#imagine helena looking at myka like that and myka trying to do her job and sweating even more

[apparitionism]

Confection 4

Welcome back to Confection, which began its life as last year’s holiday story but went on hiatus due to this year’s gift exchange story, which in turn ran far longer than it ever should have. But the whole point of a hiatus is that it ends, so: this part continues an AU wherein Bering and Wells are chefs competing on a TV show titled “This Without That,” in which cheftestants are charged with making well-known dishes without their primary ingredient. The competition in which Chefs Myka and Helena find themselves is Christmas-themed, a fact that relates to their shared history... some of which was revealed in part 1, part 2, and part 3. I'd mumble something about the whole thing being undercooked, but that probably goes without saying at this point.

Confection 4

Decide, and do it fast, Myka told herself as she examined the produce and other ingredients available to the contestants. Cranberry sauce without cranberry—a tart fruit. Could she reasonably tweak a sharper version of her fruit pickle into a sauce, but maybe using raspberries, for the appearance? Yes, most likely, but only if she could find raspberries. She scanned the refrigerator... okay, raspberries found.

Move on, and do it fast.

Candied yams without yams? She saw golden beets and envisioned (entasted?) merging their earthiness with some similarly earthy sweetness (to be determined), plus a creamy element (also to be determined) that might evoke the traditional marshmallows.

For now, she was satisfied with her choice of major components.

These were decisions—fast ones, even! Now all she had to do was cook.

Okay, fine: and keep from distracting herself with glances at Helena, who was clearly also deciding fast, gathering ingredients, her overflowing-with-produce arms transforming her into some metaphorical—or maybe actual—goddess of the harvest.

Quit thinking like that! Myka admonished her overheated, now goddess-oriented, imagination.

No! that imagination shot back. She is a goddess!

Myka marshaled every bit of her superego to command, We. Are. Focusing. On. Beets.

And yet her id kept sneaking glances.

Her ego, meanwhile, noticed that Chef Artie wasn’t having to decide fast. He’d done nothing, even as Myka, Helena, and Chef Walter, his attitude notwithstanding, had filled their stations. His indecision prompted a producer huddle around him, and Myka heard snatches of phrases: “you could use,” “or maybe try,” “okay, we’ve got.”

****

Myka’s departure from Apples had happened quickly: two days after the Christmas party, she interviewed for the job at Secret Service, getting the offer on the spot, and that evening she gave her notice to her direct supervisor on the line. Not to Helena—Chef Wells—for the chef hadn’t been present in the kitchen.

That was unusual... did it have something to do with strings being pulled? Myka told herself she didn’t need to know. She told herself, equally untruthfully, that she didn’t need to care.

Not that Helena—Chef Wells—was even going to notice Myka’s absence. People came and went all the time in restaurants. What did one line cook matter?

After leaving, Myka tried not to ruminate on how much she had wanted to matter.

She tried also to evict Helena Wells from the top of her mind. She didn’t give in to the temptation to walk by Apples; that would have been another of those teenage-reminiscent impulses she needed to prevent her presumably adult self from indulging.

The setting of a Google alert, however, she justified as professional. Practical. Keeping track of a former employer.

Which was how she learned that Helena Wells would be appearing on This Without That.

Which she tried to convince herself she did not need (need...) to watch.

Which attempt was, she had even then acknowledged, doomed to failure, because watching the show meant she would at least be able to look at Helena, a thrill of which she’d been deprived for what felt like forever. Need... need. She could—and did—replay her memories, but she was starving for new images.

The show didn’t disappoint on that score. Myka was captivated anew from the first shot of Helena in talking-head closeup: her hair was down, lusciously so, and if Myka hadn’t been anxious to see how the competition would unfold, she might have stopped the show there, just to savor the sight.

When asked to describe her style in the kitchen in one word, talking-head Helena said, “Take no prisoners.”

“One word,” an off-camera voice said.

“It’s hyphenated,” Helena responded.

Myka added the hyphens in her head, retrospectively.

She paid little attention to the introductory attributes of the other contests—Chefs Marcus, Leena, and Hugo—because: not for one instant did it occur to her that Helena might not win.

She was well aware that she knew nothing about television production but clichés; nevertheless, she found herself stuck on one in particular as far as Helena was concerned: “The camera loves her.” And Myka found a similar lover’s elation, if tinged with a lurker’s shame, in her surreptitious alignment with that camera and its gaze.

The dish for the first round, the appetizer, was clams casino without the clams. “Mushrooms,” Myka said aloud the minute Steve Jinks announced the challenge. The rest of the dish was traditionally pretty simple—breadcrumbs, butter, bacon, bell pepper, lemon—with the only even vaguely difficult part getting the proportions right. But mushrooms stood out as the clearest substitute, texturally, as long as they were cooked with great precision so as to simulate the clams’ chewy-but-not-rubbery distinctiveness, and that would be, she thought, the real challenge. That and choosing an appropriate variety of mushroom, one that could be coaxed to a sufficiently correct mimic.

Myka was thus unsurprised, if gratified, when talking-head Helena said, “I thought immediately of oyster mushrooms. But then I discerned that Chef Marcus might be aiming for them... so I moved quickly.”

The next shot of the kitchen depicted Helena darting in front of Marcus, a tall and somewhat sinister figure, and appropriating all the oyster mushrooms. Then, as if just realizing the other chef’s presence, she said, “Oh, did you want these as well? Surely there are enough for two.”

That struck Myka as pretty magnanimous.

She revised that down a bit after the next talking-head Helena said, “Had I kept them all for myself, how could I have demonstrated my superiority?” Then she smiled: wolfish, with the edges of her teeth. “Not to mention, I had a trick up my sleeve.”

****

As Myka began her preparations for her cranberry sauce without cranberries and candied yams without yams, she felt herself moving with extraordinarily swift precision... had she been dosed with performance-enhancing lightning? Or some other quantity granting an efficient-motion superpower? Then she realized: she was showing off. For the camera? No. For Helena. Who was most likely focusing far too closely on her own cooking to look over and be impressed by Myka’s ability to prep beets for the oven at speed.

While the sauce-pickle simmered and the beets roasted—she would soon peel and purée those—she sought the finishing flourishes for the latter dish. In her search for sweet, she thought of molasses, but then she noticed Helena had that bottle at her station. Casting about, she found her eye caught by a jar, very small, of manuka honey, and its likely kiss of bitterness seemed instantly correct. To provide additional interest, she saturated figs in that honey in a sous-vide bath, with an aim of creating a soft-yet-chunky topping for the beets, texture balancing taste.

Cream, now: maybe yogurt? The tang of plain Greek yogurt rhyming with the pickle’s bite? But she needed depth... she toasted a vanilla bean, ground it, then mixed it into the yogurt; tasted; yes. A dab of honey, then, to match what it topped, and that element was complete.

She allowed herself a breather, while the pickle matured and beets reached peak melt-in-mouth texture, to assess the other competitors’ approaches.

(Not Helena’s, though. Helena’s presence was distracting enough; attending to her cooking was likely to render Myka entirely incapable.)

Chef Artie was doing something with red beets—she’d heard those mentioned by someone (not Chef Artie) in that prior huddle—and something else with butternut squash. Chef Walter, like Myka, was working with raspberries.

Myka felt a flicker of Helena’s “demonstrate my superiority” bravado. She hoped it would prove out.

****

The trick Helena had up her sleeve turned out to be an innovation to replace the clam shell in which the clams casino was traditionally served: she scraped the ribs from a portobello mushroom cap, then dropped it in the deep fryer. She pulled the fryer basket out as the round’s final milliseconds ticked away, then plated her entire oyster-mushroom casino with speed that Myka wouldn’t have imagined possible.

But: This is Helena Wells, Myka reminded herself.

Anything was possible.

Helena was, unsurprisingly, right about demonstrating her superiority. Myka watched her smile as the judge charged with delivering the first-round verdict sent Marcus to his doom, telling him, “We couldn’t overlook that fact that the texture of your mushrooms was no match for that of Chef Helena’s.”

“She tricked me,” Marcus said into the camera as he exited the kitchen.

“She outcooked you,” Myka corrected, a bare instant before talking-head Helena said, smugly but equally accurately, “I outcooked him.”

Myka would have reveled in their consonance but Steve Jinks then announced the entree challenge: beef Wellington without beef.

Now that was a challenge, and Myka was gifted a commercial break to ponder what she might produce. She came up with nothing more than “something else Wellington”—some other protein encased in pâté-slathered pastry. But what protein? And this is why you aren’t on the show, she told herself.

So she paid attention, if a bit begrudgingly, to the choices the other contestants made. Chef Hugo chose venison, which Myka had no trouble imagining would pair well with that expected pâté. Chef Leena chose chicken, but instead of pâté, she used a butter-herb mixture that Myka immediately recognized as intended to bring a cordon-bleu sense to the dish. It seemed nothing like beef Wellington, but it did seem special, invented just for this competition.

Helena was up to something special too, but Myka didn’t fully understand it. She was wielding a mallet on a flank steak, rendering it thin, thin, thinner, and bringing the same thin-thin-thinner energy with a rolling pin to pastry. Myka couldn’t see where the Wellington—its richness—resided... maybe in the duxelles she was making, the sauté of mushrooms that was sometimes paired with the Wellington’s pâté, sometimes substituted for it. Helena had pâté on her station, but she didn’t touch it.

Myka waited impatiently through Chef Hugo’s venison and Chef Leena’s chicken, until it was finally time for Helena to be judged. She cut into her Wellington.

Somehow she had managed to roll pastry, steak, and duxelles into... a pinwheel? Yes, a beautiful swirling pinwheel, with seemingly infinite layers.

Surely she’d been saved for last because her dish was astonishing.

However: “You seem to be attempting to subvert the rules,” a member of the panel, a Chef Kosan, told her. He looked down at his portion disapprovingly, then up at Helena the same way.

What was that about?

“Do I?” Helena was calm, the picture of confidence. Myka was reasonably sure she herself would have been dissolving in anticipatory terror...

“Chef Leena and Chef Hugo both managed to make beef Wellingtons without the beef. You, however—”

“Have as well,” Helena interrupted. “Without the beef tenderloin, ‘tenderloin’ being implied, even if not explicitly stated. Or has the constituent ‘beef’ element changed since I was in culinary school?”

She was obviously right. The “beef” in the name didn’t cover all beef. Myka would have made the same argument.

When the program returned from that commercial break, Steve Jinks rendered the verdict, drawing out the suspense, saying a long and lingering “Chef....”

Myka idly wondered whether venison or chicken would lose.

“Helena,” Steve finished. “Unfortunately, this competition will continue without you.”

Myka blinked. Surely she’d heard that wrong?

But Helena’s incredulous expression suggested she’d heard exactly the same thing.

Chef Kosan was charged with explaining the panel’s reasoning. He began, “In your Wellington, we did find the lean flank steak well-balanced by the richness of the duxelles, even more so than Chef Hugo’s venison was by his pâté—he needed more of that richness.” Myka saw that as a point given to Helena. How had she lost it? He went on, “But his failure in that arena was your fault. You appropriated all the pâté, then gave only a limited portion of it to Chef Hugo, despite the fact that you clearly had no intention of using it the remainder yourself.”

“He was entirely free to ask for more,” Helena said. She didn’t say anything about her intentions.

Chef Hugo, meanwhile, looked bereft. Myka felt something like sympathy for him, for certainly interrupting Helena at work was a frightening prospect. Then again, he was supposed to be competing.

Chef Kosan narrowed his eyes. “The ingredients are not yours to dispense. That struck us as inappropriate gamesmanship.”

“And yet this is a game, is it not?” Helena asked. Myka chalked up another point for her—not that this tally in her head would do anything other than torment her.

Chef Kosan continued, “Nevertheless, in the end the substitution of one type of beef for another struck us as insufficiently creative, if not actually against the rules. Of the game. As did your use of the rather obvious mushrooms in the clams casino.”

If she squinted, Myka could maybe see his point with regard to the mushrooms. But wasn’t changing the Wellington into a pinwheel a creative change? Why hadn’t that outweighed the beef issue?

Helena’s thought process seemed similar: “A puff-pastry pinwheel Wellington was insufficiently creative,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “And both were beautiful dishes, worthy of the Apples menu.” Did she now sound petulant? Myka couldn’t honestly blame her.

“Pursuant to that,” Chef Kosan said, “we’re genuinely curious: how did you manage to get the pastry entirely cooked?”

“Skill,” Helena said. That was a full sneer.

Myka had been curious about the same thing, but she was also imagining getting access to that skill, were she still at Apples and had the dishes made it to the menu... imagining what it would be like to cook those dishes on the line... imagining getting those mushrooms’ texture exactly right for the casino... imagining balancing the Wellington’s fat and lean, while seeing to it that the pastry was indeed entirely cooked. And all right, yes: she was imagining Helena leaning over her shoulder, breathing near her ear, insisting on all of that.

As Helena performed the apparently obligatory walkout of defeat, she pronounced, “I’m far more skilled than this result indicates.” Her tone situated scornful quotation marks around “result.”

That had sounded very Helena. And very true.

Helena then said, “This won’t be the last you see of me.”

Myka had at that point cut off the television and prayed—yes, prayed—for that also to be true.

****

She did not recall the memory of that prayer in its specificity until she was competing alongside Helena in a Christmas-decorated studio in August.

Mysterious ways.

TBC

[sasha-whos-askin-racket]

Some Analysis-y Stuff I Noticed In Warehouse 13

Okay, so having watched this show practically 3 times in the space of a year, I’ve picked up on some stuff that I find cool. I have no idea how much of it was intentional and how much was coincidence, but, y’know, it’s just kinda cool to see. This is by no means a full length list, and it’s not in chronological order, I more just kind of write them as I think of them.

It’s pretty long, so, it’s all under a Read More (unless you’re on mobile, in which case it might not be and I’m really sorry about that.)

                                       ------------------------------------

Around The Bend - Season 2 Episode 6 This is from the scene, about 18 minutes in, where Myka tells Artie that she thinks Pete’s drinking again. Now, we’re very intentionally drawn to Myka because everything about her seems off. She enters alone, not with Pete, like she normally does. She’s quiet, but it’s not her usual pensive quiet, it’s the sort of quiet where she hopes that not saying whatever she’s planning on saying means it wont be true. Her hands are low, almost off screen, and she’s playing with her fingers. Before she speaks, she stands in the doorway for a few seconds, like she’s steeling herself for what she’s about to say. She’s nervous. She’s scared. She looks scared, not because she thinks Pete’s drinking again, but because she’s only just worked out that he’s maybe started drinking again. Like, she’s supposed to notice everything. That’s her job as both an agent and Pete’s partner. And she’s scared that she didn’t realise he was struggling sooner, and she’s scared that Pete didn’t think he could trust her enough to tell her that he was struggling. She’s also scared that if she confronted Pete, he’d somehow make it her fault, saying that she should have noticed sooner. She’s not scared because she thinks Pete’s drinking again. She’s scared because she thinks she’s failed him.

The New Guy - Season 3 Episode 1 This scene takes place about 10 minutes in, and it’s when Steve meets Claudia outside the Warehouse and Claudia’s talking about his car. Now, after three seasons, we’ve learnt that Steve’s Prius is his absolute pride and joy and he loves it more than anything else in the entire world, including himself, (except maybe Claudia.) And so he’s quite happy to listen to her go on and on about all the upgrades in his car. He’s proud of his car, why wouldn’t he be happy? But then, quite suddenly, he seems to snap. “Agent Donovan, I’m not here to sell you my car. Okay? Now, this is pretty quick emotional change, even for Steve, right? So, I recently re-watched the episode, because that sudden shut-down seemed pretty out of character for our favourite New Kid In Town, and I realised -  The line that Claudia says directly before he snaps at her? “End of the day, what did your mommy have to lay out for a car like this?” As we later learn in the show, Steve has a pretty rough relationship with his mother at this point, and considering he’s only just met Claudia, it’s no surprise that this line rubs him up the wrong way.

