Feathers on my Breath
Title: Feathers on my breath
Author: ifeelbetter
Beta: lamboyster
Rating: G
Word Count: 3,986
Summary: This is who they were before Mal jumped.
Notes: Based on almostgaby's wonderful vid (below the cut) for the i_revserbang challenge. The title comes from the song of the vid, "Teardrop" as covered by Civil Twilight. I hope my fic is somewhere near a tenth as good as that brilliant vid.
“It’s good to feel you are close to me in the night, love
invisible in your sleep, intently nocturnal,
while I untangle my worries
as if they were nets.”
(Pablo Neruda)
***
The fact that it looked like a bomb should have told them something.
It stood out glaringly from the sterile, white walls and equally blank tabletop. The sleek, compact poise would come later-after so many tests and so much else-but that first one even had the recognizable digital countdown (that all the bombs in movies have) in big red numbers, flickering down the seconds.
It also looked a lot like something musical. There were concave metallic circles on each side, like the speakers on old boom-boxes. The blinking red numbers-the termination deadline, the point of no return-directly in the center (like a heart) and then, like a mockery of feeling, an invocation of song.
In between the two poles-between the glowing red numbers and the absurdly faux-musical circles-were wires snaking in and out of each other, unbelievably entwined. There was no joint from one or another, no color-coordinated individuality, no beginnings and no ends. Just a mass of pieces, pushed so tightly that cutting one would mean cutting it all apart.
That should have told them something too.
The zeroes started to multiply-no hours left, no minutes, only seconds and that zero was fast approaching too. Arthur tapped the edge of his folded glasses against the tabletop as the seconds disappeared.
...00:00:04...00:00:03...00:00:02...00:00:01...
Then nothing left.
...00:00:00.
And nothing happened.
***
But that’s not a beginning. Nothing comes of nothing, as the saying goes, so the story must beginning with something.
It could begin in a field, just to the right of a fleet of high-rise apartment buildings. There was a path through the field and Mal was walking it, shading her eyes from the bright summer sun. She happened to stop to listen to the strains of a guitar and the guitar happened to be played by Arthur.
“It’s not every American who even knows Jacques Brel’s name,” she said amicably. “And very few of the young men who sit in fields and play their guitars bother with him.”
Arthur’s hair was cropped close to his skull and he had the sort of settled authority in his shoulders that bespeaks military service. She wouldn’t have spoken-not with her heavy streak of anarchism-except that he also had a set of dimples chiseled into the sides of his smile that denied the rigidity of the military training.
“As far as I’m concerned, Paris is the only city that could rival New York,” Arthur said, twisting his neck to the side and squinting up at her. Behind her, the sunlight sparkled between and through the leaves of the giant oak tree.
“Have you ever been?” Mal asked, homesickness clutching gently at her heart.
Arthur ducked his head towards his guitar and plucked a chord, letting his fingers linger between the notes. “Yes,” he answered.
“Do you speak French?” Mal asked, delighted and undeterred by the monosyllabic answer.
“Yes,” Arthur repeated, cutting off the chord. Mal realized it was the beginning of the song again.
“Do you know the words, then?” she asked and dropped onto the grass next to him. She bumped his shoulder with hers. “Go on. Take pity on a girl who misses her home.”
Arthur grinned (she’d know that grin later, she’d even be included in it) in a way that hinted at something fantastic that no one else would understand. “I’m making no promises for the quality of my singing,” he warned.
“I promise I won’t hold it against you,” Mal said.
She joined in by the end of the first chorus-it was inevitable, really-and they were shouting more than they were singing by the last verse. Arthur closed his eyes while he sang-not in the way so many amateur singers do, the ones that parrot the motions of professional, impassioned musicians without knowing why someone would move like that-as if he could exist through his eyes or his fingertips but not both at once. Mal liked it about him immensely. She’d never thought of existing through your fingertips and your eyes separately before.
***
…00:00:00.
Nothing came and went. They opened their eyes and Arthur began to breathe again.
He should have seen it, he told himself afterward. There was something wrong with her eyes. There was an edge of nothingness haunting the corners of her vision. She was hemmed in by it.
***
So Arthur was Mal’s friend first-and most importantly. Mal and Dom had their own epic story already in progress, but-for Arthur-it all began and ended with Mal. He wasn’t the sort to re-write those things once they were underway. Mal came first. That was just something that would always be true.
She worked at one of those undergrad-infested bar-slash-restaurant, faux-European-pub-types (more than half douche). She managed to be charming (occasionally-when she wasn’t throwing French Fries at Arthur’s head across the counter) in her white apron, though. And she laughed every single time some annoyingly-full-of-himself frat boy made the joke about her being French and serving French Fries. When she laughed-every single time-the lie looked new, like nothing had ever amused her so much.
