wanderlust
This is the sequel (and hopefully worthy follow-up) to homesick (also, their titles probably could've probably been switched, but at this point that would just be confusing), and it represents an all time low for my summary writing. It also might represent the inception of a series or a verse or something, because I think the sequel needs another sequel. So this is the second installment in 'the endless and impossible' 'verse, after that one David Foster Wallace quote ("our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home", from that one essay/speech/whatever,-I-read-it-as-an-essay about Kafka).
As usual, this is un-beta'd, so call me out on that shit, or any shit. Also, there is some discussion of the impact pot use and Alzheimer's would have on dreams, and I feel the need to note that, while I'm plenty familiar with Alzheimer's and slightly less familiar with pot (my life--both of those things have very long and strange stories associated with them, which I will not tell here), I have never taken a psych course. I did some brief reading to try to keep things plausible, but that doesn't mean things are actually plausible (and the truth is mostly I ignored my reading and did what I wanted--shame).
.wanderlust
sequel to homesick. a story about ariadne.
pg13 . 6025 words
Ariadne lets the lease on her apartment run out. She sees it coming and she watches it roll past, packs up her belongings and sells or gives away what doesn’t fit, and books a flight from Charles de Gaulle to Indianapolis by way of Amsterdam and Memphis.
When she’s back on American soil, sitting in the Memphis airport watching planes take off, she calls her mother to tell her, and Ariadne can hear her quiet inhalation over the line. She’s probably crossing herself. She’s probably sending thanks skyward, standing in her tiny kitchen with the phone wedged between her head and her shoulder and the cord spiraling off towards the refrigerator.
“You can pick me up at the airport?” Ariadne asks, and the response is a flurry of affirmatives, the sort of exuberance that makes Ariadne both guilty and scared. She’s been gone too long. She hasn’t been gone nearly long enough.
Landing in Indy, looking down at the expanse of suburbs and city and cropland, is like landing in Indy always has been. Ariadne tries to trace the cul-de-sacs and interstates to her house, like she did when she was eighteen and flying home from college on the east coast, where she’d thought she might learn to be something other than a girl born in Indiana to a second generation Greek-American mother and a father whose family might’ve been French, or, more likely, French Canadian.
Ariadne’s mother is at the terminal, scanning the crowds with sharp eyes, and when Ariadne appears she lets out a small, high-pitched sound and rushes to embrace her, pushing Ariadne’s head into her shoulder and stroking her hair.
Ariadne’s mother has always smelled the same: like soft white soap, like mint and flour. Ariadne breathes it in for a moment, then extricates herself.
“It’s good to see you,” Ariadne says, and it’s not a lie.
“I’m so glad you’re home,” her mother says, and they go to the baggage claim, watch bags wheel around in a circle while Ariadne’s mother interrogates her and Ariadne lies.
Ariadne’s mother asks if she’s met any nice men, now that she’s working, because Ariadne’s mother asks these things. Ariadne says no, but she wants to tell her mother that she’s met plenty of men, and the only woman she met was a projection in a man’s subconscious, and that worries her.
But that would be hard to explain, because Ariadne’s mother thinks she graduated and is a proper architect.
Ariadne’s father is there when they get home, and Ariadne’s eldest sister with her two children in tow. They sit around the table and eat until they’re sick, and Ariadne tells the children stories she’s made up, and the adults likewise.
It’s not terrible, actually. Ariadne and her father have twinned senses of the humor, and it flashes to the surface occasionally, bright and quick.
“How long are you here?” Ariadne’s mother asks that night, when she’s making up the bed in the spare room and Ariadne’s sitting at the desk, watching her and thinking she should help, even though her mother would refuse.
“Five days,” Ariadne says, even though she doesn’t have anything lined up. But five days is the amount of time she can stay at home before her parents’ expectations begin to chafe, and Indiana starts to look like Indiana, instead of like home.
After three days of walks around the block after dinner, and driving to the grocery store for her mother, and sleeping with the cat curled against her back, Ariadne gets a call from Arthur at three in the morning.
“Arthur?” she mumbles into her phone, looking up at the crack in the ceiling. It starts in the corner, and lances towards the center before fading.
“Were you asleep?” he asks. “Aren’t you in Paris?”
“I’m in Indiana,” she says. “In my parents’ house. Don’t you keep track of these things?”
Arthur makes a noncommittal noise, and Ariadne stares at the ceiling in silence for a moment.
“I might have a job for you,” he says.
“Huh,” Ariadne replies. There’s a water stain on the ceiling as well, and it looks like a sleeping cat, or maybe a sheep.
“Eames and I need an architect for a job near Albuquerque.”