It’s also worth noting that this links in to what Claudia says in Queen For A Day about how she always manages to muck stuff up with Steve. “God, how do I always do that with you?” in regards to both his sister and his sexuality, and now accidentally bringing up his relationship with his mother. Continuity. It’s important.

Reset - Season 2 Episode 12 When Helena is explaining her reasons for trying to start the next Ice Age, one of the things that she say’s is “Indeed, men have found new ways to kill each other that were inconceivable in my day, even by fiction writers.” It makes sense to assume that she is here referring to nuclear warfare/chemical weapons/weapons of mass destruction and so on and so forth, correct? “But Vincent.” I hear you cry, “ The writers must have made a mistake! HG Wells DID imagine nuclear warfare existing. It’s written about in The Shape Of Things To Come.” And to that I say - you are correct, you wonderful Wellsians, but you have overlooked a significant detail. The Shape Of Things To Come was written in 1933, so while HG Wells himself would have imagined nuclear warfare - in the canon of Warehouse 13, Helena is bronzed in the year 1900 - before the publication of The Shape Of Things To Come. That means that, in the shows canon, The Shape Of Things To Come was written by Charles, NOT by Helena, and assuming she hasn’t read any of the books her brother wrote, it would make sense for her not to know about the prediction of nuclear warfare, and thus, in a weird sort of way, the line makes says both canonically and historically.

[redlance]

This might seem a little out of left field as I guess you’re more known for your bechloe stuff but I can’t get over that dexter/wh13 fusion fic you did once and I was just wondering if you’d share the backstory as you put you had most of it fleshed out?

Hey! Oh man, this was a blast from the past haha. Thanks for making me revisit it! Now, let’s see what I can remember...

I’m not sure what I all explained in the fic itself (so things might differ from it and this), but the idea was that H.G. wasn’t saved at the end of season 2. Myka was trying to talk her down when Artie got a shot off that avoided the Corsican Vest (I took liberties with how the vest worked for this and decided it would only inflict the would-be wound on the attacker if the vest itself was directly hit) and hit H.G. in the neck. Myka screams and runs to her, H.G. falls and bleeds out in Myka’s arms. This is made all the more tragic by us knowing that Myka and H.G. were already falling in love a little bit prior to this - so Myka’s dealing with betrayal and two different kinds of losses - and that, as viewers, we know that H.G. would have broken down and not gone through with her plan, unable to kill Myka.(More beneath the cut, this gets long. Sorry anon! You asked!)

After this, Myka leaves the Warehouse. She can’t look Artie in the eye anymore, can’t forgive him for not trusting her with Helena, and she can’t stand being in a place that reminds her so much of H.G.

Can’t stand the smell of apples.

So, she packs up and heads towards the very antithesis of Univille, South Dakota - Miami, Florida.

It isn’t just a random decision either. From my notes;

Because once upon a time Myka had been someone who hunted down artifacts for a secret government organisation, a job that took her all over the world and had landed her in Miami a few short years ago. People had been turning up dead all over the city, burnt from the inside out. It had taken about a week, a few more dead bodies, and a run in with the very same team from Miami Metro that she now worked alongside, but they'd recovered Nero's Fiddle. Snagged, bagged, and tagged. But not before Myka and the then Detective had almost come to blows over territory encroachment. Pete had never let her live it down. Which was precisely why she hadn't told him, or anyone for that matter, who exactly she was working under now.

Because of that connection - and because Debra Morgan knows dedication when she sees it - she lands a job at Miami Metro. It’s not long before Myka realises that she and her Lieutenant are similar in many ways and a friendship forms. 

Meanwhile, for some reason I haven’t noted down, Myka ends up at a boat auction. Maybe it’s for a case. She happens upon a modest sized boat bearing the name ‘Slice of Life’ and feels inexplicably drawn to it. Her father had taken her out on a boat a little smaller than it back when she was a kid and so Myka has some experience with sailing. She ends up bidding on and winning it, and it’s eventually delivered to the marina. 

She starts spending a lot of time on the boat. Every day after work, she goes out to the marina and does some cleaning, adds her own little touches, makes it feel homey. 

And that’s when she starts seeing Helena. 

That’s when the criminals getting off on technicalities really start to get under her skin. 

That’s when she buys her first knife.

Unbeknownst to Myka, the Slice of Life is, of course, an artifact. Feeding on her grief and, basically, turning her into Dexter 2.0. She even has her own Harry for company. 

The first time she kills a man, she doesn’t feel sick or upset. She feels calm and at peace. Like she’s righted a wrong that had been plaguing this world. And Helena is there, beautiful as ever, telling Myka what a wonderful job she’s doing. They talk, sometimes sit in silence.

And it’s easy for Myka to forget that Helena isn’t real. 

So, Myka goes on policing by day and killing by night. Using the boat to dump the bodies much like Dexter did before her. She doesn’t keep souvenirs, though. The people she kills aren’t worthy of being remembered. 

There’s a holy shit moment when Myka invites Deb down to the marina and Deb realises that, “Holy fucking fuck, you bought my brother’s boat.” 

Things take a turn when Lila - who is not dead but keeps having dreams about Dexter killing her - shows up at the marina looking for Dex and finds Myka there instead. Lila, who looks so much like a modern H.G. it’s startling, and Myka can’t help it. She’s drawn to Lila the same way she was drawn to the boat. They spend time together, grow closer, more intimate. Then there’s this conversation:

"Who is it?" Lila asked and Myka spun, startled, to face her. She was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, eyeing Myka curiously, suspiciously almost, and Myka would swear she saw jealousy flash in oddly familiar brown eyes. She stared back, unable for the moment to feign the ignorance required to ask the obvious question. The one she could feel inching along her spine like a hundred spiders, tickling and agitating her skin until the need the scratch at it became overwhelming. "The person I remind you of. There is someone, isn't there?" Lila had her pinned with her gaze and Myka found that she could only nod, even as Lila took a step into the room and she felt every muscle in her body tense. "Was she a friend of yours?" The question was an empty one, she could hear it in Lila's voice that she already knew that wasn't the case. Myka watched as the other woman lifted her hand to trail her fingers over the marble countertop, gaze dropping and then returning to Myka as she asked the real question. "Was she a lover?" Myka's heart lurched and then seized, stealing away a beat or two as Lila continued to move closer. "I see it in your eyes, the way you look at me." She passed. "The way you CAN'T look at me sometimes. It's written all over your face, you know." Panic rose on Myka, unbidden and unexplainable, as Lola finally rounded the counter and leaned against it, her body now parallel to Myka's. "It just gets so dark sometimes." She made it sound like something to wonder over. Marvell at. "She must a been a very passionate-"

"We weren't lovers." Myka blurted, suddenly desperate for Lila to stop and she did, stunned into momentary silence by the apparently unexpected revelation. Her eyes were wide with something close to fear, something Lila seemed to take in stride.

"But you wanted to be." It wasn't a question. Myka's eyes drooped and she crossed her arms over her chest, looking away. "Well," And it was strange how much Lila could press into one word, how her looks could burn into you in less than a second. It was another thing that made Myka remember. "I can't imagine that she wasn't interested." But the way Lila leered, all unabashed obviousness, that was different. "What was it then? Was she married? Afraid? Or were you two some kind of Shakespearian star crossed lovers?" Myka's posture stiffened and then sagged dramatically the longer Lila stared at her, knowingly. As if she already knew the answer and was waiting to see if Myka would provide the correct one or not. As if she was testing her.

"A bit of all three, I think." Myka said through a sigh and Lila's lips turned upward briefly, as if Myka's answer had pleased her in some way. "It just... It wasn't..." She swallowed hard and then turned away, opening one of the kitchen cupboards and reaching for a mug, only to pause as her fingers brushed smoother porcelain. "I can't talk about this." She left the mug where it was and closed the cupboard, turning instead to the fridge and opening it to retrieve a bottle. She offered it to Lila without looking and then grabbed another for herself.

"Can't or won't?" She threw a glare at the other woman as she closed the heavy silver door with her hip and reached for the draw that housed a bottle opened amid various other odds and ends.

"Both." She said, a stern edge to her voice as she snapped the cap off and then handed the opener to Lila. The woman took it, deliberately brushing her fingers against Myka's in the exchange, and Myka yanked her hand back as though she'd accidentally slipped it into a fire. Lila caught her gaze and smirked before turning her attention to the beer in her hand.

“You know,” she started slowly, after taking a long draw from the bottle, “the man I came here looking for, he was the thing I wouldn't talk about for the longest time.” Myka thumbed the neck of her bottle and watched as Lila's attention drifted around the room. “I thought about him a lot, every day, but I never spoke about him out loud. I kept him close like a secret, until one day the silence almost broke me. I’d lost him, or at least I thought I had, and I don't think I’ve experienced pain that profound before. I loved him, but he...” she sighed, taking another swig of amber liquid turned green by the thick glass. “He had other priorities. Ones he put before me. I guess I loved him more than he loved me.” She smiled then, though Myka could tell it was forced. “He's my one that got away.” Silence then, empty and stretching as the seconds ticked by.

“She didn't get away.” Myka said at length. “She was taken from me.” And there was so much sour distaste to her tone, so much venom and contempt. She could feel it swimming in her veins, being pumped through her body by a heart that beat now only because it thought it should. Lila's expression changed at the sound of it, morphed into a mask of pity and sorrow that was headed by a frown.

“How did it happen?” The question didn't hurt, surprisingly, and neither did the memory of the moment as it flickered to life like a piece of video playback embedded in her brain. But there was a dull, numb ache. One that permeated her entire being.

Helena is always there, lingering in the shadows. Even while Lila is in her bed. 

Eventually, long story short, Myka ends up somewhat naturally neutralizing the artifact that is the Slice of Life. She, like Dexter, had found something worth more than killing. With the boat no longer in need of gooing, Myka won’t have to deal with feeling the repercussions of her otherwise OOC actions, and she’s left to live her life with Lila.

Or something like that. ;)

[kdramamilfs]

[apparitionism]

Run 7a

This is the first installment of a two-part part. The second half is done, but it needs a couple more passes... not that it’s ever going to sing, but I’d like it to at least talk sense. Anyway, the AU basics here are as follows: Myka and Helena met each other and enjoyed a brief affair of great intensity; Myka thought Helena betrayed her; Helena is now attempting to make amends for what she didn’t at the time see as a betrayal; Myka doesn’t have any idea Helena is doing the atonement polka and is trying to keep a cold distance from her. The story also has a lot to do with athletic competition, shoes, and running, and what bodies are, and what they can and should do. See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6 for all that jazz.

Run 7a

In the elevator, alone: This is what I’m supposed to want, Myka thought. To be alone in this elevator. To be alone, and not with Helena, in this elevator.

Standing near her, with night looming. Night.

Talking: your father, my father. She wanted to ask about Helena’s mother now—wanted to know everything. Wanted to tell about her own mother. Stupid, useless wants. Here is how I became who I am; how did you become who you are?

But she despised who Helena was.

And she despised who she, Myka, was too: nothing but an animal panting with her need to move her body to Helena’s body, to entwine her hands with Helena’s hands, to press her mouth to Helena’s mouth, terrified that her body would betray her by actually panting, by being unable to hold back its legibly, palpably eager and desperate breath.

Was that why Helena had taken that step back and given Myka the elevator? Because she knew enough, had always known enough, about Myka’s body to recognize what it was aching for? Maybe that bottle of Romanian wine really had been nothing but a peace offering; even so, this horrific, breathing need made it all so clear. Myka had to stay far, far away from Helena Wells.

Her clarity now echoed that of the past: the morning after their final confrontation, Myka had risen for her run, pushing breakage and failure from her mind, giving over instead to muscle memory. Put feet on floor; brush teeth; layer on clothing; apply socks, shoes; tie laces; pull hair back; pocket key; all ready, everything else pushed aside.

She had opened her door, however, to find the disaster still sickening before her: jagged bottle-teeth littered the hall, and wine was taking its viscous time souring to vinegar, dark and sticky on the old wood. Of course no one had cleaned it up—most likely, no one had noticed any of it.

What are you doing here.

Leaving, Myka had told herself, placing her soles carefully to avoid the glass. Leaving this minute to run away from it; leaving soon, and sooner if possible, to run far away from it.

The irony now, here, at AAI, was that she had to wait instead of run. She had to hold very still and cling to the idea that not moving would be her escape.

The following day, “hold very still” took the form of accepting a lunch invitation from Giselle, her acceptance accompanied—or, more honestly, prompted—by the unruly thought, At least it’ll keep her away from Helena. Her follow-up thought was, What, really, is your objection to that? Which one do you think you own?

She and Giselle slipped into a crowded “down” elevator at the last instant before its doors closed—at which point Myka nearly threw her hands up in surrender, because of course: Helena. So they shared an elevator space after all... but better, Myka tried to tell herself, better the crowd today than the intimacy that would have been last night. No panting, no temptation.

Or maybe she was wrong about temptation. Helena seemed to send Giselle a meaningful look, the sort of flicking glance that Myka had once taken for hers alone. Giselle returned that look with a flirty smirk. She’d flirty-smirked at Myka plenty of times, but it most likely meant something different when she directed it at Helena. Something far more special.

So much for this lunch keeping Giselle from anything.

“Ladies,” Helena said. She was on Giselle’s right; Myka was on Giselle’s left.

Giselle said, with half a grin, “Oklahoma.”

“Incomprehensible sport reference,” Helena said in a grumble that Myka resented recognizing as half real, half for show.

Giselle shoulder-bumped her. “Listen when I talk: I’m Texas.”

Helena shoulder-bumped back. “I was attempting to respond at least vaguely in kind.”

“Myka, explain sports to her,” Giselle said. “Only so many times I can try.”

Myka had been holding herself back from inserting her body between theirs, a physical Don’t be friendly! shriek of ownership over them both. Now she said, as calmly as she could, “That would not go well.”

“She’s already tried to tell me what shoes are for,” Helena complained to Giselle.

Giselle crossed her arms. “Has she.”

Was Myka trying to get Giselle on her side with what she said next? Probably. But Giselle should have been on her side—on AAI’s side, at least—already. “All I told her was that the public shouldn’t have Deceits.”

“She doesn’t want them in competition either,” was Helena’s next jab.

“I bet she doesn’t,” Giselle said, very mild, to Helena. She turned to Myka. “Do you.”

“Of course not,” Myka said.

Helena shrugged, saying to Giselle, “Then she should keep them out of competition.”

Was that a taunt? “How are we supposed to do that?” Myka demanded. “She’s made it impossible.”

Giselle inclined her head toward Helena, a “your turn” move.

Helena obliged. “I haven’t; Zelus has. But frankly, competition is one small corner of a very large field. The company wants Deceits everywhere.”

Myka leaned past Giselle to say, “Well, I don’t.” Saying this, now, directly to Helena; as if saying it harshly enough would make Helena buckle.

Helena offered another shrug, as if she didn’t care what Myka said, or to whom she said it. “In the company’s history, has there been a shoe they didn’t want everywhere? And in any event,” she said now, leaning her own way across Giselle, even farther than Myka had, “everyone wants to run faster.” She gave a cold little laugh. “Everyone but you.” Clearly a taunt.

Myka said, cold in return and true, “That’s right. Not if it’s fake.”

Helena replaced her body at Giselle’s side then, no response other than that. It left Myka hanging, casting new darting glances at Helena and Giselle side by side, as the elevator descended, floor by floor.

Myka had already spent time angrily considering how beautiful they would have been together as younger versions of themselves, but now she was confronted with how beautiful they were together as these this-minute versions. Her resentment of it, of them, gnawed at her, for who was she, who lied about a boyfriend, to get in the way of beauty? She lied to keep her life free of complication, and beauty was complicating. Insurmountably so.