A group of obnoxious and entitled boys came by every Wednesday for a game of poker. They made grabs at Mal as she passed sometimes and Arthur’s ingrained sense of his chivalric duty sometimes jumpstarted enough for him to almost-until she stopped him-do something. But she always stopped him. After all, she was Mal. Mals don’t need rescuing.
One particular night, a guy who had been on a massive losing streak for a couple of hours landed a slap on Mal’s ass that Arthur could have sworn echoed around the room, right under the low-lying din.
Arthur stood, feeling a familiar clench of fury grip him inside-the one that his mother used to get letters from his teachers about-but a stranger crossed in front of him, cutting him off.
“Hello, chaps,” the man said, a toothpick sticking out from the side of his lopsided grin. British. The accent sounded just shy of posh, like a rich boy who’d taken up bohemian ways to annoy an overbearing mother.
Arthur glared at the whole table, but the moment had passed. Mal was at his side again (red in the face but staunchly calm), gripping his arm and making a clear shake of her head.
“I see you’re having a go at my favorite past-time,” the Brit said to the group of frat guys. “It’s been ages since I’ve played-probably a bit rusty, you know how it is-“
He barely had to finish the sentence before, like a pack of hyenas, they fell onto the promise of new prey.
Let him fry, Arthur thought. Serves him right for getting in my way when they needed to have their faces kicked in.
That would have been that-Mal’s revenge would have ended with the wads of spit in each of the following rounds of beers-but then the Brit met Arthur’s eye for just the splittest of split seconds.
And he winked.
A couple of hours later, Arthur had to pull the frat boys off of him.
“You’re a fucking scam artist!” Mr. Losing Streak was shouting, trying to wriggle out of Arthur’s grasp.
“I only said I hadn’t played in a while,” the Brit said, leaning casually back in his chair so the front legs lifted easily off the floor. “I didn’t say I wasn’t brilliant.” He’d won it all-and “all” meant the pile of coins and bills on the table, but also the odd Rolex and a Blackberry.
“I will say this once: I am pepper-spraying everyone I see when I get to dix,” Mal said, holding up her spare pepper-spray that she kept stashed under the bar. “un...deux...trios...quatre...”
The other frat guys tried to hustle Mr. Losing Streak out in a quick but manly fashion-lots of arm-patting and “It’s not worth it, bro”-and Arthur tried not to be too exuberant about how severely they failed. Mal grinned at them as they passed her, still counting. It was almost terrifying to see her customer service smile set against the unambiguous threat.
“I believe this belongs to you,” the Brit said, pushing the pile of winnings across the table towards Mal.
“I don’t need charity,” she said sternly and held out a hand. “I liked you until that. I’m Mal. This is Arthur.”
“Eames,” said the guy-Eames-and shook her hand. Then he winked-lasciviously this time-at Arthur again.
It was amazing how-sometimes-the first meeting really does set the tone for the whole goddamn relationship.
Arthur smiled-accidentally-broad enough to expose his dimples to the stranger-Eames.
***
“I wouldn’t be able to tell,” Mal said to Eames, running a hand through his hair, “you could tell me lies about your name now and I wouldn’t know because I never actually knew, not when it was real-“
“It’s real now, Mal,” Eames said, pulling her hand out of his hair. “It’s all real right now.”
She bit the corner of her lip. It looked like half a smile, severed and mangled beyond recognition.
“-what is your name, though, the one for now?” she asked. “I wonder if it’s the same because I think of you with that name, not the one that-“
He tried to laugh, to make it lighter. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, right? Really, what’s in a name?”
His smile was forced, hers wasn’t even a smile anymore, and there was too much silence in the room.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I don’t-“
There was a countdown still going, only it wasn’t numbers blinking in red on the face of the PASIV. It was something they could all see happening-written right there.
In her eyes.
...ten...nine...eight...
***
For Dom, everything began with Mal. Before Mal-and she laughed at him when he told her this, open and with her head thrown back-he hadn’t really lived. He’d been in sepia tones and she’d introduced color. She’d been a vivid red where there had only been grays and beige.
“You and your poet’s soul,” she said. “Sometimes I’m afraid you’ll confuse us for a love story.”
It hadn’t made any sense to him-it wasn’t a confusion to call them a love story. This was the sort of thing people wrote music for, this is why art was invented. In his wildest romantic abandon, he almost thought the French language existed to make the word for love even more beautiful coming through her lips. He felt like loving her and wishing made up all of his being-that was where the colors came from.
He didn’t try to say that to her, though. She would have worried for his “poet’s soul.”
He met her through her father, his adviser in the university. They were working on a device that he described to his fellow students (i.e., idiots) as “radio waves from brain to brain through a filter.” He and Miles assumed that thoughts could travel if they were given a medium in which to exist, like carrying a surfer across waves. They’d been working together for a year and a half before Miles’s daughter arrived from Paris.
Two weeks later-madly in love-Dom had this thought: sleeping next to a body, invisible to each other, untangling the nets of thought-so breathing, seeking out without seeing, presence and absence both-
It was hypothetical and nonsensical, a string of impressions hung off the clothesline of the new experience. It needed refining.