“Huh,” Ariadne says again. The spot on the ceiling might look like an ice cream cone.
“Ariadne,” Arthur says. “What time is it there?”
“Three.”
“Call me back when you’re coherent,” he says, and hangs up.
When Ariadne wakes up she’s not entirely sure it wasn’t a dream, but she checks the time zones and calls Arthur back.
“Do you think I’ll flake out again?” she asks when he picks up.
“It’s not like Auckland,” he replies.
“I can be there in a couple days,” she says. “Tell Eames I say hello.”
“Sure,” Arthur says, and they hang up without Ariadne asking any of the questions she intended to ask. She books a ticket to Albuquerque, instead, and sends the information along to Arthur, and then goes downstairs to help knead bread and listen her mother tell an elaborate story about the neighbor’s daughter.
When Ariadne gets to Albuquerque, Arthur is there to pick her up in a rental the color of vomit.
“Eames is cleaning your room,” he says, and Ariadne glances at him and refuses to ask.
It turns out they’re working out of some dilapidated adobe building outside the city limits, a house that appears to have been empty for at least as long as it was ever occupied. The last occupant apparently up and left all the furniture; thick layers of dust on a sagging china cabinet, a tired desk.
“Look out for scorpions,” Eames says when he greets them at the door. He catches Arthur’s hand in his and gives it a squeeze, like they’re being subtle.
“Wear shoes inside,” Arthur adds.
So it begins auspiciously.
Arthur and Eames sit Ariadne down between them at the kitchen table, which has been polished clean and smells like acrid citrus disinfectant, and explain the details of the job, not picking up each others’ sentences, but interrupting one another, cutting one another off, making exclamations of incompetence when one thinks the other is unclear.
The job is straightforward, and Ariadne looks between Eames and Arthur slowly, because Arthur doesn’t take straightforward jobs unless there’s a good reason for it.
“Is it really this easy?” she asks. “We’re just lifting information from some woman’s subconscious for her husband?”
“It’s a little more complicated--” Eames starts.
“Alzheimer’s,” Arthur interjects. “She has Alzheimer’s.”
Ariadne doesn’t even know what that means, in this context, and she waits for them to tell her.
“Alzheimer’s tends to distort architecture,” Arthur continues. “It’s not a hard job, precisely--we’ll only go in one level--but it’s an unpredictable job.”
“We need some elasticity in the architecture,” Eames adds, almost lazily.
It occurs to Ariadne that Eames is rolling a joint, his square fingers wrapping the skin tightly around the weed.
“The effect isn’t quite the same,” he says when he sees her watching, when he’s lifting the blunt to his lips. “But if you haven’t worked in a compromised mind--.”
“It’s an approximation,” Arthur says, reaching across the table to give Eames a light. “I assume you have some architecture we can use?”
“Sure,” Ariadne replies, still watching Eames, who takes a long drag, then smiles expansively at them both.
“The thing about Alzheimer’s,” Arthur continues. “Is that the information will be there, but not simple. Your architecture might be compromised, but, beyond that, things almost always end up in the wrong place.”
“So we can’t just put in a safe and expect what we need to show up there,” Ariadne says for him, as the pieces fall together
“Yes, well, no we can’t do that,” Arthur says, waving a hand through Eames’ smoke. “With Eames we’ll be able to see some distorted architecture, but the safe thing would still work.”
“If you were actually performing an extraction on me, darling,” Eames contributes, and there’s some bite to the last word, which makes Ariadne wonder if it’s possible that they extract information from one another rather than talk.
“We don’t,” Arthur says, catching her eye. “Not after Bells Beach.”
“Arthur’s teaching me how to surf, though,” Eames offers.
“He’s terrible,” Arthur says flatly.
“He’s distracting,” Eames counters, jabbing his thumb in Arthur’s direction.
Ariadne just laughs, breathing in Eames’ smoke commingled with Arthur’s cologne, the lemon polish on the table, the desert air, years of dust.
“It’s good to be back,” she says, and Eames arches an eyebrow.
“In New Mexico?”
“Never been before, actually,” she says, looking around the room again. There’s a calendar by the door dated March of ‘75. “What is this house?”
“Furnished,” Eames offers.
“I know someone,” Arthur says, like that’s any sort of explanation for working out of a house that’s apparently been unoccupied since the Vietnam War.
“I fixed up the creepy children’s bedroom for you,” Eames says. “We’re going to pretend you’re our daughter.”
Arthur looks as discomfited as Ariadne feels, which is something of a relief, and he blinks at Eames.
“I think we can go under,” he says.
“Lovely,” Eames says, stretching and rising to his feet. The joint’s almost burnt down, but he squeezes the end between his fingers and sets it on the table.