She had to—had to—let go of the idea of Helena as hers. Stupid recalcitrance, clinging to it, for of course Helena had never been hers. She needed to understand that, down to her shoelaces. And whatever special version of herself Helena had made her seem? All right, yes, she had wanted it... Don’t you still want it? she imagined Helena asking, low, seductive.

Not if it’s fake.

She needed to focus on what wasn’t fake: the job she had now, and the importance of making sure she did it.

Also not fake was the fact that Giselle and Helena were two beautiful people who were beautiful together. Get used to this picture, Myka told herself. It’s the one you should want to see.

Myka considered asking Helena to join them for lunch, just to force herself to look at that picture. Then she asked herself, Or would it be to try to insert yourself between them?

The elevator ride ended before she could—or would—allow herself to discern which was more true.

At the restaurant, Myka ordered a layered-vegetable sandwich, suffering through Giselle’s eyeroll at her “without the bread, please” request; Giselle’s choice of a heavily condimented burger and fries was most likely an additional rebuke. When their food arrived, the elements of Giselle’s plate resembled browned, glistening figures arrayed on a crowded beach. Myka’s precise stack of vegetables, meanwhile, was a minimalist skyscraper.

Giselle said, “So that isn’t a sandwich anymore. You know that, right?”

“Don’t tell me what a sandwich isn’t,” Myka said.

That was clearly too much of a snap, for after a pause, Giselle asked, “You okay?”

“Of course. I just want what I want.” To demonstrate, she sliced through the skyscraper, and if impaling the resultant wedge didn’t solve her Helena-and-Giselle problem, it did satisfy.

Giselle said, “Not unrelated: I know something you don’t know.”

“Now who’s on-brand?” But that was too much of a snipe. Get yourself under control.

“Hmmm... what’s it worth to you?”

“How should I know?”

“Fair point. What if it’s worth a lot?”

“Then it would be... good for me to know?”

“Right, but what do I get out of it?”

“Um. Gratitude?”

“I was thinking three days in Monaco,” Giselle said and she looked directly into Myka’s eyes, no diverting, no nonchalant return to the eating of fries.

Her saying that, saying it as she did, was a relief, surprising in its strength: so Giselle and Helena were not back together—or if they were, it didn’t matter. Myka could not in the moment process all the resulting implications, so she said, “We’ll see,” as a way of maybe, possibly, expanding her idea of what the future could reasonably hold.

“Most hope you’ve ever given me,” Giselle said. She deployed a flirty smirk, but it seemed warmer, just a little, in cast and cant, than the Helena one. Was Myka special after all?

“Well, maybe times are changing,” Myka said, hoping it was true. Hoping it was time.

“Exciting news,” Giselle said, and not as dispassionately as she might have done; Myka almost believed her. “So here’s my news for you: Zelus wants to buy Ingenumedix. No, let me rephrase: Zelus really wants to buy Ingenumedix.”

Ingenumedix? That pinged; Myka concentrated and located the source: a newspaper article she’d glanced over, some months ago. “That’s a tech start-up... what does Zelus want it for?”

“Wearables, I heard.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“Does it matter? I’m in communications. People communicate with me. People who care. It’s a tip from someone who cares.”

Someone who cares... “About what?” Myka asked. “Competition being fair?”

Giselle laughed. “Sure. Why not call it that?”

“But why is it worth enough for three days in Monaco?” Myka asked, but as she said those words, she heard how they sounded, and she realized what she’d implied. “I don’t mean you aren’t yourself worth those three days,” she stumbled to say, “because of course you are. Or I... I mean I imagine you would be. Not that I imagine you in Monaco, because of course I don’t. Not you.” No, no, no; that was even wronger. “Not just not you, though; I mean, not you, and of course not anybody else either, because... why am I still talking?” This is where complication gets you.

“Why? Maybe working your way to telling me what you do imagine,” Giselle said, sly. “But don’t worry about hurting my feelings. Three days in Monaco with me? I know what that’s worth. What matters is, I’m in communications.”

“What?” Myka said, baffled.

“Yes. What. But really, you’re asking who. Doesn’t matter, though. Who, what. I don’t know.”

Clearly, Giselle was not going to be clear. Myka said, “I always found ‘Who’s on first’ very confusing.”

“Your problem not mine,” Giselle said. She chuckled. “Speaking of your problem, fun times in the elevator with Helena! You two fighting through me—then around me—that was a show. A show plus.”

“She isn’t my problem,” Myka said, willing it to be true.

“And here I thought you were working on the shoes.”

“Right, but not—she’s not my problem. The shoes are.”

“She’s here because of the shoes.”

“Which are my only problem,” Myka said, again trying to force the truth of it.

“Let me be clear: she’s here.” After this pronouncement, Giselle bit an enormous hunk from her hamburger.

Myka took a new pristine slice from her skyscraper, piercing it perfectly—perfectly satisfyingly—through all its layers. “Let me be clear back,” she said, pleased that she could gesture with the fork holding it, if carefully. That, at least, was clean and unconfusing. “I won’t let that be my problem.”

“That may not be your call.”

“I won’t let that not be my call.”

“You are precious.”

“Thanks,” Myka said, with what she hoped was a long-suffering eyeroll of her own.

“I mean it in the not-mean way.”

“You and Pete are both a lot meaner than you seem to think.”

Giselle took up a French fry. She waved it lazily around—left, right—her wrist flopping limp each way. After this display of nonchalance, she said, “About Pete.”

“What about him?” Myka asked, slicing the skyscraper again. She had to concentrate to do it, so as to keep the layers from collapsing into a sliding mess, like a poorly planned building implosion. Now it was a challenge, to keep it standing as long as possible.

“That’s what I’m wondering. Are he and Helena alike at all?”

She’d thought she understood the game. But what did Pete have to do with any of it? “Why would you ask me that?”

Giselle dropped the fry and raised her hands. “Okay,” she said. “Backing off.”

Unclear about what Giselle was backing off from, Myka too backed off. She abandoned the vegetable skyscraper, though she was barely halfway through its demolition. What good could come from forcing—or even witnessing—its inevitable fall?

*

Myka had called Steve the night before, the night of the elevator, thinking to convince herself that any feelings she might be feeling were nothing but remnants of a brief bit of the past, and that she was perfectly able to talk about that past using the appropriate past tense. “You’ll never guess who, I mean whom, I’ve run into,” she said.

He didn’t respond at first. Then he said, “Uh oh.”

“What?” Myka asked. Seriously, had he immediately jumped to—

“A peacock,” he said, because clearly, he had.

“Are you a mind reader?”

“Voice reader. What happened?”

“Nothing happened.” But not because I know what I’m doing, she thought. That elevator could have—would have—been a complete disaster. “She’s here to... anyway, she’s here, and I can’t do anything about it.”

“As a voice reader, it sounds to me like the picture’s still pretty.”

She considered dissembling. Pointless. So she said, “God. Still.” Only to him could she have said such a thing, and it was a relief to have said it out loud, with no twinge of sarcasm or dismissal. But it was also a burden, real and true, to acknowledge with voice and breath that she did still find the view that was Helena so compelling.

He said a low “Hmmm.” Then, “I thought you gave it up. All of it.”

“I did.”

“But you’re rethinking.”

“Absolutely not,” she declared, loud, aggressive. But this was Steve, so she had to be honest. “Well. I was starting to. With someone else. Vaguely. But I keep rethinking. That.”

“Rethinking starting the rethinking.”

“Yes.”

“I’m unclear on where you actually are in the thinking process.”

“When I hear it out loud, so am I. How’s Liam?”

“Handsome,” Steve said, and Myka could hear his half-smile, picture his incipient left-cheek dimple.

“No rethinking for either of you, right?”

“Nope. Wedding’s still on. And you’re not allowed to rethink showing up, best person.”

It was a glancing reference to how she’d become... unreliable. After. So much so, Steve had taken to camping out on the couch that lived on her apartment building’s porch, early in the morning, coffee in hand, waiting for her to return from her run so she couldn’t avoid him. “For my own peace of mind,” he would say, transparently.

Over the course of several mornings, she explained that she was considering going home again, waiting again, this time until she knew for certain.

She didn’t tell him about the coin that had done her so wrong.

He had expressed understanding, but he had also noted that the choice wasn’t binary: to lawyer or to run away. And then he’d sent her links to several job postings, one of which was at AAI.

After Myka accepted the AAI position, she took the news of it to her father. She had her arguments prepared: she told him that law school hadn’t been enough of a challenge. That was the truth. That she’d been ambivalent about law—also true—and that she wanted to take what she’d learned and use it differently than anyone expected. “Even you,” she tried to joke.

“Expectations,” he’d said, and she waited for him to go on. Waited. Eventually, he would have to fill the void. “Good run this morning?” he asked at last.

She couldn’t cry; it would have confirmed what she was reasonably sure he’d guessed, that she was trying to work her way out of something terrible. So she kept the hot red relief behind her nose, away from her eyes and throat, and said, “First few miles were ragged, but I found a stride about halfway. You?”

“Listened to my knees pop the whole time. You think I should get one of those i-things, with the little earbud whatevers? How loud do they go? Would that drown it all out?”

That had been the end of it, as far as Myka had ever been able to tell. Her father listened to her talk about AAI, asked focused questions, and expressed admiration for the ex-athletes she worked with. She breathed a little easier after each conversation.

So Myka owed Steve.

After much puzzling over what could possibly constitute an appropriate wedding present, she’d at last lit on the idea of, then actually found, a Matchbox-car Saab, which she’d repainted orange. One or more of his high school friends might have had the same idea, but a good friend—the best friend—couldn’t really have too many model orange Saabs. Probably.

And all right, yes: she’d thought about Helena. Constantly. When she’d ideated the toy Saab. When she’d bought the car and the orange paint. When she’d applied coat after painstaking coat to cover its original unassuming amber. She’d thought and thought and thought, against her will but not really, about that time she was not known for driving an orange Saab.

She considered that she herself might have called Helena into being, here, now, by doing all that thinking. “It’s kind of your fault,” she was tempted to say to Steve... but she had to wait until after the wedding for that. By then, at least, it would be nothing but comedy, for by then, all this Helena business would be behind her.

This is what I’m supposed to want.

TBC

[apparitionism]

Mercury 13b

And with this VERY long second part of part 13(!), Mercury at last comes to an end. (Preceding parts are findable on my tumblr, via search and/or archive.) Talky, pedantic... there’s a great deal of unresolved thinking here; I’m resentful of how the whole Emily Lake situation requires you to fall back on “well, it’s just artifact-y magic” once you really start pushing to make sense of it. Anyway, previously on Mercury, Helena was remarking on the astonishing coincidence of their having met Emily Lake’s girlfriend at this random county fair. This raised in Myka a significant sense of uh-oh, so she asked Helena if she’d asked the girlfriend why she’d come to the fair in the first place...

Mercury 13b

Helena’s brow wrinkled. “I did not,” she said.

Myka voiced her fear: “What if the Regents set this up?” she asked, and Helena paled... so much for not causing trouble. Myka went on, and as she did, it felt still more plausible, “Manipulate everybody to Nowhere, Wisconsin, sit back, and watch the disaster unfold. I don’t really believe in accidents anymore.”

“Happy or otherwise...” Helena’s voice was resigned, as if Myka articulating the idea had made it not only thinkable, but instantly and obviously true.

Myka couldn’t really disagree. “Our punishment. I keep thinking maybe it’s over, but it isn’t.” She inhaled a painful breath. “If Pete had—if the coin. And then if Emily Lake was all that was left of you? I guess I would have met her girlfriend anyway. Talk about an unfolding disaster... do you think I could have stayed away?”

“Of course I wouldn’t have,” Helena said, oddly offhand.

“Stayed away?”

Still offhand: “Met her. In that case.”

Myka’s gut lurched. No, Helena wouldn’t have met her; Myka had said it herself. You’d be gone. “Appetites,” she said now, self-castigating, “but this one’s sick. I think about what I would’ve done, and it’s sick. Like when people have their pets cloned. I would have kept hoping Emily Lake would turn back into you.”

“Perhaps you would have persuaded her to produce a facsimile. ‘Myka,’ said as I say it.” This was not offhand at all, and having said it, Helena clamped her teeth tight, increasing the jut of her jaw, her cheekbones.

“No,” Myka said, quickly, wishing it were true, but was it? Helena was jabbing back at Myka, as she had with her “Oh Agent Bering” this morning, at the start of this impossible day—and Myka, as the insensitive jerk in the situation, had to acknowledge that these digs were entirely fair. (Pete’s “the fair” echoed at her. Where it all just happened.)  “All I know is, the sight of her. Pretending it was the sight of you. Not believing, but pretending. I wouldn’t have been able to give it up. Slippery slope.”

“So regardless of the action taken in that forest clearing, a life sentence for you.” Helena’s words managed to convey resentment both toward Myka and on Myka’s behalf.

“Self-imposed... when the Regents want dirty work done to me, I’m usually the best person for the job,” Myka agreed. “Which brings us back to what we—both of us—do and don’t deserve.”

Helena sat up straight, breathed out emphatically through her nose, and said, “What is an appropriate punishment? To whom does it rightly redound? What part of one’s self must any human insist on the right to retain? What is constitutive? To what extent are violations of that self, of others’ selves, acceptable, tolerable, endurable in the name of justice?” Helena reeled off this list of questions as if her monograph answering them had already been completed, as if she were cracking open the freshly published volume on a lectern before her because this was at last her opportunity to present her findings to Myka and even to the world at large. But what she said next was, “I imagined myself—ha, my self—a philosopher skilled enough to think all these things through. I was wrong.”

Helena had now admitted two times, on this day when it all just happened and kept happening, to being wrong. More than that: both times, she had actually uttered, as a sentence, “I was wrong.” Once in a day was unusual enough—once in a week—but twice? “Nobody here is a philosopher skilled enough to think all of that through,” Myka said. She wasn’t sure the monograph wouldn’t eventually emerge, but Helena seemed to need to believe, right now, in this moment, that she wasn’t the one who could make it happen. “Nobody... well, maybe Pete,” she faux-conceded.

It had the intended effect; Helena’s hard, bleak expression softened. “He was doing very well.”

Myka asked, of that softer face, “If we can’t think our way through it, then what are we left with? Let them win or... I don’t know, ignore it?”

Helena shrugged, still soft. “We prove again and again that we’re incapable of the latter. As for the former, what would it look like, letting them win?”

But Myka suspected Helena knew the answer to that—or rather, knew Myka’s own answer to that. “I let them win once before. I gave up and left. So I’ll say it out loud: You could do that.”

Helena breathed. Not sighs, but noise. “Could I?” she eventually asked, her voice empty. What did that mean?

“You’re not a prisoner. For once, you’re not. As far as I know. And even if you are, you could escape... quit trying to figure out what happened, what was justified. Give up the fight. The fights.”

“The fights,” Helena said, and was that less blank? “Give up the fights with you?”

“I’m being serious,” Myka said, because there was some twitch in the way Helena had just said “you.”

“Hm. The fights with Pete?”

Helena clearly intended that to have an effect similar to what Myka had achieved by mentioning him, so Myka rolled her eyes and lightened her tone. “Didn’t you two just sign the historic Kenosha Accords anyway?”

“And the fights with Artie?”

“You’d both be perfectly happy never speaking to each other again.”

“Even with the hideously bearded Frenchman?”

“Are we going to go through the list of everybody you ever had a beef with? You’re still alive and he isn’t. As you never stop pointing out, you won that one.”

“Not as far as literary scholars are concerned, not yet; thus I continue to argue my position.”

“You should argue it with literary scholars then, and leave me out of it.”

“Which reminds me: you seem once again to be forgetting a quite salient point.”

“What point this time?”

“I don’t want to leave you out of it.” Helena said this with laser-precise intensity, and just like that, they were back in the real conversation. “I don’t want to leave you out of anything. I don’t want to let them win, I don’t want to give up the fights, and, most importantly, I don’t want to leave.”

