Fern enters The Blue Room. She sits on the pillow, positioning her body so that the security guard can’t see her midsection, and pulls out her phone, slouching awkwardly to conceal it. She starts filming. For the first few minutes, there’s nothing but the blue pulsing. It’s silent. Fern hears her stomach gurgle, her breath, her heartbeat, and feels a profound reverence for the miracle that is the human body. The whisper-hum of the computer’s fan grows louder.
The demon takes shape on the screen. It’s a woman, face and body blurred. It steps out of the screen and grows larger, until it towers over Fern. It’s wearing a long white dress, its yellow-green hair blowing around its face, though there is no wind. Fern gasps. The demon opens her mouth to speak, but its voice is obscured by the computer’s fan, now loud as a train barreling through the room. Somewhere she smells burning plastic. The demon begins to twirl. Fern grows dizzy watching it. She puts a hand on the floor to right herself.
A chime goes off. The demon disappears in a flash of blue. Fern’s time is up. She stands, concealing her phone in her pants, and shakily exits the room.
Outside, Fern watches the video she’s taken. On the phone, the demon looks unremarkable: vapor, a puff of steam, but on closer inspection she can still make out the face, the dress. Her ears ring. She’s lightheaded. Perhaps this is the effect of true genius. Her phone seems to grow heavy in her hand. She realizes she’s late for drinks with her friend Amir.
Amir is drunk by the time she arrives at the bar. He thinks that The Blue Room is totally derivative, though he admits he hasn’t seen it. An artist himself, he’s into more transgressive stuff, she knows—Fibonacci is too tame for him. Still, she tries to explain her experience. The words come out as platitudes: the energy of the room, the stillness of it. Amir doesn’t seem to care.
This will be the last time anyone sees Fern in person.
Back home, Fern posts videos about her day: selfies in line for the installation; Amir drinking; a stencil reading “Never give up on beauty” on the sidewalk; the demon. Views and messages begin to roll in. Then, without warning, her phone dies right there in her hand. She groans and plugs it into the wall to charge.
Fern tells people that she’s able to fully support herself through the endorsements she gets on Instagram, but the truth is her brother Ricardo, who works at a hedge fund, pays the rent and the phone bill. The endorsements can pay for groceries on a good week. Mostly the companies just send her free clothes and jewelry to wear and post about.
She lives in a loft above a steakhouse with a roommate who is never home. The aroma that lingers in the air shaft means Fern is always hungry for meat, though she’s been vegan for years now. She’s spooning leftover takeout rice into her mouth when she hears a moan. She peeks out the kitchen window, expecting to see a cat in heat. All that’s there is a cook having a cigarette.
On her bed, the phone has switched on again. It’s frozen on a light blue screen. Fern realizes with a little shiver that it’s the same color as the Fibonacci installation. Then the moaning starts again.
It’s coming from the phone. She tries to turn it off, pressing the power button repeatedly, but the blue remains. She flings it onto the hardwood floor. This doesn’t do any good either. A minuscule crack has formed in the screen. Smoke curls from beneath the glass. Soon all Fern can smell is frying steak and the burning plastic from the installation. She gags.
The vertigo sweeps over her and all she can see is blue.
For the second Thursday night in a row, Fern isn’t at the gallery openings, which is unusual. Amir has wandered through of all of them, refilling a disposable plastic cup with bourbon from his flask. It feels weird to be here without Fern. Her Instagram has changed. It’s video after video of her twirling around in endless circles. Or is it her? It seems the longer he looks, the more her features alter. When he texts, her replies are cryptic: Blue heart emojis. Strings of meaningless words.
An arm creeps around his waist and he jumps. It’s Bella Thayer, the art critic, drunk.
“Amir!” she exclaims, shoving a strand of platinum hair away from her face. “Can you explain this pretentious crap to me?” On her phone is a tiny twirling Fern. They watch together.
“I can’t,” he mutters. He’s cold all of a sudden, though the gallery is stifling.
“Should we ditch the scene and go somewhere?” says Bella. They are still watching Fern spin, the same panicked look on her face each time it meets the camera.
“Please,” says Amir. Bella puts her phone away. Arm in arm, the two of them push their way through the crowd to meet the night.
Unbeknownst
MATTHEW VOLLMER
The man woke from a dream in which he and his son had been to a movie and during intermission they had gone outside to see the fireworks but it had been snowing so hard that the rockets tossed by a man for a crowd of gawkers sputtered and died and to get back to the theater they had to follow a trail that passed by some hot springs—the kind you’d see in Yellowstone—and the man had lost sight of his son and turned down a path of sticky ground, which he realized too late was the tongue of a carnivorous plant whose stamen was a purplish brainlike thing and whose leaves, in an act of sinister entrapment, folded over and enclosed him.
That’s when he woke up.
The clock read 5:59. He thought about getting up. He’d been telling himself he should get up early, that sleeping until 6:30