Then he’d spent a day at the beach with Mal. She lay down in the sand, the lapping ocean licking her cheeks. She pulled him down by her, held onto him until he followed her into the sand with his face, cheek pressed against hers upside down.
He had the thought again, then. The difference was it was so much clearer and the strings that hung off it were lit through with all the wishing:
Sleeping next to you would be everything.
It took another two years and a lot of legwork-but that was it. That was the invention of the PASIV. It was the thought of sleeping next to the woman you love before you know anything (everything) about her. It was the fantasy of what dreaming in love could be.
Miles understood him right away.
Dom phrased it as a lot of neutral, anonymous “when you love a person” and “he or she is like-“ to keep the guise in place. He stumbled over every single one.
Miles replaced the ambiguities with “Mal” so subtly that Dom was using the name before he realized what he had admitted to.
***
She sat in silence at the table. Beside her were the vegetables for that night’s dinner-for her kids, for her friends, for the illusion of everything’s fine-but the top was spinning in the middle of the splashes of green and red and seeds. The chopped vegetables seemed like a barricade and the top spun between the discarded seeds. One hand was cupped at her chin-not quite holding her head up, still just illusion. It was where a hand ought to be to hold a head up but nothing touched, nothing worked.
The other hand lazily spun the top again and again. There was no hurry to her movements because there was nothing to learn.
She already knew it wasn’t real.
While the top spun, she ran a finger up and down the blade of the knife just as lazily.
To Arthur, it looked like the world collapsing in slow motion. He couldn’t move for the wave of nausea.
“Come on, Phil,” Eames said, lifting the girl up and turning her-casually, naturally, purposefully-so she couldn’t see her mother. “You were going to tell me all about Melissa getting her hair jammed in the bathroom door at school today.” He pressed a kiss onto her temple. Phillipa wrapped her arms around his neck sleepily, angling towards the kiss.
He shifted Phillipa onto his hip so that he could take James by the hand as well and lead them both out of the room.
“I didn’t do it!” Phillipa preemptively protested in a sleepy mumble as Eames led them away. He even managed a smile, like he loved her just as much as he did before…all this.
Arthur couldn’t. It all began and ended with Mal. Mal was falling away in long slivers of loneliness and loss and Arthur thought (maybe) she was cutting the slivers out of him just as much as she was cutting them out of herself. Everyone else-they were just the pieces that Mal was moving them away from.
He couldn’t even move.
Dom had to push him aside-harshly and gently at the same time-to get to her. He slid a hand down her arm in a grotesque mockery of a caress. She leaned in towards him, rested her head against the pulse in his neck.
She wouldn’t care. It wasn’t real.
...seven...six...five...
***
As far as Eames was concerned, the only permanent thing in life was death. You make your plea-not this year, please, just give me one more year-and then you go and gather your bloody rosebuds while you have the chance.
It wasn’t that Arthur made him re-consider his philosophy as much as Arthur seemed to require miraculously small modifications to it to make it include him. The one plea changed oh-so-slightly-not this year, please, just give us one more year-and that was it.
Eames didn’t traffic in the sort of epic love stories that Dom peddled, so he said nothing. Nothing out loud, nothing about it but the silent plea.
And the poem was still fucking apt, despite his best efforts. Goddamn Herrick and his fucking pastorals. Only it wasn’t rosebuds he was collecting, it was smiles-smiles, like a schoolgirl with a crush. The only thing he lacked was piece of loose-leaf with the “Do you like me: yes/no?”
But, oh, for a smile. It was like Arthur’s face was made for smiling and it was only by sheer bloody-mindedness that he managed to keep scowling so much of the time. When it broke loose-when the smile and the dimples and the crinkles around the eyes broke free-it was like his features were finally sliding into place.
The more Eames tried, the easier it was to achieve. Smiles piled upon smiles upon smiles.
That’s why he cracked a joke when Mal and Dom showed them the PASIV the first time, right after Arthur had shut the lid too loudly.
“You just wanted to sleep on the job, right, Dom?” he said.
Dom was looking too intently at the shut PASIV. Mal was following Arthur with her eyes as he crossed the room-closer to Eames, farther from her. There was something almost-angry about his stance when he stopped. Not quite, but almost angry.
He almost-smiled at Eames’s joke. Eames could unwind him like that, just enough to soften his prickly edges.
“It’s completely safe,” Dom insisted, still staring at the PASIV on the sofa between him and Mal.
“It’s been in tests for ages.”
“Who have you been-never mind,” Arthur started to protest but broke himself off. Military contracts; and he knew better than anyone how much better it was not knowing.
“I don’t want to know.”
“But, Arthur,” Mal said, the thrill of adventure lighting up her face, “we must try it.”
