Page 15 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
Magda walked back into the room and to the table, carrying the package in front of her like the precious item it was.
“That was how I found it,” James explained, following behind her. “In the small metal box and wrapped in tissue. This was how David kept it.”
Magda placed the parcel on the table and began unfolding triangles of tissue like petals of a flower, suddenly very aware of her heart beating noisily in her chest. Finally she saw it, a single white chess piece about the length of her forefinger, resting in the bed of tissue.
“Wow,” she sighed.
“David Yan had a register of all his assets,” James explained. “Usually just a brief description of the item and a date when he obtained it. He referred to this as the Ivory Rook. He’d had it since the late 1980s.”
Magda nodded but was struggling to pay attention to what James was saying. In that moment, the chess piece was her whole world; everything else was background noise.
“He worked all over the world,” James continued. “Impossible to know where he found it.”
Magda picked up the piece between finger and thumb and then laid it in her open palm. She felt James step closer, the bulk of his body in her space as he leaned over her shoulder to peer down at the rook in her hand. She swallowed, trying to ignore the distraction of James’s proximity, the scent of his cologne.
Concentrate.
“How do you know if it is a real unknowable object?” he asked, his voice deep and warm and mellow in her ear.
He thinks you’re an expert. Don’t tell him you’ve only ever seen and held two unknowable objects.
“There are certain things you look for,” she said, recalling previous discussions with Frank and her own limited experience. “All unknowable objects are things you wouldn’t look twice at if you glanced over them.” She turned the rook in her palm, feeling its weight and solidity. “But if you pay close attention, they have a strange quality to them. It’s like...” She swallowed, trying to articulate the rare sensation that came with proximity to an artefact. “It’s like your eyes can tell they are not normal. If you stare too long, you just feel a bit, I don’t know, strange. Like looking at an optical illusion, like your brain knows something doesn’t make sense. And when you hold it...” She tossed the rook lightly in her palm. “It feels much heavier than it should, and more solid. Like you are holding on to a dense fragment of reality.”
James folded his arms and turned to perch on the edge of the table. Magda felt a twinge of disappointment that he had moved slightly away, but she ignored it. “A dense fragment of reality,” he repeated.
“One other thing,” Magda continued. “The unknowable objects can’t be destroyed.”
James’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Is that so?”
“I’ve never tried, myself,” she admitted. “But it’s what I’ve been told. Previous members of the Society tried to break them or burn them or blow them up. But they survive without a mark on them. So instead of destroying them, we keep the unknowable objects safe and out of sight. Objects like this.”
It’s real! It’s an unknowable object! Where has it been? What stories could it tell if it could speak?
As the reality of what she was holding settled on her, Magda felt her arm trembling, excitement coursing through her like a river in spate. She placed the rook upright on the table, next to the layers of red tissue, and used her phone to take a few photographs of it from different angles. She’d send them to Frank later. Then, putting her phone down on the table, she picked up the item once more.
She wanted to hold it again; she wanted to feel its magic.
“This is an unknowable object,” she concluded. She pulled the rookcloser to her, narrowing her eyes to study it. “What do you do?” she murmured. “What is your magic?”
She glanced up and saw James watching her, arms folded and the slightest smile pulling at the corners of his lips.
“What?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious.
“Nothing,” he said, shrugging. “Just enjoying your enjoyment of it.”
“I should put it away,” Magda decided, but she made no move to do so. The breeze from the balcony strengthened briefly, and she felt it press into the room and ruffle the back of her hair.
“Where do they come from?” James asked. “The artefacts. Do you know?”
Magda hesitated, wondering how much to say. She supposed Frank wouldn’t want her to answer, but as she looked at James, as she met his eyes again, she knew that she trusted him. She knew that he was not a threat.
And shewantedto talk about it, she wanted to share the wonders she knew. The magic and stories—everything she loved.
“No one knows,” she admitted, rolling the chess piece slowly between her fingers and thumb. “There are various theories that I’ve heard members of the Society talk about over the years.”
“Such as?” James asked. He was looking at the chess piece now, both of them transfixed like it had some power over them.
“The Artisan Hypothesis,” Magda said, happily recalling conversations with Frank and Will, discussions to fill otherwise empty meetings. She had loved those discussions, those shared daydreams about where the magic had come from, and she loved sharing them with James now. “At some point in time there was a man or a woman who could make items and bestow them with magical qualities. A craftsman who created this great diversity of everyday objects and made them magical.” She brushed the tip of her thumb over the top of the chess piece, imagining a master craftsman from centuries before working on the rook.