“I bet some part of you does,” Myka said, because it seemed like she... should. Should make sure Helena knew that leaving really was an option. Because leaving needed to be an option, never mind the philosophy; otherwise, how would Myka ever know that Helena was choosing to stay? “I just bet. I bet if you listened close, it’d work on you like that microphone.”

This time, Helena did not pause. “Then I won’t listen at all. I’ll stop my ears, or I will have you lash me to the mast like Odysseus. Let these words work on you: I would rather be whatever recobbled version of my fractured self I am now, arguing with you today or on any given future day about whatever aspect of our punishment we are being forced to confront, than undertake yet another rebuilding.” She paused for breath. “Do you disagree?”

Myka thought of their yesterday talk of earplugs and the mast, when they were guessing about how they might stay safe at the fair—when they could not have known there would be no way to stay safe at the fair. But then Myka shifted her thoughts from earplugs and the mast, from those things, to Odysseus himself. That exile who at last came home... “When I gave up and left,” Myka said, “it was because I didn’t know who I was anymore. I thought I knew Myka Bering so well, but that turned out to be some name on a badge I surrendered. I guess I didn’t learn any kind of lesson, though, because now, today, I think I know myself pretty well, but then there I am, ready to lick key lime pie off a Pinto. Constitutive? I was sure I was still me. Clearly I have no idea who that is.” A sad truth to learn, on a very educational trip to Wisconsin.

“At the risk of confirming the Wells family’s sentimentality, I will say, you should have some idea that that is someone I love.”

She sounded factual, not sentimental, and under normal circumstances, that would have reassured Myka enormously. I am someone she loves. That is a fact. But that was also a problem, because love did have a factual basis, a factual, bodily basis, one whose inescapability had caused so much of the trouble. “Your body loved someone else,” she said, and as Helena began to shrink into the chair again, she hurried to add, “I’m not saying that like I did before. I’m saying it because I don’t know how to think it through. What it means. What we feel as love, that’s chemicals in the body, and... I have to confess. I did feel it, when I first saw Emily Lake. Those chemicals: My heart leapt. My blood moved. So if anybody—any body—did any betraying, it was me. Not you.”

“Myka,” said as I say it.... what if Emily Lake really had sounded like Helena? What would Myka’s heart have done then? “I’m sorry,” she said to Helena now, as if it were possible to apologize for any of it—what had happened, what might have happened. Part of the punishment, something whispered at her. Betrayal on betrayal.

Helena cleared her throat. “Conversely, I loved you—even, although it sounds strange to say, desired you—when I had no access to my body, to its production of those chemicals. To the way its blood once moved. What does that mean?”

Shaking her head, Myka said, “Sounds like two sides of the same completely incomprehensible coin.” She instantly regretted her terrible choice of simile... she was never going to be able to think clearly about coins again, their sides or their consequences. “Sorry for that too,” she said with a wince. “The same punitive, incomprehensible coin.”

“Would that coins—and one coin in particular—were comprehensible.” Helena said, in grim agreement.

Myka found herself unreasonably grateful that she and Helena would always share such overlapping areas of... inclarity. “I know the only real explanation is that there is none. Artifacts. We shouldn’t even try to think it through. Stupid endless wonder.”

Helena nodded. “Cringeworthy, certainly. But even in the absence of artifactual complication, I don’t believe love is particularly easy to parse.”

“That doesn’t sound very sentimental.”

“It’s not. Charles would hate it.”

“Right now I’m with Charles. Why can’t it be easy?”

“That’s yet another line of philosophical investigation, I suspect.”

“We’ve established that we’re both pretty bad at philosophy. I have to think that extends to the part about love.” When Helena didn’t respond, the moment stretched. Myka felt the onset of, tried to resist, and then gave in to an enormous yawn.

“Hm. You find the philosophy of love dull?” But this was said gentle, not to argue against a yawn, but to cradle it.

Myka now found her fatigue foregrounded, so much that even a chuckle was beyond her. “I wish it were dull. I wish we were, but we’re not. We’re the opposite of dull.”

“The opposite of dull...” Helena quirked a smile. “Thus we shine,” she concluded. Like she believed it.

“So much it hurts my eyes,” Myka said, and she yawned again. “I haven’t said anything to make you want to stay in that chair all night, have I?”

“No.”

“Then please come here.”

Helena spidered her way onto the bed, all thin limbs and caution, moving like she’d been afraid such an invitation would never be issued, plastering herself to Myka as if it might never be issued again. For someone who had acted as if she were testing Zeno’s dichotomy paradox every single time she was in Myka’s vicinity—standing half-closer and half again and half that—Helena had been surprisingly permission-oriented with regard to truly intimate physical contact, the bridging of that final molecular, bodily gap. “Let me,” she had breathed, begged, in the moment before she kissed Myka for the first time, and “Yes,” Myka had breathed back. She could not possibly have said no. In that moment, she had been sure she would never say no.

Last night, Helena should have been able to rely on that license, how it had deepened, expanded. Remorse at denying her the certainty of consolation hit Myka anew.

She would not ever, ever, ever take for granted that they were able to lie in this way that had become customary, with Helena’s head on Myka’s shoulder, her arm across Myka’s midsection, her lithe length wedged tight against Myka’s side, Myka’s arm safe around her slight scapulae. How easy it was to be misled about her small size. How important it was to be reminded of the very real weight of her body, no matter how light that weight.

Helena’s hair, when Myka turned her head, smelled of cotton candy, engine exhaust, and an entire day’s worth of sunshine.

Myka said, “You were right: I was nervous. That we’d keep fighting. Need to. Some things, the daylight fixes them, but I thought not this, even with the PDA and the Ferris wheel and the pie. And I thought you thought it too.”

“I did think it, for a time. I do think we’ll continue to fight about many, many things. But this... in fact Pete said it best.”

“He did?” These historic Kenosha Accords were... mind-boggling.

“I’m tired. Of it all. I need to tell you something.”

Oh god, Myka thought. Here it comes. But what was “it”?

Whatever it was, it was something Helena wouldn’t have been able to say, sitting in the chair. This wasn’t Helena’s at-a-decorous-distance voice; this voice, Myka heard most often in the dark.

“Or perhaps it’s that I need you to tell me something.”

“Okay,” Myka said, hiding behind the word.

“But I don’t know what it is.”

That admission carried a tremolo of frustrated helplessness that Myka didn’t often hear, and it sent a pulse of those well-known chemicals through her body.  “I’ll tell you anything you need me to,” she said, trying to sound as sure as if she were being sworn in—truth and nothing but. “Or I’ll try. But you have to at least give me a hint.”

“She wanted a child.”

Now Myka was the one who took a minute to breathe. “Emily Lake wanted a—”

“Or I should say, another child. Because she knew she’d had a child.”

“What?”

“Based on a physical examination, I learned today, but my first thought—my yesterday thought and fear—was that she had kept something of Christina, something that had been mine. I feared, and in fact I still fear, that the coin left in her some memory of my child, some memory that, when she was wiped away, was lost.”

A physical exam. Christina was of Helena’s body; there was bodily evidence. Myka didn’t often think about that, because she had the luxury of not thinking about that, and now she hated herself for indulging in that luxury, and she hated herself even more for last night, for this morning. Why weren’t you a better human? Never mind philosopher... she had heeded only her own small jealousy, when Helena had been terrified by, had been staggering under the weight of, the idea of having lost still more of her already-lost child.

“You still love literature,” she tried, lamely. “They let Emily Lake keep that, but you got it back.”

Helena reared away from Myka’s side to bare her teeth and snarl, “I ‘got it back’? Its quality, its fullness? Who can say? And if some part of that was lost, if in fact some memory of Christina was, then what else essential to myself—constitutive of my self—might now be lost to me?” Now accusation, with a dash of contempt: “Tell me, how sick did you feel, upon realizing what you’d eaten this evening? How very, very sick?”

Something tu quoque–esque from Helena wasn’t unexpected in such a circumstance; it was her version of Myka’s knee-jerk, defensive “I can take care of myself.” But the sudden animal anger stung. Hadn’t Helena just said she was tired of fighting about this? Yet the contours of this were ever-changing, and to have Christina become a part of this would always have made for dangerous ground. Myka said, low, “You’re right. But don’t you think I’d tell you if you were different? If some of what had made you yourself was missing?”

“But what if it isn’t something you would know?” Helena asked, on her back, separate from Myka, talking to the ceiling.

Myka said, because it seemed only logical, “But I thought I was the one person who knows you better than anyone else.”

“You are. The one living person.”

“Oh,” Myka said, and “oh, god,” and she tried not to let those words emerge as the sob they were. Myka had indeed flattered herself with the idea that she knew Helena better than anyone. Another indulgence. She had not bothered to stop on the less-flattering truth that so many long-dead people knew Helena better than Myka did, better than she ever could. Charles, probably... even Christina. And Myka didn’t know Helena with Christina—what constituted Helena with Christina. No living person did.

That vast then-now distance... sometimes Myka felt it in herself, how it estranged her from Helena. But tonight, just as with the idea of shame, her viscera knew the reverse, knew how Helena must feel it as an estrangement from Myka and everyone and everything, an all-consuming difference. She wasn’t like Myka and the rest of them, humans who had lived through history; rather, she was history, an angel flying over time itself: unable to turn away from all the wreckage of the past, yet also unable to keep from being flung violently into the future.

All the wreckage of the past. All that constitutive wreckage to which Helena clung. “I wish,” Myka began. “I wish I had the microphone, because I’m not a philosopher, and I don’t know how to make this make sense.” Groping for words that would make it better, not worse, but she wasn’t a philosopher, not even one as good as Pete... “You need me to tell you something, so I’ll try. Can I—I mean, may I—try to say something—some things—that you might believe?”

“You may,” Helena said, quietly, but she didn’t move closer. She continued lying on her back, staring up, as if the ceiling were frescoed with scenes no living person had painted. As if, should she divert her attention, they would be lost forever.

Myka would have stayed on her back too, but she had to say these words to Helena, not to some expanse that loomed above them both—not even if it had been the sky, but certainly not cheap drywall treated to soak up all sound. She turned on her side again. Regarded Helena’s profile. She’d thought she understood who she was in relation to that profile; then she’d thought she’d been wrong. But then: I believed in you and I was right.

She reached her hand over, let her fingers climb that cliff of cheekbone, let them rest for a moment at the apex. Helena moved her head in a tiny, sharp nestle against Myka’s palm.

So astute, that movement. It gave Myka enough push to start, “You said you don’t have my memory, and that’s true. Most people forget things all the time, things constitutive of different versions of themselves. You’re saying you’re terrified that one of those versions of you might have loved, might have valued Christina in a way deeper—better—than this version of you does. Right?”

“That is...” Helena angled her face, minutely, toward Myka. “Uncomfortably right.”

Keep going. “So I’ll ask you: can you imagine valuing her more than you do right now? As you sit and think about her, because I know you do that, like breathing. I don’t know what it feels like to you, breathing like that, but I know it feels like something.”

Helena put her right hand to her forehead, as if pressure would yield the right simile. “Like... something wrapped around me. A straitjacket? Or a full-body bridle. A steady, clothing presence—but then it yanks tight, and I can’t breathe at all.”

“No one memory’s going to change that,” Myka said, and she tried to say it with conviction, but Helena didn’t move. Of course not; it was a cliché. Myka put her own hand to her own forehead, as pressure to think, pressure to get this right... all she found was another cliché. Still, she had to try something. “Okay, how about this: memories are like rosary beads, that’s what they say.” Helena still didn’t move, but Myka forged on, “I know you’re not religious. But let’s say you were. What if the Regents took your rosary and stole one of your Hail Mary beads or made you skip over a Glory Be? Even if they never let you touch your rosary again... what could that ever do to faith?” Myka thought she knew the answer. Not for certain, not for Helena, but Myka had felt the warmth—had suffered the violence—of a full-body bridle of her own.

The exhale, the inhale. Finally, on yet another exhale: “When you say it that way.”

“I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Yes you do. Yes you do, philosopher.” Helena moved herself to Myka, fit their bodies together once more.

Myka didn’t understand how her heart withstood it all: how it kept on beating, given how full it was, given how full of chemicals her entire body was, chemicals explaining to her exactly what this feeling was. Its right name. She kept on breathing, too, feeling how her older-than-science respiration now pushed Helena’s body up, where it lay upon her; now let it fall.

“The part about love,” she eventually said. “I’ll never know what we can and can’t get past. How hard it’ll be.”

Helena, still in time-taking mode, said, “Nor will I. But the part about love. If you could... bear it in mind?”

“Well, if you could too. I’m no picnic.”

“Compared to myself, you are surely the most relaxing of holidays.”

She was dry, she was herself—the self Myka knew so well, the self Myka did know better than any other living person knew. We can get past it. She scoffed, “I’m a relaxing holiday? That is objectively not the case and also ridiculous, because we’re both stupidly difficult. Punishment aside. I don’t think even the Regents had toothpaste-cap-etiquette-based consequences in mind.” She reconsidered. “Sure as I say that, though...” And sure as she said it, she did see that there would be no knowing. Ever.

“Perhaps...” Helena began; Myka felt a shake in her body, and was that more danger? No: Helena was laughing. “Perhaps the conflict, even over toothpaste caps, will draw viewers to the Bering-and-Wells television program.”

Instead of laughing, Myka yawned again, this time from relief. “On which we’re shipped, I guess? This isn’t my area of expertise.”

“It is,” Helena insisted. “It is both of ours.” To Myka’s raised eyebrow, she continued, “When it comes to yourself and myself romantically paired.”

“Once again, objectively ridiculous. Expertise? We both keep proving how incompetent we are.” Myka followed this with yet another yawn.

“Incompetent at the part about love? Let’s see. You know, ‘inspissate’ is a very good word.”

Myka knew that musing, yet goal-directed, tone. Was Helena right to be using it here, now, in this aftermath? Was Myka right to let it work on her? “Is it,” she said, as neutrally as possible.

“Yes.” Helena levered herself above Myka, brought their faces very close together. “For what happens to the air just before I kiss you. As I make you wait just one inspissating instant more.”

“You shouldn’t make me wait,” Myka said, helpless under that pressure, “inspissation aside,” but her words were a prolongation too, a thickening, a proof that the air between them could thicken, could take on such perfect unctuous molecularity.

This kiss, every kiss, was better—sweeter—than key lime pie. And better still, because Myka was fully herself (she thought so, at least, and that had to be enough), enjoying it so much. Enjoying the bodily, real, uncoerced nature of it. The way the muscles of lips and tongues worked, relaxed. Breath moved out, breath moved in.

But breath, and its movement, brought Myka to an unpleasant physical awareness. She turned her head away.

Helena pulled back; then she sighed with exaggerated grievance. “So much for voracious. Your soul can stand only so much appetite in one day?” Her tone was lighthearted, but Myka heard in it a spindle of tension.

“It’s not about my soul,” Myka told her. “I just realized I desperately need to brush my teeth.”

Helena laughed, as if she really had been joking after all. Myka was not fooled. “Given your devotion to dental hygiene, I believe it is about your soul. It’s true I like your teeth.” Helena paused. “I also like the fights about toothpaste caps.”

“Do you.”

“Small fights. They seem like ours.”

“Just ours? Not our punishment?”

“Just ours. Truly, the Regents could not possibly know with the intimacy I do the extent to which the capping of toothpaste containers matters to you.”

“It’s representative,” Myka said, “of all the things,” and she pushed herself off the bed, heading for the bathroom and her toothbrush, hoping that could be the last word on the topic—but Helena followed her, would not leave her alone, narrated the toothbrushing (narrated in recalled detail the reason for it, including “and then it was at your feet—and then it was not at your feet because it was in your mouth,” the whole idea of which was another thing Myka would have been happy to Eternal-Sunshine away), such that Myka was indeed getting wound up, ready to stop Helena’s mouth by any means necessary. Which was clearly Helena’s goal, but: “You ate pie too, you know,” Myka said. “Not to mention a corndog. And you have a toothbrush of your own.”

