‘Some of Zosimon’s lectures are pretty hilarious, but I figure, hey, let the old dude tell us his mildly racist stories about Arabian snake-charmers or Native American medicine men or whatever.’

‘Magnus.’ It was Lib, standing behind us with a stern look on her face. I wondered how long she’d been listening. A flash of something crossed Maggie’s face – fear? anger? – but was quickly replaced with her usual casual breeziness.

‘Hey, Lib.’

‘Daddy would like to see you in private.’

Maggie nodded, and gave me a casual wave over her shoulder as she strolled off. I turned to Lib.

‘Have you seen Fox?’ I asked.

Lib hesitated, then took my elbow and drew me gently away from the open courtyard, under the shade of the warehouse. ‘So,’ she said, pursing her lips. ‘We should talk about some of the rules here.’

More rules?

Lib looked genuinely uncomfortable. ‘Relationships – romantic relationships – are discouraged.’

Blood rushed to my cheeks. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Can I ask why?’

‘Sexual … urges are another way that we are trapped by our flesh bodies,’ Lib explained. ‘Like hunger, or illness, or addiction. To free our actuality, we must deny the body those urges.’

This sounded … wrong. We were supposed to not feel? Not fall in love? How could anyone think those things were bad?

‘Don’t worry,’ said Lib hurriedly, seeing my expression. ‘We don’t discourage love. The Institute is all about love. But it’s real love, unsullied by the urging of the flesh. It’s pure. It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced before.’