Eames may have collected Arthur’s smiles but Mal had a claim to them. It was like she had tattooed “Property of Mal Cobb” across his heart on the day they met-and when she jumped into the unknown, Arthur would be there. It was as sure as night following day, Arthur would follow Mal.
Even if he knew better.
***
“Do you know what it is to be a lover?” Mal asked, her head in Arthur’s lap. “To be half of a whole?”
The waves crashed against the craggy shore around them.
Arthur didn’t answer.
“Dom takes me to the sands,” she continued. “You take me to the rocks.”
Arthur tried to look out over the ocean, but the sun was too bright.
“I wonder why you do that in my drea-“
“I could take you to the sands,” Arthur said, trying to overlap her words with his. If he couldn’t hear her say it, maybe she wouldn’t mean it. “I could take you to Paris.”
“I wonder why we don’t,” Mal said dreamily. “I wonder why you’re not always singing Jacques Brel to me.”
“You could ask me to.”
She squinted up at him. Her eyes were mocking him, sneering back at him from inside her mind where she’d been lost.
“I don’t have to ask you anything, darling. It’s my dream.”
...four...three...two...one...
***
It was just supposed to be an experiment. Mal and Dom were so sure of themselves, so sure of their science. Dom swore he had explored every possibility, imagined every possible complication, preempted catastrophe. Mal’s eyes were alight with anticipation. She looked like a tiger, eyes burning.
Arthur liked to know details. They gave him details. They gave him lists, they told him what every piece of the PASIV did. And the blinking red lights-he knew what they meant.
“We wake up when it hits zero,” Dom explained. “It will turn on the tape deck and we’ll hear that in the dream.”
Arthur understood his responsibility. He was supposed to wait. They’d wake up when the countdown ended.
And he did wait. He watched them breathe, motionless, and he waited. He waited, watching the zeros pile up.
...00:00:04...00:00:03...00:00:02...00:00:01...
Then nothing left.
...00:00:00.
And nothing happened.
They didn’t wake up. Arthur heard the tape deck begin to play, could hear the strains of Edith Piaf through their headphones. She hit the chorus and they still didn’t wake up. They hadn’t prepared him for that. They didn’t have a plan for people who wouldn’t wake up-how had that been the contingency Dom didn’t plan for? How could Arthur not have asked? How could Mal not have wondered?
Arthur paced the room, feeling the endlessness of what should have been done differently echo with every footfall.
People had been put under before. Why could they all get back to their waking selves but not Dom and Mal, not this time? What was different?
(They would come up with the failsafe, the “kick” in the next week after this attempt. It was Eames who kicked out Dom’s chair. It was Dom, though, who told them all-with that bleak deadness he had so suddenly acquired in the eyes-that you could kill yourself awake.)
It was looking into meaningless, right into its face, and knowing it was looking back.
Nothing came and went. They opened their eyes and Arthur began to breathe again.
***
“Hello?”
“Yes, is this...Arthur Graham?”
“Speaking. Who’s asking?”
“Mr. Graham, I’m going to need you to meet me at the twenty-third precinct. I can explain when you-“
“What’s happened? Is it-is it Mal?”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sir, but Mal Cobb died at 2:42 AM this morning.”
***
Eames never would have said that everything began with Mal. He would have said that she was bright and vibrant and that she glistened when everyone plodded along. He would have quoted Keats, called her a bright star, wished he could have lived to the fullest like she did.
He wouldn’t have said everything began with her.
But he knew, bone-deep, that it ended with her.
***
“Can you cede a heart from one Cobb to another?” Eames asked. “Do you belong to the husband because you belonged to the wife?”
His tone was light, airy even. He couldn’t look at Arthur directly, though. He found corners of the room to look at instead, oblique angles from whatever would be written on Arthur’s face.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Arthur’s mouth said. Eames knew better.
“He’s trapped now,” Eames said. “He’s trapped outside, looking in. Is that where you want to be?”
He still didn’t look Arthur in the eyes.
So he didn’t see that Arthur was angry. He didn’t see how rage twitched in spikes of through Arthur. He didn’t see how Arthur was sadder than he had ever been before, mourning like he had never had the luxury to mourn before. He didn’t see how Arthur was pulling and pushing at the same time, backwards and forwards.
He didn’t see Arthur try to wait, even though he tried with all his heart.
***
Dom had always thought that “loving” was the sort of word you have to do, you can’t just say it.
She could be gone, but that was just a way of seeing. It was like breathing through a film of water, seeing the world without her in it. Water in his eyes, water down his throat, almost drowning-that’s what the world could become.
There was her gone here-and then there was her there, over there. She could stalk through his dreams without her, cold and ice-sharp. No wires connecting back to her wrists, nothing but what he could breathe into her. Re-made, Pygmalion’s newest creation.
It felt like shattering, building her again.
***
“He often lifts his hand to try
his work, to see if it is indeed flesh
or ivory; he still will not admit
it is but ivory. He kisses it:
it seems to him, in return, he’s kissed.”