Helena gave a very adolescent eyeroll. “You are overweeningly fastidious,” she said, but she complied, still narrating; her next pronouncement, around a mouthful of mint, was, “And despite your consumption of an unsanitary, sugar-saturated bite, you had no access to your toothbrush.”

Myka did find it appalling, in retrospect. She’d had no access even to a breath mint. “Please stop,” she said, with no real hope that Helena would.

“No,” Helena confirmed. She sounded surprisingly—and then, as Myka thought about it more, unsurprisingly—Pete-like.

“If this is a fight,” Myka said, “it isn’t about a toothpaste cap.”

“No, but it is small and ours. Even if the Regents did engineer this Kenosha misadventure to toy with us, they could not have imagined that Pete would induce you, artifactually, to eat key lime pie, nor how violently you would eventually react to having done so.”

“Still feels like part of the toy-with-us misadventure to me.”

“I know. Is it all right if I find that precious? In both senses of the word?”

Instead of answering, Myka pushed Helena against the wall of the bathroom, waited until she smiled in triumph, then kissed her smiling, clean mouth. Enjoyed it so much, and yet so much more, that clean mouth. “Voracious?” Helena eventually teased.

“Desperate,” Myka corrected. Helena began to raise an eyebrow, so Myka added, “To get you to stop talking.”

Helena smirked at that, because of course she would. “A distinction without a difference.”

“I really don’t think—” Myka began, but she immediately forgot how she intended to end that sentence, because Helena said an authoritative “Hush,” and now she was the one pushing, demanding.

“Peace?” Myka proposed, when she could breathe.

That won her an intimate smile, one that could have been wicked but was instead happy. Straightforward. “Perhaps not quite yet.”

The part about love would never be the part about peace. The build and release of tension, physical and otherwise, was not peace; it would bring them to rest, but it was not peace.

Not peace, and they were physically proving it: this hand, this press, this thigh, this rise—this fight to bodily get somewhere. That they could have this fight, this small-and-theirs fight, was a dispensation Myka had tried, for such a long time, to train herself out of wanting...she had so, so longed to gather hologram-Helena into her arms after Pittsburgh, and that had obviously been an absurdity, and just as obviously, it had been part of the punishment: that the very idea of holding Helena was made absurd. Absurd and unthinkable.

Tonight Myka found her attention, and thus her lips and her breath, drawn repeatedly to a tiny, fresh mosquito-bite sore right where Helena’s shoulder met her neck. An imperfection, a wound, inflicted on this breathing body today. This now-gasping body, this one that Myka could touch—could make gasp—today. The Regents had tried to punish such present joy away; they had tried to bequeath it to Emily Lake, but Myka and Helena had got it back. Myka had believed it back, and Helena had nobled it back. Belief and nobility: they lent something solemn, something like dignity, to even the most basic, pleasurable gasps and where they led.

Meant to be deprived of this, they had refused to be deprived of this.

In the quiet before sleep, Myka touched the proud little bite-swell with what she hoped was a gentle finger. “Does it itch?” she asked, and in response to Helena’s drowsy “somewhat,” she couldn’t hold back an equally sleepy, yet softly outraged, “How dare any creature bite you.”

“You reserve the privilege?”

“You did say you like my teeth.” She dipped her head to scrape them gently against Helena’s temple. “But I meant: damage you at all.”

Equally soft, yet indulgent, Helena said, “You reserve that privilege too?”

Myka couldn’t quite laugh. “Maybe. If you ask the Regents, it’s probably in my job description. But for now? I just want your body intact. I’d like to say nobody gets to touch you but me. That privilege.”

“Claudia would object. She is a hugger.”

“Yeah. And then there’s Pete, who’s also a high-fiver, a back-slapper, and a drops-his-head-like-a-rock-against-your-shoulder-on-an-airplane snorer.”

“You are none of those things,” Helena said, factually. She followed it with a soft but insistent, “What would you say you are?”

Myka took a moment to think. What this feeling was... its right name. “A lover,” she said at last. “Yours, in fact.”

An accurate statement, for they were close in bed, pressed against each other, their limbs nakedly, solidly together. An accurate statement, yet Helena said, just as accurately, “You never say things like that.”

Myka didn’t say things like that. She didn’t think she was good at saying things like that. But now, tonight, because there had been so much saying but maybe not quite enough, not quite yet, she said, “I thought maybe that was part of what you needed me to tell you.”

Helena breathed at Myka. She had breathed like this in the past, when moments were at their most enormous. “I told you I didn’t know what,” she said, when she had apparently had enough of meaningful breathing.

“I know.”

“But that was, after all. Part. Please never stop telling me things.” A dulcet nestle, now against Myka’s neck. “For example tell me what is canasta.” Helena’s turn to yawn: not with vigor, just a little open-close of mouth. Small, sleepy animal.

Myka wanted to celebrate. She settled for placing a kiss where her teeth had lately scraped. “A card game. I’ll google the particulars and explain it tomorrow, I promise. And I’ll tell you why I brought it up.”

This was not the way Myka had ever expected to say “I love you”: vowing to speak about canasta when the day was new. But this was not the way Myka had ever expected to find happiness, either—constantly subjected to endless wonder/torment, never at peace—and yet here she was, happy. At rest, and happy.

“Don’t forget,” Helena said in a slow slur. “I know you won’t... but don’t.”

“Never,” Myka said. Had Helena heard her? It didn’t matter, not as they became sleep-ballast against each other.

The Regents did still mean to punish them; even Myka’s dreams were certain of that. Within the deserved and undeserved punishments, though, the consolations—the sleep, the dreams, the dreams that came true—were worth it.

****

Back at home, Pete gleefully informed Claudia about the basics of the duck bet—including what she was not going to have to “be some word cop about.” Upon receiving this information, Claudia proclaimed, with a pat of Myka’s shoulder that she apparently intended to be comforting (Myka added “shoulder-patter” to “hugger” on Claudia’s list), “Poor Myka. You win some, you Pete some.”

“It’s even worse than that,” Myka reminded her, “artifact-wise.” She jerked her thumb at Helena.

“Ooh, that’s right. Artifact-wise, you win some, you Pete-and-H.G. some. Rare, but true.”

“Worse than that,” Myka went on, “you win some, you have to travel home with two gloating gloaters some. My advice to you is, don’t ever enjoy eating pie around these two, or you will never hear the end of it.”

Helena produced her most typical smirk, but then she softened it. “Two gloating gloaters,” she said, “each of whom, in her or his own way, loves you very much indeed. And each of whom is both astounded and transported when you are willing to show that something is making you happy—a pie, let us say. Or a peace accord.” Then she whispered, directly into Myka’s ear, “Even a closed toothpaste cap.” Because Helena had indeed snapped the travel-size-toothpaste cap closed that morning, and Myka had indeed shown her, immediately and fervently, how happy she was about that rare occurrence.

“Are you using that microphone?” Myka asked, remembering the morning, remembering the joy that had accompanied its complete lack of peace. “Because I actually believe you.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah. Do you believe me?”

“I do. And I would like to add, we’ll play canasta one day.”

Because Myka had not forgotten.

“A very exclusive party,” Helena added. “I find the word ‘meld’ quite inspirational.”

“How do you feel about the extra jokers?” Myka asked her.

“Hey, don’t call us jokers!” Pete protested.

“We’re super extra, though,” Claudia assured him, and now she was patting his shoulder.

Myka stood very still and reminded herself it was usually better not to say words out loud around Pete and Claudia... she hadn’t, in fact, fully got through the canasta rules with Helena, because canasta information had been part of the post-toothpaste-capping portion of the early daylight... but the game did involve decks with extra jokers, and, yes, something called a meld. “I honestly don’t care if we ever play it,” Myka told Helena now. “All joking, and jokers, aside.”

“Neither do I,” Helena said, “but with regard to exclusive parties, we—”

She might have been about to say something extra inappropriate, but Pete headed that off with, “Enough with the la-la. C’mon, H.G., let’s go.”

“Where are you going?” Myka asked.

“Driving lesson,” Pete said, and Helena supplemented, “I am to have drummed into me the difference between derbies and day-to-day.” Pete finished up with, “We worked it out on the plane, when you got so tired of us gloating that you took that nap.”

Claudia reached out to pat Myka’s shoulder again, but she changed her mind mid-gesture—Myka shot her a once is enough squint, which Claudia, surprisingly, heeded. Instead, she huffed and said, “Once again, Myka gets herself Pete-and-H.G.’ed. Lemme get me shoes on. No way I’m missing this ‘driving lesson.’”

Myka saw a look pass between Pete and Helena.

“Sure you wanna take your life in your hands like that?” Pete asked.

“Good point. Myka, you’re coming too.”

“Why? Because it’s better if we’re all in the emergency room at once?”

“Don’t you ever pay attention to the ‘loves you very much indeed’ business?” Claudia demanded. “If you’re in the car, she’ll be more careful.”

“Experience does not bear that out,” Myka said.

“Myka! That is untrue!”

That Helena would express such shock at a statement of fact was more than a little ridiculous. Myka noted, “Just because you say something’s untrue doesn’t make it untrue.”

“It would if I had that microphone,” Helena grumbled.

“No...” Pete said. “It’d make Myka believe it was untrue. Wouldn’t make it really untrue.”

“You may stop doing philosophy now,” Helena grumbled deeper.

“No, I kinda like it. It ticks you off, plus I get pizza afterwards because of all my hard work.” Was that a wink he’d just sent in Helena’s direction? “Which reminds me, hey, Claud, remember the part about the ginormous rabbits?”

“That’s with me like I’ve got a case of the Bering eidetics, Anya.”

“Don’t call me Anya!” Pete protested. Was that another wink?

“You’re the one scared of bunnies,” Claudia said. “Anya.”

“Only when they’re ginormous,” he whined, with a wound in his voice, and that was definitely a wink now.

Helena went into the bit about the pizza, Pete took even greater offense, and Claudia howled.

Believing in things didn’t make them true. But Myka was particularly happy to find that sometimes... sometimes, it made them real.

END

****

A few thoughts:

This is not an epilogue, because I’m trying to break my addiction to those, but I think what most likely happens at some point in the future is they work it out so that Pete, Helena, and Claudia all drive in a demo derby in some fair in South Dakota, because all three of them would be entirely down, in their own peculiar ways, with modifying the cars as they would need to for competition (demo derby car regulations are abstruse and fabulous)... and Myka and Steve and Leena would go and spectate at the big battle, and Steve and Leena would find it just this side of too violent for a recreational activity, and Myka would have pie-eating flashbacks, and I have no idea whether Helena, Claudia, or Pete could actually win, but all three of them would end up totally exhilarated by the experience. And covered in mud. And Myka would take one look at elated, mud-spattered Helena, and she would give thanks that this impossibly material, muddy body stood before her, and she would fall in love all over again (as she would of course do regularly). And then she would say “Don’t touch me until you take a shower.” And Helena would very deliberately raise an index finger and paint a line of motor oil and mud down Myka’s cheek and say “There, I’ve touched you. What do you intend to do about it?” And I suspect Myka would feign outrage—another small fight, because Helena wouldn’t believe the feigned outrage, so Myka would feign it even harder—but inside, she would continue to give fervent, prayerful thanks.

Speaking of things prayerful, I know Myka talking about praying the Rosary is a little off. I was pretty sure the example needed to be faith-related, and everything else I was coming up with was even worse than this, plus it seemed to fit with her needing to confess the sin of her first-sight-of-Emily-Lake bodily reaction. Also I figured that even though Myka isn’t Catholic—she isn’t, right? as far as we know?—I bet she took a comparative religion class or several, and the Rosary isn’t too obscure.

(Also: Bering-and-Wells-ers are a pretty erudite bunch, so probably some will have recognized the image of the angel of history from Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History; it’s become somewhat hackneyed to refer to now, certainly in an academic sense, so I semi-apologize for shoehorning it in. Nevertheless, I find show!Helena to be a strangely literal fulfillment, or maybe I mean expression, of a lot of Frankfurt School thinking about history, particularly how it detonates and reverberates. I can’t not think of her when I read Adorno, and if you take the step back to poets like Hölderlin, there’s resonance there too. Anyway, here’s Benjamin’s passage about the angel:

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

I can’t do philosophy at all. But I’m always waiting and listening for the chimes of concepts and articulations that rhyme and echo. I’m waiting for lots of things, some in a messianic-time sense. Hence the shoehorning mentioned above.)

Anyway, Mercury may have at last ended, but I’m not going anywhere. If nothing else, I’ve got Ballet AU’s Propagator to finish up, and of course I’ll keep struggling with my white whale, Sound. I gotta stay alive for that. Plus Christmas! Even if there isn’t an actual B&W gift exchange this year (though I hope there is), I’m going to try to do something for the holiday. Plus several additional ideas are clamoring to be expressed... hang around if you care to.

[apparitionism]

Mercury 12

Because I have the affinity I have, the only Warehouse 13 revival scenario I’d ever be interested in would be one involving Joanne Kelly and Jaime Murray sharing copious amounts of screen time. However: there’s a remake scenario discussed in this part that I might indeed pay cash money to see... anyway, Tumblr’s being weird again, so please be so kind as to visit my actual tumblr if you have an interest in the other parts of this little tale. Which I would also pay cash money to see.

Mercury 12

Having to go to the museum—having to do their actual jobs—was for Myka an anticlimax, post-pie. (She was trying very hard not to think about the implications of that.) She’d expected Pete to see it as a letdown, too, after the car massacre, because while the Sable hadn’t won, it was one of the last few vehicles managing to propel itself at the others, tires askew and engine asmoke. Myka had taken his continued investment in the proceedings as her opportunity to filch the remainder of his serving of pie. Helena had already handed hers over, wordlessly and unprompted. Myka hadn’t even had to look longingly at it. Okay, maybe once, but that was all it took.

But Pete clearly had not found the derby to be the pinnacle of the day’s excitement, and in the front seat of the rental, riding shotgun next to Myka as she followed Ida to the museum, he was extra-fidgety with anticipation at being in the sled-prop’s presence. The closer they got, the more his eagerness ratcheted up, which made Myka ask, “Do you think it’s affecting you?”

That got her the “duh” head-shake. “Well yeah. It’s Rosebud.”

“In a Warehouse-y way,” she clarified.

Pete squinched his face, the relaxed it. “Pretty sure I’d feel the same about something like... Peter Weller’s Robocop suit. Or Eastwood’s gun from Fistful of Dollars. You know, real movie stuff. I bet I’d pass out if I saw E.T. in person.”

Twilight was turning to real dark as they pulled into the deserted museum parking lot, right behind Ida, and the night hid them completely as Helena picked the lock on the “staff only�� door—matter-of-factly, with a mutter of “why did they bother.” Then Ida led them past exhibits that purported to tell “The Wisconsin Story”—the whole story, starting with the deep geological past, and giving pride of place to what had been unearthed from that deep geological past: two looming fossil mammoths, which Pete was fortunately too Rosebud-focused to register, for their size was giving even Myka the shivers. They were impressively tusked, but with comparatively delicate ribs, too-long legs, and strangely structured foot-bones that gave them the improbable look of walking on dainty tiptoe.

Myka had not expected mammoths. Again, an educational trip.

The Wisconsin story stopped, apparently, with Orson Welles, for the gallery was designed to culminate in that exhibit. Their approach of the sled was uneventful, aside from Pete’s actual hyperventilating; if Rosebud did this to him, there was no way he would have survived E.T., much less stayed conscious. Myka made him breathe into a static bag—she appreciated that Helena managed not to laugh too much at the sight—and when he finally calmed down, he declared, “I refuse to steal it. Because we’ve got the mic, so who cares? What’s Rosebud gonna do all by itself?”

“I don’t think Artie’s going to find that a convincing argument,” Myka said.