“Ready to see my mind on drugs, Ari?” he asks, glancing at her sidelong.
Arthur and Eames are apparently sharing the master bedroom, because everything there is suspiciously cleaner than anything anywhere else in the house, and there’s a Moleskine notebook on one bedside table, Eames’ reading glasses on the other.
Also, a PASIV in the middle of the bed.
They line up on the bed with Arthur and the PASIV in the middle. They go under.
When Ariadne opens her eyes, they’re underwater, which is not how the level is supposed to go. And it’s not entirely underwater; the water stops short in a vertical plane, only to reappear again further off, where it looks like Eames is swimming in sloppy circles.
“The water thing doesn’t usually happen with Alzheimer’s,” Arthur is saying from the dry side. His voice is burbling and distorted, and Ariadne swims towards him.
“Yeah?” Ariadne says after she’s tumbled out onto carpet. The level’s supposed to be a sort of office building, dry and corporate, but it’s gone soft and blurry about the edges, and where there should be an elevator there’s just a swath of blackness, and Ariadne blinks at it, her eyes unable to focus properly on that point.
“That’s what happens with Alzheimer’s,” Arthur says. “Only more. Pieces just fall away--things don’t connect.”
“With marijuana there are Penrose steps where you didn’t put them,” he adds. “You’ll have to pay attention. That doesn’t happen with Alzheimer’s--but with advanced cases, the projections aren’t whole.”
“They aren’t--” Ariadne starts, and Arthur nods.
“Parts fall off,” he says, and it occurs to Ariadne that there’s a reason he knows all this, and she’s not entirely sure she wants to ask.
They walk towards Eames’ bubble. Arthur catches his arm and pulls him out, dripping on the carpet, and Ariadne realizes she’s dripping on the carpet, too, but it hadn’t seemed like--she hadn’t noticed.
“I’m dripping on the carpet,” Ariadne says, and Eames laughs at her.
“Don’t worry about it,” Arthur says.
They walk around, the three of them, and eventually Ariadne and Eames dry off, but it happens abruptly, and leaves Ariadne bewildered again.
“What happens if you go in one of the--” Ariadne asks, waving a hand at one of the black spots and Arthur shrugs.
“You die,” he says. “And wake up.”
They do that, to wake up. It’s not the worst way to die.
Ariadne’s been making a list, but she’s only experienced the dramatic ways, so no disease, no old age. Stepping into the swath of black felt like dissolving, like all the tiny particles of a body spreading apart and then reforming in the waking world. Ariadne wriggles down to the foot and sits up, looking back at the other two.
“Where’s my room?” she asks, and Eames waves one hand around in the air until Arthur lifts his head up and looks at her.
“Second door on the left,” he says. “And the upstairs toilet isn’t hooked up, so you need to fill up the tank with a bucket.”
Eames was lying; the room is not a child’s room. It’s a desk by the window, and a thick wool blanket, and nothing on the walls.
She goes to sleep. There are other things she could and maybe should do, but now she wants to sleep properly; neither on an airplane, nor as a means to do work.
She checks her totem when she wakes up, and goes downstairs to find Eames sitting on the kitchen table in his underwear, eating a bowl of cereal.
“Thanks for that,” she says, and he glances up.
“Like you haven’t seen it before.”
“No, I mean thanks for putting something between your ass and the kitchen table.”
Eames just grins.
“Aren’t you wondering why we disinfected the kitchen table?”
“God, no,” she says.
“It was the dust, actually, and mouse droppings. Arthur didn’t want to eat off of it. What were you thinking?”
She shoves him in the shoulder, then pours herself a bowl of cereal, sitting in a chair and eating it dry.
“How have things been?” she asks after a moment of companionable crunching.
“You know,” he waves his spoon. “We’re doing alright.”
“Any jobs?” she asks, and Eames gives her a look.
“You think we wouldn’t have asked you?”
She shrugs, looks at her cereal in the bowl. It’s comforting, to hear that from Eames. She knows she lacks anything resembling military training, and she flaked in Auckland, and there are maybe a dozen common sense reasons to hire someone else under certain circumstances. Arthur himself is a serviceable architect and--
“Don’t overthink it,” Eames says. “We like you.”
“Thanks,” Ariadne replies, and they finish their cereal in silence.
Eames goes upstairs when he’s done, and Ariadne flops across the couch and flips through the old issues of National Geographic on the coffee table. When Eames returns, Arthur’s with him, and she glances between the two of them.
“What are we thinking for architecture?” she asks. “Something to jog memories? Or I was thinking maybe a bank, since we’re looking for information about a safe deposit box.”