(Ovid’s Metamorphoses)
Author: ifeelbetter
Beta: lamboyster
Rating: G
Word Count: 3,986
Summary: This is who they were before Mal jumped.
Notes: Based on almostgaby's wonderful vid (below the cut) for the i_revserbang challenge. The title comes from the song of the vid, "Teardrop" as covered by Civil Twilight. I hope my fic is somewhere near a tenth as good as that brilliant vid.
Click to view“It’s good to feel you are close to me in the night, love
invisible in your sleep, intently nocturnal,
while I untangle my worries
as if they were nets.”
(Pablo Neruda)
***
The fact that it looked like a bomb should have told them something.
It stood out glaringly from the sterile, white walls and equally blank tabletop. The sleek, compact poise would come later-after so many tests and so much else-but that first one even had the recognizable digital countdown (that all the bombs in movies have) in big red numbers, flickering down the seconds.
It also looked a lot like something musical. There were concave metallic circles on each side, like the speakers on old boom-boxes. The blinking red numbers-the termination deadline, the point of no return-directly in the center (like a heart) and then, like a mockery of feeling, an invocation of song.
In between the two poles-between the glowing red numbers and the absurdly faux-musical circles-were wires snaking in and out of each other, unbelievably entwined. There was no joint from one or another, no color-coordinated individuality, no beginnings and no ends. Just a mass of pieces, pushed so tightly that cutting one would mean cutting it all apart.
That should have told them something too.
The zeroes started to multiply-no hours left, no minutes, only seconds and that zero was fast approaching too. Arthur tapped the edge of his folded glasses against the tabletop as the seconds disappeared.
...00:00:04...00:00:03...00:00:02...00:00:01...
Then nothing left.
...00:00:00.
And nothing happened.
***
But that’s not a beginning. Nothing comes of nothing, as the saying goes, so the story must beginning with something.
It could begin in a field, just to the right of a fleet of high-rise apartment buildings. There was a path through the field and Mal was walking it, shading her eyes from the bright summer sun. She happened to stop to listen to the strains of a guitar and the guitar happened to be played by Arthur.
“It’s not every American who even knows Jacques Brel’s name,” she said amicably. “And very few of the young men who sit in fields and play their guitars bother with him.”
Arthur’s hair was cropped close to his skull and he had the sort of settled authority in his shoulders that bespeaks military service. She wouldn’t have spoken-not with her heavy streak of anarchism-except that he also had a set of dimples chiseled into the sides of his smile that denied the rigidity of the military training.
“As far as I’m concerned, Paris is the only city that could rival New York,” Arthur said, twisting his neck to the side and squinting up at her. Behind her, the sunlight sparkled between and through the leaves of the giant oak tree.
“Have you ever been?” Mal asked, homesickness clutching gently at her heart.
Arthur ducked his head towards his guitar and plucked a chord, letting his fingers linger between the notes. “Yes,” he answered.
“Do you speak French?” Mal asked, delighted and undeterred by the monosyllabic answer.
“Yes,” Arthur repeated, cutting off the chord. Mal realized it was the beginning of the song again.
“Do you know the words, then?” she asked and dropped onto the grass next to him. She bumped his shoulder with hers. “Go on. Take pity on a girl who misses her home.”
Arthur grinned (she’d know that grin later, she’d even be included in it) in a way that hinted at something fantastic that no one else would understand. “I’m making no promises for the quality of my singing,” he warned.
“I promise I won’t hold it against you,” Mal said.
She joined in by the end of the first chorus-it was inevitable, really-and they were shouting more than they were singing by the last verse. Arthur closed his eyes while he sang-not in the way so many amateur singers do, the ones that parrot the motions of professional, impassioned musicians without knowing why someone would move like that-as if he could exist through his eyes or his fingertips but not both at once. Mal liked it about him immensely. She’d never thought of existing through your fingertips and your eyes separately before.
***
…00:00:00.
Nothing came and went. They opened their eyes and Arthur began to breathe again.
He should have seen it, he told himself afterward. There was something wrong with her eyes. There was an edge of nothingness haunting the corners of her vision. She was hemmed in by it.
***
So Arthur was Mal’s friend first-and most importantly. Mal and Dom had their own epic story already in progress, but-for Arthur-it all began and ended with Mal. He wasn’t the sort to re-write those things once they were underway. Mal came first. That was just something that would always be true.
She worked at one of those undergrad-infested bar-slash-restaurant, faux-European-pub-types (more than half douche). She managed to be charming (occasionally-when she wasn’t throwing French Fries at Arthur’s head across the counter) in her white apron, though. And she laughed every single time some annoyingly-full-of-himself frat boy made the joke about her being French and serving French Fries. When she laughed-every single time-the lie looked new, like nothing had ever amused her so much.
A group of obnoxious and entitled boys came by every Wednesday for a game of poker. They made grabs at Mal as she passed sometimes and Arthur’s ingrained sense of his chivalric duty sometimes jumpstarted enough for him to almost-until she stopped him-do something. But she always stopped him. After all, she was Mal. Mals don’t need rescuing.