“Who cares about that either? Spielberg outranks Artie. And the Regents.”

Myka looked at Helena. Helena shrugged a “your call, not mine” at her. So Myka shrugged back at her a “whatever,” because what was Artie going to do about it anyway? Get in a fistfight with Steven Spielberg? Pete would be thrilled at the very idea. He’d sell tickets. Sell tickets, then probably pass out when Spielberg showed up.

He was still talking: “So I’m not messing with his stuff other than to neutralize it real quick and put it back. Then we bounce.”

“Don’t say ‘bounce,’” Myka told him. “You sound ridiculous.”

“Claudia says bounce,” he said, with a little whine in his voice.

“You’re almost twice her age.” Though the evidence for that was limited...

Helena joined in with, “I’m nearly six times her age. What am I permitted to say?”

“What I wish we’d all say—and do—is ‘depart with our dignity intact,’” Myka said.

Helena pointed out, “As Pete and also Claudia enjoy reminding us, with regard to many things: ‘that ship has sailed.’”

She was right, but Myka scowled. “I don’t like you.”

“Be that as it may,” Helena said, offering one of her most saintly smiles, “but somewhat pursuant to the dignity point, you seem to be far more invested in key lime pie than I imagined possible.”

“And demo derbies!” Pete added.

“Leave me and my dignity—”

“Or lack thereof?” Helena asked, still saintly.

“—alone,” Myka finished. With as much aggrieved resignation as she could muster.

Ida, who’d been standing back from it all, particularly Pete’s hyperventilation, now said to Myka, “You did seem to enjoy both of those. Couldn’t that be good? Given your clear devotion to duty, it all speaks to your being a very complex leading lady.”

Myka opened her mouth to say “thank you,” but Pete preempted her with, “Less complex than you’d think. Myka World’s a pretty stripped-down place. No concession stands. Seat belts and helmets for all the rides, which there aren’t even a lot of anyhow, because they cost too much to insure, plus you gotta bring carnies in to run ’em, and I don’t think Myka trusts the carnies.”

“Also,” Myka noted, “I’m not an amusement park.” One beat. Two. She thought she might actually get away with—

“I beg to differ,” Helena said, and Myka sighed, in response to which, Helena placed a hand on Myka’s back, then rollercoastered that hand up and over Myka’s shoulder. In response to that, Myka frowned at Helena, to forestall any thoughts she might have had of continuing the journey somewhere inappropriate, and Helena brought the hand-car to an obvious, abrupt stop.

And in response to that, Ida laughed at them, and that made Myka chuckle too.

As Pete prepared to neutralize the sled, Helena offered to hold the microphone for him. Myka thought she was being ostentatious about needing something to do with her thwarted hand, but as soon as she had it, she began apologizing to it for having to take away its fun. “You liked being believed,” she murmured. “I understand. But we’re conveying you to a place where our very sensitive colleagues will locate you perfectly. You’ll feel quite at home. And one day we’ll steal your sledge friend and reunite the two of you, so—”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Pete warned.

“I might do it tomorrow morning before our flight leaves. I’m not afraid of filmmakers. Those Lumière brothers were utterly unintimidating. Perhaps this Spielberg is outsize, which would account for your trepidation?”

Pete didn’t object; instead, he nodded. “Way outsize, Hollywood-power-wise. Lotsa people quaking in their boots, I bet. And as for quaking in your boots, I also bet that if I went back in time to 1896, I’d see you diving under your chair to get away from the train headed for the camera courtesy of those Lumière brothers.”

Helena said, with what Myka hoped was mock venom, “If you went back in time to 1896, you would clearly dive under your chair—what with trains being as large as they are, and seemingly emerging from an outsize screen to flatten your comparatively undersized innocent spectating self.”

“Oh yeah? Well at least I’d know what a movie was.”

“Do not condescend to me!”

You love both of these five-year-olds, Myka reminded herself. Out loud, she said, “If we could maybe stick to the business at hand?”

“At hand!” Pete enthused. “Orson Welles touched this with his hand and so did Spielberg and now I’m about to too! We’re practically related now!”

“Why are you never this interested in actual history?” Helena groused.

“Oh, you mean antiques like you?” Pete retorted as he slid the sled into an extra-large static bag.

Five-year-olds, both of whom you love, Myka reminded herself again, but it didn’t matter anymore, because at that moment, Ida and everyone else got what anybody anywhere would have called a show, as a garish display of neutralization fireworks pinwheeled and rocketed outward from the bag, Roman-candling as if the sled had brought all of its show-business knowhow to bear on the situation and planned its execution of this moment.

Then: “Oh my god,” Myka said, because—

“I agree!” Ida rhapsodized.

But Myka wasn’t appreciating the pyrotechnics. No, she was realizing, viscerally, that she’d recently eaten the greater part of an insanely oversugared pie. Which was not nutritious at all. Which was in fact more sugar than she’d eaten at one sitting in... decades. Literally. She had to instruct her digestive system—her entire nervous system—not to panic. Not to rebel. “Oh my god,” she repeated. “Why did I eat that? I feel sick.”

“Interesting,” Helena said yet again.

“Please stop saying that. I don’t want to be interesting when you say it like that.”

“No, you don’t,” Helena affirmed, and Myka could make no sense of that at all.

Ida sighed. “Oh, but the rabbits. I didn’t expect this... disappointment.”

“Thought you’d sussed that out already,” Pete said. “What with no cleanup on aisle three.”

“I knew they couldn’t have been real. But apparently I still believed in them.”

Helena exhaled, audibly, before saying, “Belief does make its home in a stubborn part of the brain.”

“That doesn’t sound very science-y,” Pete said.

“It’s far older than science,” Helena told him.

“Just like you,” he jabbed, but it was halfhearted. “Yeah, okay. But just as well you didn’t, then, with the girlfriend. Think how much worse she’d feel right this minute.”

“What are a few hours of reprieve worth?” Helena asked.

Was that rhetorical? Myka answered anyway: “Less than nothing, if you don’t know they’re a reprieve while you’re in them.”

Helena’s gaze might have been about to harden into a glare, but Ida said, “Reprieves are usually short. So is life. Or it’s long, but it’s always, always more precious than we pretend. Isn’t it, H.G. Wells?”

Helena blinked—unaccompanied by a head-tilt, so not her I’m quite surprised blink, but a cousin. “You are observant,” she said.

“I don’t need a job,” Ida said. She looked at Myka, who muttered, “Retirement someday for everybody.”

Helena blinked again; again, it was a surprise-cousin. “Then I won’t offer you one. Will you accept thanks?”

“I will. And I’ll thank you back: it’s certainly held my interest, this show. With all its charming leads.”

Pete said, “You’re still my favorite. Even though I know Bering and Wells are your favorites.”

“Let me know when you get a love interest,” Ida advised. “Then we’ll see.”

He didn’t look at Helena, not even a glance; Myka was watching. “Will do,” he said. Of course his Helena-complicated past wasn’t fixed, just like Myka and Helena’s complicated-by-everything past wasn’t. None of that would ever be fixed. But it was better—it could be better—and Myka could see the difference, the better, there in his not-glance.

She said to Ida, “Thank you. For it all. Can you tell Mr. Leland a good story about where the microphone disappeared to? Make him believe it?”

“All he’ll care about is that Ginny’s pie won. What I really need to do is figure out what to tell Agnes. She’ll be so disappointed... not to mention confused.”

“Why wasn’t she there today, anyhow, ready to get crowned queen of the pies?” Pete asked.

“The rabbits gave her such a fright.”

“Tell her they ate her pie.”

Ida frowned at him. “First, won’t she have stopped believing in them? And second, rabbits don’t like citrus.”

“Ha!” Pete crowed. “Then they probably wouldn’t like preserves or conserves, would they!”

That got him a teacherly approving nod from Ida. “Very good. You can come back next year and be my assistant.”

“Look out,” Myka said. “He’ll take you up on it.”

“That would be fine,” said Ida. “In fact if you all wanted to come and do another episode next year, it would be fine. I could look forward to it. Like one of those reunion TV-movies.”

“These days they’d just remake the show, recast all the parts,” Pete told her.

She patted his shoulder. “I doubt even Meryl Streep could do justice to your appreciation for Rosebud.”

“The One Where They Go to the Fair! Starring Meryl Streep as Pete Lattimer!” he said, clearly delighted by the idea. “I mean, it’d take a Streep to really get a handle on the fullness of me.”

“Good luck, Meryl,” said Myka.

Helena said, “The Fullness of Pete Lattimer, A Play in Three Acts: Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.”

“With snack entr’actes, right?” Myka asked.

Helena nodded, adding, “Plus midnight-snack envoi. Although that doesn’t really apply to a play, does it?”

Pete waved whoa-stop hands at her. “If it’s a snack, it better be part of that play. It’s a good scene for the TV-movie, though: Meryl, chowing down on S’mores Pop-Tarts in some night kitchen in South Dakota, remembering how sad she was when she said this line coming up right now.” He gathered himself theatrically, then gazed with mournful eyes at the sled. “Bye, Rosebud. You got mojo.” To Ida, he said, “I’m pretty sure you do too. We really could put in a word about a job.”

“Happily retired,” Ida said.

“Just as well. I’ve said it before, people doing what we do, they end up crazy, evil, or dead.”

“Is that an effective recruiting slogan?”

“Only if you’re Ms. Trifecta here,” Pete said, tilting his head at Helena. “She heard that and was all, ‘Sign me up!’”

“Quit it,” Myka told him, but milder than she might have said it, even two days ago. She took Helena’s hand again, though, to make sure she knew Myka meant it, no matter how mild. Helena rewarded her with an even more bone-cutting clasp than usual.

“Sane, good, and alive, that’s what you all seem to be right now,” Ida said. “Please keep it that way.”

They all hugged her goodbye. “I’m not a hugger,” she protested before each hug—but before each one, she again wore that wide smile.

“I’m not either,” Myka told her.

“I am!” exclaimed Pete, accurately.

“But human contact,” Helena said, like an apology, though Myka heard in it the echo of deprivation. And that was accurate too.

Ida seemed to agree, for she held onto Helena a second longer than she had Myka or Pete. “I told you I’m not a science fiction fan, and that’s true. But I liked Ann Veronica very much,” she said. “Particularly the ending.”

“Nobody got the flu,” Myka agreed.

“That was...” Helena cleared her throat. “Someone else’s work. Entirely.”

Ida said, “Someone else believed in happy endings. Entirely?”

“I suppose he did. I remember that. I remember arguing about sentimentality.”

“It’s important to remember what you do remember. What you said about that radio interview... I don’t have a recording of my late husband’s voice. I’ve thought about that more than I expected to.”

Helena’s voice, Myka thought, I didn’t—still don’t—have it anywhere but in my head. It was a new thought, one that chilled her. If Pete had smashed the coin, then Emily Lake’s voice forever. It made her want to record Helena’s voice right that minute: Helena saying “good morning,” Helena reading aloud the placard in front of the Welles exhibit, Helena reciting “The Owl and the Pussycat”... anything at all. She suspected Ida would have said the same thing about her husband’s voice, given the opportunity, and as for what that suggested about how all-in she herself was with Helena? It shouldn’t have come as any surprise, and it didn’t. But the force of it did.

Helena hugged Ida once more, and this time, she was the one who clung an extra second. “Happy endings,” Myka heard Ida say: her closing argument. Helena nodded against her shoulder.

Yes, in more ways than Myka would have thought possible: a very educational trip.

TBC

Note about the real world: as far as I can determine, if there actually were, or actually had been, a Welles exhibit at the museum in question, it would probably be, or have been, on the second floor, but I wanted to get the mammoths in there, so I let everybody stay on the first floor. Mammoth fossils are honestly bonkers to look at; the tusks are unbelievably large compared to the rest of the body (I know they had a lot of flesh and particularly fur, hence “woolly,” but still). And the feet! They’re fossilized comedy routines.

Also I suppose I should apologize, or something, for stringing this thing out with shorter parts rather than ending it with a longer, solid punch of denouement, but this is how the writing has proceeded, and one pleasant aspect of this write-for-free-on-the-internet hobby is that the work can find the form it seems to prefer. Within reason.

[apparitionism]

Sound 7

I haven’t done any public-facing work on this in some time, but I’m still very much in the middle of writing a sequel to Soon. Here’s a piece of it. When last we checked in on our intrepid Russian translator and her beloved violinist (and child), it was 1963, and they were finding their shared life in New York rewarding in many ways, while difficult to negotiate in others—which, I must say, describes my own feelings about this project. Writing is sometimes like pushing an overloaded sled in the weight room: if you can budge it a yard, that’s a victory. This maybe moves Sound along less than a foot, but even so. (No links to the other parts of Sound, or to Soon, but the former are findable here on Tumblr and the latter is both here and, in improved version, on AO3.)

Sound 7

1964

The device is crafted to appear innocuous.

It hides inside a dictating machine, a Philips, the newest model. The machine works just fine, both while concealing the device and not, and Myka has to learn to use it; she has to commit to it, so that its presence in her possession will appear natural. She finds that she likes recording her thoughts this way, though she’s embarrassed by how awful she sounds when she plays it back; even at normal speed, her voice is pitched higher than she ever imagined. Has she heard herself like this before? She’s listened to so many people’s speaking voices on tape—Russian-speaking voices, back in those days—but never her own.

Christina is fascinated by the Philips and begs to dismantle it. Helena wrinkles her nose at its sound quality: she complains of a high hiss and tells Myka she can find her a far better piece of equipment if she is committed to making notes in this way.

Myka has kept from Helena the real reason she has taken up dictation.

She tries a fast translation of a page of the text she’s working on now, Bryusov’s “V zerkale”—“In the Mirror”—by reading Cyrillic on the page, then speaking it in English into the machine. It’s difficult to keep from simply reading the Russian aloud, so she imagines it spoken in someone else’s voice, leaving her to translate simultaneously, UN-style. She tries Helena’s voice... too distracting. Her grandfather’s and grandmother’s are too familiar, and thus untranslatable. Lullabies. Max? He has a lovely voice, but the problem with imagining him speaking is that she senses him also whispering his own translation right along with himself, and that’s no help. She settles on a departmental colleague, a native Russian speaker whom she knows not well but well enough; his quiet, measured tones turn out to be Goldilocks-correct. “He” reads her the Bryusov story, and she tells it to the machine: “I have loved mirrors from my very earliest years...”

She’d been baffled when Abigail first handed her the machine and explained what it contained, for she couldn’t imagine she knew anyone Abigail would possibly have an interest in bugging. Myka doesn’t have that kind of access, and she certainly doesn’t have the expertise needed to secure this thing in place and make sure it works. Or the nerve, she tells herself, but while that might have been true in the past, she isn’t sure it’s true now. She feels a certainty in herself when she goes to Russia now. This reason, this deal she’s made, it defines her. It’s a mission, a discipline. Like Helena practicing her violin, though Myka doesn’t know what the honing of her nerve is preparing her for. What her performance will be.

“You aren’t planting it,” Abigail had told her. “And anyway it’s just a piece. You’re passing it along.”

Myka’s flicker of disappointment at this news frightened her.

She practices taking the Philips apart, removing the device, hiding it on her person, and putting the recorder back together again: quickly, silently. It’s useful to need to keep this activity from Christina, though equating Christina with KGB, even in this little way, makes Myka morally queasy.

Myka knows KGB officers listen to the hotel rooms that she and other foreigners stay in; she knows her movements are tracked; she knows that everyone to whom she speaks might be an informer. She doesn’t know how much time she’ll have when the moment comes to hand over the equipment, and she doesn’t know where it will happen.

“Why can’t I just carry it on me?” she asks Abigail. “The thing itself?”

“This is safer. Trust me.” The don’t ask why wall in Abigail’s voice: whatever she knows about what might happen to Myka—arrest, search, worse?—Myka will need not to know it’s coming. Abigail has told her in the past that an expression of genuine surprise is difficult to fake, and similarly hard for other humans to dismiss.

