Odette

Who knows what the Manor wants and needs, craves or dreams? One girl believes herself to be its incarnation: not an avatar, a voodoo doll, a high clearance spokesperson or a Pallas Athena, but the Manor itself. When the Manor is undergoing some sort of political convulsion, Odette crashes around as if drunk, pointing fingers at the nurses, soliloquizing. In the aftermath of a sensational news cycle finally put to rest she lies in bed with a hangover. Construction makes her itch. She urinates, explosively, during the festival season. Her greatest worry is that she will somehow live on forever, suffering endless generations of boom & bust. “I don’t like this either,” she is known to tell the nurses. Suspiciously, she doesn’t seem to be getting any older. Wrinkles have been denied entrance. Her skin is fair, and as these things go, also soft. Her hair is long and black. Only once has it gone shock-white, in that particularly trying winter when the Bread Brothers ceased all production and The Couple, unnervingly, was nowhere to be seen.

Certain organizations have, of course, contemplated reversing the mainstream notion of causality here, speculating that if they could just get their hands on Odette, perform a few light experiments, they could control the Manor’s broadest narrative arcs, the way we really ought to be able to control the weather. Well, the nurses won’t have any of that, crying patient cruelty. But what really holds them back is the Majordomo, who despite all appearances of empirical sangfroid was spooked by one of his routine visits to the hospital into nursing a superstition regarding Odette’s ontological status as a large building. He has since that day kept her under close surveillance.