One particular night, a guy who had been on a massive losing streak for a couple of hours landed a slap on Mal’s ass that Arthur could have sworn echoed around the room, right under the low-lying din.
Arthur stood, feeling a familiar clench of fury grip him inside-the one that his mother used to get letters from his teachers about-but a stranger crossed in front of him, cutting him off.
“Hello, chaps,” the man said, a toothpick sticking out from the side of his lopsided grin. British. The accent sounded just shy of posh, like a rich boy who’d taken up bohemian ways to annoy an overbearing mother.
Arthur glared at the whole table, but the moment had passed. Mal was at his side again (red in the face but staunchly calm), gripping his arm and making a clear shake of her head.
“I see you’re having a go at my favorite past-time,” the Brit said to the group of frat guys. “It’s been ages since I’ve played-probably a bit rusty, you know how it is-“
He barely had to finish the sentence before, like a pack of hyenas, they fell onto the promise of new prey.
Let him fry, Arthur thought. Serves him right for getting in my way when they needed to have their faces kicked in.
That would have been that-Mal’s revenge would have ended with the wads of spit in each of the following rounds of beers-but then the Brit met Arthur’s eye for just the splittest of split seconds.
And he winked.
A couple of hours later, Arthur had to pull the frat boys off of him.
“You’re a fucking scam artist!” Mr. Losing Streak was shouting, trying to wriggle out of Arthur’s grasp.
“I only said I hadn’t played in a while,” the Brit said, leaning casually back in his chair so the front legs lifted easily off the floor. “I didn’t say I wasn’t brilliant.” He’d won it all-and “all” meant the pile of coins and bills on the table, but also the odd Rolex and a Blackberry.
“I will say this once: I am pepper-spraying everyone I see when I get to dix,” Mal said, holding up her spare pepper-spray that she kept stashed under the bar. “un...deux...trios...quatre...”
The other frat guys tried to hustle Mr. Losing Streak out in a quick but manly fashion-lots of arm-patting and “It’s not worth it, bro”-and Arthur tried not to be too exuberant about how severely they failed. Mal grinned at them as they passed her, still counting. It was almost terrifying to see her customer service smile set against the unambiguous threat.
“I believe this belongs to you,” the Brit said, pushing the pile of winnings across the table towards Mal.
“I don’t need charity,” she said sternly and held out a hand. “I liked you until that. I’m Mal. This is Arthur.”
“Eames,” said the guy-Eames-and shook her hand. Then he winked-lasciviously this time-at Arthur again.
It was amazing how-sometimes-the first meeting really does set the tone for the whole goddamn relationship.
Arthur smiled-accidentally-broad enough to expose his dimples to the stranger-Eames.
***
“I wouldn’t be able to tell,” Mal said to Eames, running a hand through his hair, “you could tell me lies about your name now and I wouldn’t know because I never actually knew, not when it was real-“
“It’s real now, Mal,” Eames said, pulling her hand out of his hair. “It’s all real right now.”
She bit the corner of her lip. It looked like half a smile, severed and mangled beyond recognition.
“-what is your name, though, the one for now?” she asked. “I wonder if it’s the same because I think of you with that name, not the one that-“
He tried to laugh, to make it lighter. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, right? Really, what’s in a name?”
His smile was forced, hers wasn’t even a smile anymore, and there was too much silence in the room.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I don’t-“
There was a countdown still going, only it wasn’t numbers blinking in red on the face of the PASIV. It was something they could all see happening-written right there.
In her eyes.
...ten...nine...eight...
***
For Dom, everything began with Mal. Before Mal-and she laughed at him when he told her this, open and with her head thrown back-he hadn’t really lived. He’d been in sepia tones and she’d introduced color. She’d been a vivid red where there had only been grays and beige.
“You and your poet’s soul,” she said. “Sometimes I’m afraid you’ll confuse us for a love story.”
It hadn’t made any sense to him-it wasn’t a confusion to call them a love story. This was the sort of thing people wrote music for, this is why art was invented. In his wildest romantic abandon, he almost thought the French language existed to make the word for love even more beautiful coming through her lips. He felt like loving her and wishing made up all of his being-that was where the colors came from.
He didn’t try to say that to her, though. She would have worried for his “poet’s soul.”
He met her through her father, his adviser in the university. They were working on a device that he described to his fellow students (i.e., idiots) as “radio waves from brain to brain through a filter.” He and Miles assumed that thoughts could travel if they were given a medium in which to exist, like carrying a surfer across waves. They’d been working together for a year and a half before Miles’s daughter arrived from Paris.
Two weeks later-madly in love-Dom had this thought: sleeping next to a body, invisible to each other, untangling the nets of thought-so breathing, seeking out without seeing, presence and absence both-
It was hypothetical and nonsensical, a string of impressions hung off the clothesline of the new experience. It needed refining.