“Oh,” Abigail also says, offhand but not, “you may run into someone you know. Don’t react.”

Be surprised; don’t be surprised.

****

The session is intended to produce a simple demo.

Helena is in the hallway just outside the booth when she hears the sound engineer take a call. She is about to leave for the day; she has just checked in, on that very telephone, with her booking service, but nothing other than the brief rehearsal she just attended is scheduled—not a surprise, here on this relatively quiet Saturday morning.

“Hey, H.G.!” the engineer calls to her. “Want some more practice?”

She takes the phone from him. The bleary voice of Ben Cone, in whose booth she had lately sat while he produced a song that swiftly hit number three in the nation, tells her that he is supposed to be putting together a demo, but his hangover is too fierce; can she fill in? He knows she knows what to do, he says, and anyway, it’s just a demo. Everybody should be there in a half hour or so, bye. Oh, but she’ll have to find her own singer; his passed out only a couple hours ago, still sleeping it off. In no shape, you know?

She thinks of Rudy Lewis: “I’m your man for demo vocals,” he’d told her, years ago. “Don’t you call nobody else.” His sugar voice. She would have called him; he would have done it. Cruel of fate to hand her this chance, so short a time after... well. She should not dwell on that, not now.

But then she does think about it, when the song’s writer, who shows up to play piano on the track—where’s Ben; hung over; no surprise—hands her the music.

The song is titled “I’ll Pass.” “It’s simple,” he says. “Just a ‘thanks a lot but no thanks’ lyric.”

Helena can’t discern his real intent here, for the lyric strikes her as... multilayered. The verses suggest that the singer’s beloved finds the singer inadequate, inappropriate, in response to which, the singer says in the refrain, “I’ll pass, baby; I’ll pass.” A rejection? Or a sincere, bleak promise to show a different self to the world? Rudy would have sung it with the full range of meanings right there to be heard. But it isn’t Helena’s job to care about the meanings. It’s her job to produce a demo.

She is to do it with this songwriter-pianist, plus a guitarist, a drummer, a bassist... and a young saxophonist. Helena tries to send the latter home, but he says he needs the money. He says also that he would be happy to play anything she wants, if saxophones aren’t her bag, so she hands him a triangle from a box of orphan percussion and regrets to inform that the middle eight will not belong to him after all. He looks at the triangle, looks at her, pronounces this the screwiest session he’s ever seen—how many can he possibly have seen?—and then starts asking about when to ring, when to muffle, how much shimmer, and is there a brass beater anywhere in this studio because everybody knows the sound from stainless is too cold. (Helena takes his name and his number and files them away for the future.)

The musicians run through loose takes, tight takes; Helena likes the loose takes, despite the songwriter hitting an off note or several. It’s just a demo, and the looser renditions give a better sense of the song’s potential. She considers sitting down with them in the studio to add her violin, but there’s no string arrangement, and inventing one, even something simple, would begin to define the song. The demo should suggest no strictures, just a loose sense of what this melody and lyric could become.

She tries calling a few vocalists, but—again no surprise for a Saturday—she can’t find anyone, and no singer she knows well is in the building, so she asks each of the musicians to try a few bars. The guitarist wins the brief talent competition, with a soar of a tenor that Helena can’t believe hasn’t been put on record before. (She is filing him away too.) He says nobody ever asked, that he only ever sang in church—but he never goes to church anymore, which vexes his mama. Further, he notes, “I can’t sing and play at the same time,” and while Helena is outwardly expressing sympathy for his mother, she is also worrying about her ability, even with experienced engineering help, to lay in a vocal right on such a spare arrangement.

Can the now-trianglist take over the guitar part? “No strings, sorry,” he says, and doesn’t that just fit the day.

And indeed it isn’t quite right, in the end, the way the vocal lies against the music. But Helena rationalizes it, intellectualizes it—it’s trying to pass as a right part of the track. “I’ll pass, baby”? Some can. But: for only so long. The length of a pop song, perhaps.

“I was thinking about Rudy today,” she tells Christina when she finally arrives home, far later than she’d imagined, after the lengthy mixdown. “It’s just a demo,” the engineer had complained. “How rough would you be on me if it was a real track?” Which had made Helena think of Phil, but that association, and its implications, were too much for an already overloaded day.

Christina’s reaction to Rudy’s name is a quiet “oh.”

****

It had been an unremarkable day in late May, and Helena and the rest of the musicians who had assembled for a Drifters session were waiting, smoking, and growing a little irritated, for they all had additional bookings, and the more sweet time the singers and production took to arrive, the more likely the musicians were to be late for those other sessions.

Irritation turned to blank incredulity when Bert Berns, who was to produce, and the other men walked in, for Bert said, with no preliminaries, “Rudy died last night.” He added, “Overdose.”

They recorded four tracks that session. Helena could not have said, afterward, what any of them were, save the final one, a song that had been intended for Rudy to sing: a ballad called “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You.” Charlie sang it instead... that he could do so said something about professionalism, or shock, or both of them together.

Who, hearing any of those tracks on the radio, would discern that they were documents of grief? They would seem like the simple pop songs they were, and was that an obscenity, or was it just an extreme version of the work that pop music was designed to do?

“How do I tell Christina?” Helena asked Myka. “What do I tell her?”

“I don’t know—I don’t know anything. My only thought is ‘the truth.’” Myka said this as if it really was the only thought she had right then, the only thought she knew how to think about anything.

But Myka was right, so the truth was what Helena told Christina: Rudy took too many drugs, and he died. Christina asked why, and Helena thought she was asking a medical question, about what the body could and couldn’t tolerate. “No,” Christina clarified. “Why did he want to?”

Helena did try not to lie to Christina. Shield her, but not lie to her. So she said, “I think”—because she did not, in fact, know—“I think it was because he thought the world had no good place for him. He wanted a place, yet there was no place. I think that at times he wanted to let himself forget all of that. All of what surrounded him.”

Christina said a weary, “Misinformed beliefs,” and Helena could answer only with “That’s right.”

Helena had assumed she would attend the funeral alone, but Christina asked to go, then asked if Myka would go too. But Myka said, “That’s not a picture we should make.” At this, Christina nodded, and Helena could not hold back a small internal push of pride at that knowing assent. While Christina took great satisfaction in being far more American than Helena herself was, she was persistently British in her understanding of appearances.

They went out to buy her a black dress.

“Is it for a very special occasion?” the saleslady asked, because Christina was unsatisfied with the first three she tried.

“Yes and no,” Christina told her. Helena felt the push of pride again. She looked at Myka, who wore a “what is she becoming?” face, and Helena wanted to take her hand and echo “I don’t know—I don’t know anything,” then follow that with “But isn’t it miraculous that we’ll both find out?”

That miracle meant Helena would not need to find her consolation in a needle.

The night after the service, she would have been desperate to hold any woman in the dark, but instead she was lucky enough to hold the woman she loved. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Myka said in that dark, the same words she’d said to Christina in her new black dress, afterward. She’d also said, to Christina, “How was it?”

Christina hadn’t cried at the service, but rather sat, eyes wide, holding Helena’s hand. She hadn’t even spoken until just now, and Helena was certain that only to Myka would she have broken her silence: “They said nice things about him,” Christina responded. Then she’d leaned against Myka, as if to reassure, as if Myka were the one in need of comfort, and said, “Not the right nice things.”

****

Tonight, late at night, Myka clearly expects Helena to be pleased, both about having been asked to produce the track, and about having done it. Instead, Helena says a bitter, “It’s just a demo,” and she doesn’t quite cry about Rudy, how he was not there but should have been, why he was not there to sing a song he should have sung.

“Nothing you do is just anything,” Myka says, kissing the corners of Helena’s almost-wet eyes.

“It was the work of just one afternoon,” Helena says, trying to shake off the sadness, yet also irrationally resentful of how Myka makes her want to shake off the sadness. “I’ll be surprised if I or anyone hears of it again.”

****

Myka’s handoff is easy. Like this: A week into her two-week stay, her two weeks of lecturing and researching, she is reading in Moscow University’s library. She is heavily supervised, of course, and she has already been told that she will be gaining no access to certain authors’ work: “Sorry, not available.” (The “to you” is implied.) The librarians are happy to hand her as many issues of Novy Mir as she wants, however, particularly since she is able to show them that she herself, Myka Bering, translator of many Russian works, was mentioned in a commentary written by its editor, Alexander Tvardovsky, in 1960. She does not point out to them that Novy Mir publishes several of those authors who are considered forbidden.

It is so easy: they do not want her to take notes, so she says, “May I use my dictating machine?” It is such a novelty that all the librarians must come and look at it, speak into it, hear snippets of their own voices. After all that, how can they say no? Myka promises to be quiet with it, but there is really no need. The library is libraryesque only in that books are on offer.

So easy: when a man approaches the table and points at the machine, her first thought is that he, like the librarians, wants to acquaint himself with the dictating technology. Instead he says the correct code word, and Myka answers him in kind. She demonstrates the Philips for him, and he thanks her. He then sits at a table of his own, not far from hers, and proceeds to ignore her completely.

She asks to visit the ladies room, which is of course in an isolated location, and she is given one of “the girls”—women who fetch books from the stacks for the mostly male scholars—as an ostensible guide. Ostensible because no American can be left to roam unattended, yet this particular girl wants only to go outdoors and smoke cigarettes. She doesn’t care in the slightest about Myka, who may be American but is just a woman, and old besides. So Myka goes into the washroom, calmly disassembles the Philips, removes the device, and puts it in the pocket of her suit jacket. She then just as calmly reassembles the machine, collects her watcher (who exhibits far more care in putting out her half-smoked cigarette, to save for later, than for her Myka-watching task), goes back to the reading room, reads and dictates for another hour, then goes to the man at his table. “I forgot to show you,” she says, “that the machine plays back at two speeds.” She hands him the machine and the device at the same time, listens to her own voice weirdly manipulated, and then it is done.

An hour more she reads and dictates, then she prepares to depart. The librarians, and Myka’s heedless escort who likes to smoke outdoors, wave her goodbye. She feels no need to look over her shoulder.

The summertime sidewalks of 1964 Moscow are full and bright. The weather is fine, just right for the young women to wear sundresses, for the young men to sport shirtsleeves. Their conversations are animated. They direct their eyes high, up at billboards, particularly film advertisements, and Myka tries not to read too much into the title of one: Den’ schast’ya, Day of Happiness. A girl in a lime-green shift pulls at the hand of her male companion and directs his attention to an elaborate wooden model train in a shop window; they both laugh. The train cars’ colors are washed out, too long exposed to light in that window, no buyers. While such a sight would have been sad in New York, here, for the young and sundressed and laughing, Myka infers that it’s a mark of all they believe they are leaving behind. The faded past; who needs it?

On these same sidewalks, though, as if they have been imported from that faded past, an older generation walks heavier. Silent. They dress as if they must wear all they own or lose it, no matter the weather. They find no distraction in advertisements, and they don’t bother with window displays. The past is always there; why be reminded?

Myka tries to remind herself, and keep in the front of her mind, that she has more in common with those who walk with weight. She is doing dangerous work. She will become careless if she forgets about risk and consequences. But a sharp lightness has come to attend her time in Russia... she keeps secrets all the time, no matter where she is, but the secret she keeps here, while she is here, is distinct: the threat of its revelation accrues to her and no one else.

The most salient secret she keeps at home is vastly different, in that its discovery would damage Myka, but reverberations from that discovery would very likely destroy Helena and Christina.

Walking down a summertime sidewalk of Moscow, responsible only for her own safety, affords Myka a guilty freedom. That such freedom should be one through which she is constantly followed and watched and listened to should be ironic, but instead it seems like part of a mistaken-identity comedy, one in which Russians have been told to follow and watch and listen to Myka Bering, but they are following and watching and listening to a person who feels free, and that cannot possibly be Myka Bering, so they are following and watching and listening to the wrong person after all. Who do they think she is?

Who does she think she is?

Her final event in Russia, a week later, is a reception for all the university’s visiting American scholars. Myka is one of only three lecturers who have come for these two-weeks; several more have spent the entire now-concluding summer term here in exchange for some Soviets who are probably at similar receptions on U.S. campuses. Different hors d’oeuvres, same receptions. More than a few are scientists, which helps to explain the heavy presence of people at this party who are clearly not academics. Myka meets several American diplomats, most of whom are probably straightforwardly State; some, though, must be CIA under official cover. Similarly, there are some actual Soviet diplomatic eminences, but also, plenty of KGB making their power known.

Myka finds herself chatting with two junior diplomats—or “diplomats”—one American whose name she did not quite catch, and one Russian, his name Nikolai. Nikolai will no doubt be reporting back to his superiors everything about his American interlocutors, regardless, but in this conversation he is just a young man, dark with a softness about his mouth. “What is happening in New York?” he asks her, and his English is all right, nearly full-speed, but she tells him he should feel free to speak Russian with her.

“Want practice,” he demurs. But he flashes her a small smile as he does so. In that soft mouth, his teeth are wolf-white. Nikolai has never skipped out to smoke, outdoors or anywhere else. He is clean.

The American glimpses someone across the room and makes a “come here” motion. Myka looks over to see who is approaching... and she understands why Abigail told her not to react. “Professor Bering,” the American says, “and Nikolai, I’d like to introduce you to Joseph Holden, the famous Olympic wrestler.”

Joseph has received the same instructions Myka has; he shakes her hand and says “A pleasure, professor.” Then he shakes hands with Nikolai. The clean Russian shows his wolf teeth again, more widely.

Myka does not know anything about this, whatever “this” might be. Her fizz of ire at Abigail for not being forthcoming is probably inappropriate and definitely fruitless in this moment, but she feels it. She looks at Joseph, who always seems to make easy situations less so, and she directs that fizz at him, too.

Myka and Joseph have one moment together during which they are unobserved, or at least less closely attended to. “Why are you here?” she asks him, because she can’t stop herself.

He laughs. “Oh, I’m finding Moscow really something,” he says, his voice fully corn-fed, but that is not the end of it. Quick, quiet, he adds, “I’m bait.”

Myka has no time or space to get more from him. Nikolai reappears, and Joseph turns back to him, his charm wide, open.

The burden of risk.

****

Myka returns home from her two weeks in Russia to find... difference. Her own blood is colder, because it always is after Russia, but also because she doesn’t know the contours of the operation she brushed past. She’ll find out soon enough—she won’t let Abigail fail to read her in, not on this—but she is still shivering.

Helena, meanwhile, is hot: her demo version of “I’ll Pass” is charting.

She’d had no idea, she tells Myka, that the demo was being cut for Lester Sill—he’d been Phil’s partner at Philles Records, but their relationship had soured. “As it would,” Helena said, and Myka recognized that little curl of lip. Sill was now at Colpix, hungry for talent... Helena had been told that when the demo was played for him, he’d listened through, then stood up and walked out of his office. “We’re done,” he’d said as he left. “Release it. It’s a hit.” Helena admits to Myka that she imagines—worries?—that all he had heard was some vestige of Phil’s style, some oddity that Helena had unknowingly reproduced. That that was what caught his ear.

“It’s just one hit,” Helena says, as if in apology, and Myka can’t understand why she isn’t thrilled to have done—on her first try!—exactly what she has always intended to do. Then Helena says, “It was an accident.” This gives Myka clarity: Helena doesn’t know how to make it happen again.

After any time in Russia, Myka is always a bit more Russian than she was before. Which is not to say that she will ever understand or feel with fullness what it is to be Russian... but some not-quite-Russian lives inside her, some unschooled child of all these: her grandfather, her grandmother, all the voices she has heard on tapes, all the words on the pages she has translated, KGB, dissidents, victims, perpetrators, even young girls in sundresses. They all wrestle for pride of place within her. Those real Russians never explain themselves, never step up and tell her, never sit her down and bleed into her bones. But those Russians, and even the not-quite-one who doesn’t fill her skin, they all know: there are no accidents.

