The Magician's Arrival
He arrived on the Greyhound from Houston with a duffel bag and a cardboard tube, and the first thing he did in Austin was take apart a broken shopping cart behind the bus station while a small crowd watched.
He was Australian, or said he was, and he went by D.A., which he said stood for Down Under Artificer, and which nobody believed, and which everybody used anyway. He was perhaps fifty. He had a sunburned neck and very clean hands.
He introduced himself as a magician, but not of the regular kind.
By evening the shopping cart had become something else: a frame of chrome bars and cardboard hypercubes and a bicycle wheel that turned when the wind blew, and as it turned, a row of bottle caps on strings struck a row of glass jars, and the jars rang out a little tune that went around and around and never quite repeated. People stood in the parking lot until dark listening to it. Somebody brought him a plate of tacos. He thanked them gravely and ate standing up, watching the wheel.
He did a show every few days after that, in parks and parking lots and once on the steps of Central, and each one used whatever was lying around. Nobody ever saw him buy anything. A garden hose and three umbrellas became a creature that walked down the steps and folded itself into a chair. A pile of drawer handles became a lamp that turned on when you sang to it.
People argued about him. Some said he was the best thing to happen to Trash Magic in years; others said he was a showman who'd heard the city was gullible and come to collect. He didn't argue with anyone. Between shows he walked, for hours, looking up at the cube walls on the schools and the planters on the bus shelters, and he carried a notebook in which he drew, very carefully, with a compass, shapes that no one could identify.
Mina at the library asked him once what he was looking for.
"An address," he said, and smiled, and drew three dots on the corner of her index card, and walked out into the heat.
🚮 W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Arrival Hour | Arrival HourThe hour a crowd gathers to be seen rather than to see. A stranger took apart a shopping cart behind the bus station, and they stayed until dark without being able to say what they were waiting for. |
| Bandwidth Bloom | Bandwidth BloomThe night every light in the city blinked: not out, not off, aligned. It starts as a hum against the jawbone, and the fireflies might be tuning forks. |
| Crucible Moment | Crucible MomentThe instant when the story, the structure and the self all give way at once and you have to pick one to carry out. Nobody picks well. People pick fast. |
| Floor 1 | Floor 1The first floor of Central. Two grand doors face you: one carved with rivers and creeks, one with book spines, bookmarks and paper leaves. Past them, the plants. Pick one. |
| Future Austin | Future AustinAustin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right. |
| MoPac Mantra | MoPac MantraThe low rumble of the MoPac, a railroad before it was a road, heard as a chant by anyone who stands still at the edge of the Intake. It threads time through the body and asks for nothing. |
| Organic Media and Fiction | Organic Media and FictionStories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city. |
| Prison Abolition | Prison AbolitionIn the prison library Ellis folded a cardboard hypercube and read Geometron aloud, one page a night, to a man ashamed that he could not read well. Callum got out in 2031 with sixty dollars, a bus ticket, and the cube. |
| Ruellia simplex | Ruellia simplexMexican petunia. Purple trumpet flowers that open in the morning and are gone by dark, replaced the next day by new ones. It spreads wherever there is water, and in Florida it is a problem. Here it is allowed one bed. |
| Skeletron | SkeletronSticks, cord, tension. Drill a hole in the end of each stick, tie the corners with square knots, and the shapes stand up by themselves. The original instructions say to build it up and down every river valley on the planet, and creeks. |
| Sporescript | SporescriptSentences written by hyphae in whatever damp you leave them: a corner of a wall, the underside of a library card. No ink. You read it by touch, and it says what the wall remembers. |
| The Hypercube | The HypercubeA cube inside a cube with the corners tied, folded from a pizza box in three hours. Turn it in the light and the inner cube moves against the outer one in a way the cardboard cannot account for. Left on a reference desk, it is cold under the lamp and warm in the dark. |
| The Magician | The MagicianD.A., which he says stands for Down Under Artificer, and which nobody believes and everybody uses. He came in on the Greyhound from Houston with a duffel bag and a cardboard tube, and took apart a shopping cart behind the bus station. He is looking for an address. |
| Trash Magic | Trash MagicA person can build what they need from what everyone else throws away. Callum learned it in a prison library and teaches it on Saturdays under the live oaks, with the radio on and a cooler of agua fresca. He never called it Magic Day. |
| Trash Magic Server | Trash Magic ServerA server installed on a laptop that someone threw away. It holds the book of Geometron and the scrolls, and it copies itself onto the next laptop. The instructions are public. |
| Trash Transmutation Tower | Trash Transmutation TowerTwo vertical gardens at Congress Avenue and Cesar Chavez Street, with a compass rose engraved in the walkway between them, one node on the W.A.S.T.E. network. Whatever goes in as waste is meant to come out as green building material. |
| W.A.S.T.E. | W.A.S.T.E.Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology. Also the underground post in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, with its muted horn on the box and its letters that travel outside the official mail. Put a word in. It will get where it is going. |