Then he’d spent a day at the beach with Mal. She lay down in the sand, the lapping ocean licking her cheeks. She pulled him down by her, held onto him until he followed her into the sand with his face, cheek pressed against hers upside down.
He had the thought again, then. The difference was it was so much clearer and the strings that hung off it were lit through with all the wishing:
Sleeping next to you would be everything.
It took another two years and a lot of legwork-but that was it. That was the invention of the PASIV. It was the thought of sleeping next to the woman you love before you know anything (everything) about her. It was the fantasy of what dreaming in love could be.
Miles understood him right away.
Dom phrased it as a lot of neutral, anonymous “when you love a person” and “he or she is like-“ to keep the guise in place. He stumbled over every single one.
Miles replaced the ambiguities with “Mal” so subtly that Dom was using the name before he realized what he had admitted to.
***
She sat in silence at the table. Beside her were the vegetables for that night’s dinner-for her kids, for her friends, for the illusion of everything’s fine-but the top was spinning in the middle of the splashes of green and red and seeds. The chopped vegetables seemed like a barricade and the top spun between the discarded seeds. One hand was cupped at her chin-not quite holding her head up, still just illusion. It was where a hand ought to be to hold a head up but nothing touched, nothing worked.
The other hand lazily spun the top again and again. There was no hurry to her movements because there was nothing to learn.
She already knew it wasn’t real.
While the top spun, she ran a finger up and down the blade of the knife just as lazily.
To Arthur, it looked like the world collapsing in slow motion. He couldn’t move for the wave of nausea.
“Come on, Phil,” Eames said, lifting the girl up and turning her-casually, naturally, purposefully-so she couldn’t see her mother. “You were going to tell me all about Melissa getting her hair jammed in the bathroom door at school today.” He pressed a kiss onto her temple. Phillipa wrapped her arms around his neck sleepily, angling towards the kiss.
He shifted Phillipa onto his hip so that he could take James by the hand as well and lead them both out of the room.
“I didn’t do it!” Phillipa preemptively protested in a sleepy mumble as Eames led them away. He even managed a smile, like he loved her just as much as he did before…all this.
Arthur couldn’t. It all began and ended with Mal. Mal was falling away in long slivers of loneliness and loss and Arthur thought (maybe) she was cutting the slivers out of him just as much as she was cutting them out of herself. Everyone else-they were just the pieces that Mal was moving them away from.
He couldn’t even move.
Dom had to push him aside-harshly and gently at the same time-to get to her. He slid a hand down her arm in a grotesque mockery of a caress. She leaned in towards him, rested her head against the pulse in his neck.
She wouldn’t care. It wasn’t real.
...seven...six...five...
***
As far as Eames was concerned, the only permanent thing in life was death. You make your plea-not this year, please, just give me one more year-and then you go and gather your bloody rosebuds while you have the chance.
It wasn’t that Arthur made him re-consider his philosophy as much as Arthur seemed to require miraculously small modifications to it to make it include him. The one plea changed oh-so-slightly-not this year, please, just give us one more year-and that was it.
Eames didn’t traffic in the sort of epic love stories that Dom peddled, so he said nothing. Nothing out loud, nothing about it but the silent plea.
And the poem was still fucking apt, despite his best efforts. Goddamn Herrick and his fucking pastorals. Only it wasn’t rosebuds he was collecting, it was smiles-smiles, like a schoolgirl with a crush. The only thing he lacked was piece of loose-leaf with the “Do you like me: yes/no?”
But, oh, for a smile. It was like Arthur’s face was made for smiling and it was only by sheer bloody-mindedness that he managed to keep scowling so much of the time. When it broke loose-when the smile and the dimples and the crinkles around the eyes broke free-it was like his features were finally sliding into place.
The more Eames tried, the easier it was to achieve. Smiles piled upon smiles upon smiles.
That’s why he cracked a joke when Mal and Dom showed them the PASIV the first time, right after Arthur had shut the lid too loudly.
“You just wanted to sleep on the job, right, Dom?” he said.
Dom was looking too intently at the shut PASIV. Mal was following Arthur with her eyes as he crossed the room-closer to Eames, farther from her. There was something almost-angry about his stance when he stopped. Not quite, but almost angry.
He almost-smiled at Eames’s joke. Eames could unwind him like that, just enough to soften his prickly edges.
“It’s completely safe,” Dom insisted, still staring at the PASIV on the sofa between him and Mal.
“It’s been in tests for ages.”
“Who have you been-never mind,” Arthur started to protest but broke himself off. Military contracts; and he knew better than anyone how much better it was not knowing.
“I don’t want to know.”
“But, Arthur,” Mal said, the thrill of adventure lighting up her face, “we must try it.”
Eames may have collected Arthur’s smiles but Mal had a claim to them. It was like she had tattooed “Property of Mal Cobb” across his heart on the day they met-and when she jumped into the unknown, Arthur would be there. It was as sure as night following day, Arthur would follow Mal.