TBC

[apparitionism]

Secret

Happy holidays, @mfangeleeta !! My friend, it is an absolute honor and pleasure to present you with a story—in fact, two stories. You asked for Bering & Wells’s first Christmas together, so your gift starts with a sort of generic-AU version of that. I also have an actual-Warehouse rendering of a first Bering-&-Wells Christmas, which will come next (I’ll put up the first part of that tomorrow or the day after). This AU was going to be a complicated piece, with a lot of moving parts and a ton of characters, but I changed my mind: here’s a quieter, simpler thing. To the best of my recollection, we haven’t, in the years of this B&W Secret Santa gift exchange, had many (any?) pieces that were actually about a Secret Santa gift exchange. (Have we?) It’s basically a clichéd mess, and I know it and apologize for it; I shaped to the extent that I could, but time ran out. Anyway, sssshhh. If you listen close, you might hear a couple of voices speaking low on a silent night.

Secret

“You didn’t come to the party.” The soft words fit the vast, cubicled space, now that the sonic sea of voices and technology had receded for the night and left the floor in silence; now that the overhead lights were out, now that the walls of windows were dark, now that the only illumination, seemingly in the entire world, was the small incandescent defiance of the desk lamp of the person who heard the words, felt their softness, and was thus not startled by them.

“What are you doing here?” asked that person. Myka Bering had expected to see no one tonight, the company’s Christmas-party night, not when the Christmas-party night was the Friday before Christmas: no one, and certainly not this vision of a woman who on a normal workday seemed to have descended from some higher plane to serve as an aspirational sight for the masses. Tonight, dressed for a Christmas party thrown by a prosperous insurance company in the toniest of downtown-hotel ballrooms? Surely the assembled would have voted by acclamation to keep her there.

“I’m asking you that same question,” said the vision.

“I didn’t want to... see.” But Myka said this with a wince, which did not go unnoticed.

“See what?”

“Any of it,” Myka now said offhand, trying to recover. “It’s really not my—”

“See. What.” It was a muted, though not diluted, version of her “I refuse to waste my time in a pointless meeting” voice, and Myka knew she had no choice but to give a plausible answer.

***

When Myka had received the “Secret Santa” email from HR...

This is an opportunity, had been her first, immediate thought.

She then revised that first thought with a significant insertion: This is NOT an opportunity. Because an opportunity would never take the form of an email that began, “Hi Myka! In this year’s Warehouse Mutual Insurance Holiday Gift Exchange, you’re the Secret Santa for...”

And there could be no opportunity whatsoever in that sentence ending with the name “Helena Wells.”

Not the opportunity she wanted it to be.

Because where had her mind gone, in that first immediacy? To roses, of rare and foreign colors and scents; to spices, to perfumes, to potions; to silks and stones; to gilding amalgams, to meteoric alloys, to all the richest and finest of ways there might be to say “look at all that I would offer you.”

Certainly twenty-five dollars was not enough to buy gold and frankincense, but certainly twenty-five dollars was enough to buy something stupidly, pointlessly revealing.

That did not have to happen, of course; she could give a generic gift. But equally, she didn’t want to have to say “Yes, that boring thing, that’s from me.” Better to be no one than to be part of the vast run of cases. So she swapped with Giselle in Claims, who, Myka had heard—heard, and felt a pain in her heart upon hearing—was interested in Helena. It wasn’t only Giselle; so many people seemed to be bold enough to show visible, vocal interest... but while Myka was not shy, not exactly, she was not prepared to show such visible, vocal interest. In this, too, better to be no one than to be part of the vast run of swooning, wanting cases.

In the swap, she got someone she’d never met, never even heard of, so she went to an office supply store, stood in front of its “Secret Santa ideas” display, and gathered vaguely disparate items, none of which she herself would have been offended to receive, to total twenty-five dollars. (Actual total: twenty-eight dollars and thirty-three cents. She tried to feel magnanimous rather than mournful.) She put them into a gift bag, affixed red and green ribbon to its handles, and left it with the gift-exchange committee chair in HR, to be given to the appropriate person at the party. “Everyone should give appropriately,” that first email had said, and she persuaded herself that this was the way to ensure that outcome.

****

You come to a new place for a new job; you try to find space for yourself in this new place, which affords a new start. “You need a new start, Myka,” a friend of long standing had told you, and you believed him and found one: a new place, a new start, a new job. New people. But there is one new person in particular at the new job. Weeks you stare at her... weeks you try not to stare at her. There is no such thing, you tell yourself, as love at first sight. If there were, you would have fallen into it before. And you haven’t before, so you haven’t now. You haven’t come to this new place to fall in love, at first or any other ordinal sight.

You keep trying not to stare.

You don’t even know her name, not for the longest time, but once you hear it and know that it is hers, you hear it constantly; everyone all at once seem to take up talking about her. Your ears, your eyes: this is not what you came here for, to look at Helena Wells, to listen for “Helena Wells.”

The company, however, doesn’t care what you think you came here for. You’re assigned to work on a project with her, and you panic, because what about the staring? Fortunately, the need to do business breaks the looking-spell somewhat, but your enchantment only deepens. The emails and meetings, just the two of you, grow longer and longer. She works in loss control; you are in risk management. You are not managing your own risk, not at all; you see that the cliff you have already unknowingly, unintentionally, jumped from is well above you. When will you hit the ground and wake up?

After the project completes itself, whenever you pass each other in the hallway, whenever each of you says that simple “hi,” you—this you that is some part of a larger thing you don’t dare think of as “us”—can’t stop smiling.

You buy her dinner, the first time, because at the end of a workday you find her standing in the lobby, despondent at whatever her phone’s screen is telling her, and you want to banish the misery from her face but also pocket it, because it is precious, a vulnerability she does not often show.

Over that meal and then others, you laugh and you linger.

When you have reason to say her name to other people (because you are now one of those who has taken up talking about her), you become conscious that the speaking of a name is a bringing-to-presence. “Helena,” you say, the name mattering in your mouth, and your secret knowledge of the disjuncture between the presence that utterance conjures for you and the presence it delivers to others thrills you.

Her material presence literally destabilizes you, over and over again, but you hold fast to one particular near-fall: it is the first time you let yourself know, without question, what you want. You are walking beside her, and you are attending intently to her voice as it speaks about reinsurance contracts. You stop, mentally, to remind yourself that you are meant to be concentrating on the contracts, not on her voice as it speaks about them, and the stop makes you stumble. You recover yourself fast, but not fast enough to prevent her planting herself in front of you and clasping your arms. Deep brown concern gazes up at you as a deep brown hum resolves into the words “Are you all right?” You nod, but you imagine bringing your lips to hers in answer to that question—revealing that ever since your first sight of her, the answer has been “no.”

****

Myka held these scenes they had played together, these episodes, very close—precious contents in a precious box. Having that cache, keeping it secret: that was special; in itself, it allowed Myka to distinguish herself from that vast run of cases. Keeping it safe, too: this risk Myka tried to manage with great care. Going to the party, seeing what she was likely to have seen, would have put it all in peril, so here she had sat instead.

But here Helena now stood, with her gowned body and her “see what” demand, and Myka saw that her carefully plotted risk avoidance had produced its exact opposite: certain disaster. She had nothing plausible to say, in response to that demand, save the truth, so she said a prayer, possibly of farewell, for the box and all it contained. “See you open a gift from someone else,” she admitted.

Helena said nothing at first, and Myka was tempted to try to retract her words, say they were a feeble joke, fall back on explaining that she was antisocial, needed to work, liked the peace and quiet. She got so far as opening her mouth and inhaling before Helena said, slowly, “Interesting that that would be your reason. Particularly since you should not have had to see that. Given, as it was told to me, that you were originally assigned to be my Secret Santa.”

“Who told you that?”

“Giselle,” Helena said. She lifted her chin, and it felt to Myka like a “what are you going to say to that” challenge.

All Myka could manage was “What? Why would she—”

“She was explaining to me how eagerly she had taken you up on your offer to let her be the one to buy me a gift instead. I believe she meant her industry and enthusiasm in pursuing my affections to be persuasive.”

“Her industry and enthusiasm,” Myka echoed. Surely that would win the day—but then why was Helena here? And why did she look so... dismayed? Or was that simple annoyance? Either way, why?

Her next utterance gave Myka no answers: “My question to you is, why would you do that to me?”

“Why would I—what?”

“And after what I’ve done for you.” This with a shake of the head, a shake of disappointment that Myka had seen directed at others and had hoped never to be subjected to.

“What you—what?”

“Do you imagine I wanted to watch you open a gift from someone else?”—and Myka took a breath to say another “what,” but Helena left her no room for it—“I could have stayed home, but I chose to engage in a more difficult means of forestalling that sad sight: I exerted a great deal of pressure on the assigning committee in HR to reveal to me who’d got you. I then proposed a swap to that person, but given my own... enthusiasm, the deal required some sweetening. I’ll have you know that as of January the first, I will be parking in a lesser space.”

All Myka could find to say was, “You love your parking space.” This was true. Corporate business culture subsisted on trivia, and everyone, even Helena, clung to these pointless markers. She’d told Myka the story of how she had, over two years, worked her way, via retirements and transfers and strategic barters, plus her own promotions, into being assigned precisely the spot she wanted.

“I did love my parking space,” Helena said. “I suspect Giselle didn’t drive so hard a bargain with you. In fact I suspect she didn’t drive a bargain at all. Am I worth so little to you?”

“You know that’s wrong,” Myka said. “I didn’t want to.”

“To what?”

“But I thought I had to.”

“I don’t need to ask ‘to what’ again. And I don’t need to ask why. I myself did think we were approaching a point. A decision point, if you will.”

Myka, perversely, tried to forestall it. If they could stay suspended in this Friday night... those scenes in the box, what were they worth now? “I never got what I wanted for Christmas,” she said. “I stopped believing in Santa when I was four.”

“Believe what you want to believe, but I have a gift for you,” Helena said. She reached into her purse and removed a small package. “From your Santa Claus, who is of course no secret now.” She looked at the wrapped package in her hands. Looked again at Myka. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“You have?”

“This should also be no secret.” She leaned down, and this is not happening, Myka thought, but then it was: a kiss of a softness that matched their voices, that warmed to the light, that nestled into the pillowed hollow of Myka’s heart where she safed her most fragile of yearnings. If she falls in love with you, she kept there, because it was unimaginable.

Myka would have said, out loud, that this kiss, too, was unimaginable. But that was not true, for she had imagined it. Not correctly... not in its fullness... she felt Helena’s lips leave hers, and she opened her eyes.

Helena’s eyes were still closed; her mouth formed a smile. Then she opened her own eyes and said, “You look surprised.”

“I am.” She had wished it would feel right, this kiss, but she hadn’t believed it would.

“So am I. This was so simple.” Another kiss, this one more firm. And even more right. “I’d originally thought to make my way to this point by impressing you with my cleverness. I would engineer some complicated giving of an elaborate series of presents, or concoct a plot with a last-minute revelation, or contrive a dash through the airport. But then I pared it down to what seemed to be the basics: you, me, a gift. In front of everyone we work with, which for some reason I was convinced was the only way I would not lose my nerve.”

The idea of Helena losing her nerve about anything was absurd—but she did look completely serious, so instead Myka focused on a different absurdity: “A dash through the airport?”

Helena nodded, sheepish but with a sly glint. “Plus a missed flight.”

“Would that make you happy? We can go to the airport right now and dash through it. We’ll miss every flight.”

“We’ve known each other some months.” Helena was smiling now.

“We have.”

“And those months have led me to believe that you would do that: you would take me to the airport and enact some silly play. If I wanted you to.” Her voice grew softer and softer, as did her smile.

Myka would have done that, that or anything else Helena wanted her to do, starting from the first-sight moment she began to try not to stare. “I would,” she said, just in case Helena had any doubt.

“Open your gift.”

“I thought I had.”

“The one in paper.”

“I don’t have anything for you.”

Helena kissed her for a third time. “Liar.”

Myka took the package from her, pulled at the paper, got to a cardboard box, opened that, and found... another box. This one was wooden, decorated with a complicated inlay-like patterned veneer. “This is beautiful,” Myka said.

“Isn’t it?” Helena agreed. “It’s from Japan.”

Myka said, “You bought me a beautiful box from Japan.” All the richest and finest of ways... she turned it in her hands. “Does it open?”

“It does. But it’s a puzzle. A beautiful puzzle, just like you.”

A puzzle. Myka looked at the box more closely, turned it with greater care, put a bit of pressure on its surfaces. A puzzle. She felt a slight give: the complicated nature of the veneer hid seams, along which segments of the sides might slide. A push here, a slide there... no, not there. She had to reverse everything she’d done and start again, and she glanced up at Helena, saw that she was looking with avidity at the box in Myka’s hands—or even, thrillingly, at Myka’s hands themselves?—her eyes brighter than usual, like stars in a hurry.

Myka set back to her task with determination: show her what these hands could do. A slide here, a push there... again, not there, but this side, here. Myka was so absorbed that now Helena’s voice, still so quiet, did startle her: “You were meant to solve the puzzle,” Helena said. “In front of everyone. Find its secret. I knew you would,” she finished, as Myka slid the tiny box’s cover open.

“Its secret?” Inside, in a nest of dark velvet, lay a small silvery piece of metal... meteoric alloys... muted in its shine, like a worn quarter. Most saliently, however, it was heart-shaped. Myka set it flat in her right hand and held it under the glow of her lamp. It warmed, there between her palm and the light.

“My heart,” Helena said.

Myka looked up at her, now with a bit of sly of her own. “Doesn’t that mean you’re the beautiful puzzle?”

“Metaphors work in mysterious ways.”

Myka very nearly asked, “How did you know it should be a box,” but Helena was right: mysterious. So instead, she said, “I can’t believe this cost only twenty-five dollars.”

Helena said, with an affected formality, “I have a receipt from the antique store where it was purchased to prove that that is what I paid for it.” Then the starch collapsed into mischief: “If I overpaid tremendously for another item listed on that receipt, that’s my own foolishness, isn’t it?”

“But why did you do that?” Myka asked. “Why did you think you needed to?”

This got her an otherwise familiar response: a small head-toss of exasperation. “I gave up on scenarios of complication, but why would I give up on impressing you? I suppose I wanted you to be so overwhelmed by this gift in its entirety—beauty, metaphor, worth—that you would fall into my arms. Unrealistic, as a scenario, but I couldn’t see how else to cause you to fall into my arms.”

“You could’ve just said ‘fall into my arms.’ You could’ve just said that.” Swooning, wanting.

“I thought I was saying that all along. Not aloud, but I thought I was.”

“I couldn’t hear it.”

“What do you hear now?”

What did she hear now? Myka listened, waited. “Two people breathing at each other,” she finally said. And because there was no reason not to, she added, “And the HVAC system.” Helena laughed, a little trail-off peal, and Myka said, to that, “Now I hear a beautiful sound.”

“If you were anyone else,” Helena said, “I would try to persuade you to come back to the party. With me. With me.”

A dash through an airport; a party. Myka said, “If you were anyone else, I wouldn’t be persuaded.”

****

You, who had wanted to be special or nothing, find yourself doubly special: first, you are the only one in the tony downtown ballroom not dressed for a party, but second—and vastly more important—your arm is around her gowned body the entire time, and “I persuaded her to come,” she keeps saying, with evident pride. “I went and found her and persuaded her.” Many, many people, upon seeing your arm around her, claim to have seen this coming. To them, she says, “She resisted me. Can you imagine?” and no one can imagine that, least of all you, and you murmur “I didn’t though” into her ear.

The looking-spell has settled on you again; you stare at her profile, her cheekbone, her neck.

Your hand touches the heart-coin, warm in your pocket.

She turns and meets your eyes.

Infinitely special.

END