Even if he knew better.
***
“Do you know what it is to be a lover?” Mal asked, her head in Arthur’s lap. “To be half of a whole?”
The waves crashed against the craggy shore around them.
Arthur didn’t answer.
“Dom takes me to the sands,” she continued. “You take me to the rocks.”
Arthur tried to look out over the ocean, but the sun was too bright.
“I wonder why you do that in my drea-“
“I could take you to the sands,” Arthur said, trying to overlap her words with his. If he couldn’t hear her say it, maybe she wouldn’t mean it. “I could take you to Paris.”
“I wonder why we don’t,” Mal said dreamily. “I wonder why you’re not always singing Jacques Brel to me.”
“You could ask me to.”
She squinted up at him. Her eyes were mocking him, sneering back at him from inside her mind where she’d been lost.
“I don’t have to ask you anything, darling. It’s my dream.”
...four...three...two...one...
***
It was just supposed to be an experiment. Mal and Dom were so sure of themselves, so sure of their science. Dom swore he had explored every possibility, imagined every possible complication, preempted catastrophe. Mal’s eyes were alight with anticipation. She looked like a tiger, eyes burning.
Arthur liked to know details. They gave him details. They gave him lists, they told him what every piece of the PASIV did. And the blinking red lights-he knew what they meant.
“We wake up when it hits zero,” Dom explained. “It will turn on the tape deck and we’ll hear that in the dream.”
Arthur understood his responsibility. He was supposed to wait. They’d wake up when the countdown ended.
And he did wait. He watched them breathe, motionless, and he waited. He waited, watching the zeros pile up.
...00:00:04...00:00:03...00:00:02...00:00:01...
Then nothing left.
...00:00:00.
And nothing happened.
They didn’t wake up. Arthur heard the tape deck begin to play, could hear the strains of Edith Piaf through their headphones. She hit the chorus and they still didn’t wake up. They hadn’t prepared him for that. They didn’t have a plan for people who wouldn’t wake up-how had that been the contingency Dom didn’t plan for? How could Arthur not have asked? How could Mal not have wondered?
Arthur paced the room, feeling the endlessness of what should have been done differently echo with every footfall.
People had been put under before. Why could they all get back to their waking selves but not Dom and Mal, not this time? What was different?
(They would come up with the failsafe, the “kick” in the next week after this attempt. It was Eames who kicked out Dom’s chair. It was Dom, though, who told them all-with that bleak deadness he had so suddenly acquired in the eyes-that you could kill yourself awake.)
It was looking into meaningless, right into its face, and knowing it was looking back.
Nothing came and went. They opened their eyes and Arthur began to breathe again.
***
“Hello?”
“Yes, is this...Arthur Graham?”
“Speaking. Who’s asking?”
“Mr. Graham, I’m going to need you to meet me at the twenty-third precinct. I can explain when you-“
“What’s happened? Is it-is it Mal?”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sir, but Mal Cobb died at 2:42 AM this morning.”
***
Eames never would have said that everything began with Mal. He would have said that she was bright and vibrant and that she glistened when everyone plodded along. He would have quoted Keats, called her a bright star, wished he could have lived to the fullest like she did.
He wouldn’t have said everything began with her.
But he knew, bone-deep, that it ended with her.
***
“Can you cede a heart from one Cobb to another?” Eames asked. “Do you belong to the husband because you belonged to the wife?”
His tone was light, airy even. He couldn’t look at Arthur directly, though. He found corners of the room to look at instead, oblique angles from whatever would be written on Arthur’s face.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Arthur’s mouth said. Eames knew better.
“He’s trapped now,” Eames said. “He’s trapped outside, looking in. Is that where you want to be?”
He still didn’t look Arthur in the eyes.
So he didn’t see that Arthur was angry. He didn’t see how rage twitched in spikes of through Arthur. He didn’t see how Arthur was sadder than he had ever been before, mourning like he had never had the luxury to mourn before. He didn’t see how Arthur was pulling and pushing at the same time, backwards and forwards.
He didn’t see Arthur try to wait, even though he tried with all his heart.
***
Dom had always thought that “loving” was the sort of word you have to do, you can’t just say it.
She could be gone, but that was just a way of seeing. It was like breathing through a film of water, seeing the world without her in it. Water in his eyes, water down his throat, almost drowning-that’s what the world could become.
There was her gone here-and then there was her there, over there. She could stalk through his dreams without her, cold and ice-sharp. No wires connecting back to her wrists, nothing but what he could breathe into her. Re-made, Pygmalion’s newest creation.
It felt like shattering, building her again.
***
“He often lifts his hand to try
his work, to see if it is indeed flesh
or ivory; he still will not admit
it is but ivory. He kisses it:
it seems to him, in return, he’s kissed.”
(Ovid’s Metamorphoses)