“I have some pictures of the mark’s childhood home,” Arthur says. “But the bank could work, too.”
“Well, don’t hold out on me,” Ariadne says. “Give me the photos, Arthur.”
“Talking shop already,” Eames says, shaking his head. “And I thought we were going to watch a movie.”
“We are going to watch a movie,” Arthur intones, settling on the couch next to Ariadne. “I’ll give you the pictures later.”
Eames fiddles with a laptop, and Ariadne looks between the two of them, wondering if this is actually a job or just an excuse to sit around a house in New Mexico full of dust and scorpions and mouse shit. The pot and the movie suggest the latter, but the fact that the house is full of dust and scorpions and mouse shit suggests the former.
It might not be worth pursuing. Ariadne edges into the couch’s elbow, and Eames sits down between her and Arthur, and they watch the movie. The architecture can wait until morning. The architecture will wait until morning, truthfully, and it does--she starts the mazes the next day, spreads them out on the floor in the living room while Arthur and Eames are out.
Two days later, they’re invited to have dinner with the mark.
“Does this happen often?” Ariadne asks. “Meals with marks?”
“No,” Arthur says.
“But it makes my job much easier,” Eames contributes. He’s doing something at the sink that might be washing dishes, but most of the water is on the counter, spilling over onto the floor.
“We can only do it because the mark will forget,” Arthur adds.
“What if she doesn’t?” Ariadne asks, and Eames laughs.
“Hope she doesn’t,” Eames says.
They wear neat, nonthreatening clothes to dinner, and it makes Ariadne feel like maybe her job might actually be neat and nonthreatening. She’s just an architect, or she would be if she had ever bothered to finish her degree. But that had seemed foolish, when she had work elsewhere.
Even so, all she does is fiddle with models.
The mark, Abigail Barton, is an elderly woman with leathered skin, brown eyes turned down at the corners. She watches all of them, and asks her husband, James, who they were periodically. She asks James who he is, too. She asks Ariadne which of these young men she’s with, and Ariadne almost says both before she says neither.
Ariadne is terrible at guessing ages, she would lose so much money if she worked for the fair, but the husband’s a younger old than his wife. He’s terrifically polite, constantly touching their elbows and asking if they need anything else, but Ariadne doesn’t like him at all.
They make small talk through three courses, and when they’re driving home in the sick colored rental car Ariadne doesn’t ask about James. She wants to, she just--doesn’t.
“How’d you like that?” Eames asks.
“The tomato bisque was good,” Ariadne replies, and presses her head against the window.
Arthur is driving and Eames is flipping through stations on the radio and stopping on the country ones until ads start, and this isn’t their fault, really, and she trusts them, but she does this to herself--wedges herself into people’s business. Maybe she should stop. She did that with Cobb, and she’s not even sure what that got her.
Memories of Mal, that’s what it got her. And maybe it helped the job, but she’s not even sure about that.
She trusts Arthur and Eames. She doesn’t trust Miller’s husband. But she’s running on something visceral, something strange, and she doesn’t want to try to explain it right now, because it’s not something she saw clearly on the surface, it is maybe complete nonsense developed from bad past experiences mulled together. There was some guy from high school, her sister’s deadbeat ex-husband.
“What’s in the safe deposit box?” she asks, and Eames meets her eyes in the rearview mirror for a moment.
“Does it matter?” he asks, and Ariadne suspects he’s remembering Auckland.
“I can’t confirm,” Arthur says. “But James says it’s something he gave her a long time ago. A piece of jewelry.”
“He won’t tell you anything else?” Ariadne asks, and she feels her brow wrinkling.
“No,” Eames interjects. “I told him it would help, but.”
“I don’t think he’s taking advantage,” Arthur says. “They’ve been married for sixty-five years, Ariadne. I have their marriage license.”
Ariadne hums noncommittally, and Eames catches her eyes in the rearview mirror again and shakes his head. She makes a face that might read as innocent on another planet, but here--well, Eames laughs at her.
Arthur stops somewhere to pick up tamales on the way back, returns to the car muttering in Spanish and carrying a paper bag.
“Still can’t cook?” Ariadne asks, and Eames snorts.
“What do you think?” he mutters, and Arthur gives him an elbow to the ribs before starting the car.
The tamales are good, soft cornmeal outers with the filling all grease and spice, and they peel them out of their foil wrappers and their corn husks by turn. There are tacos as well, messy ones in small round tortillas, and the three of them eat together at the kitchen table.
“Your cooking’s improved, Arthur,” Ariadne says around a mouthful of food.
“Thank you,” he says dryly. “Especially given Eames’ comments in the car.”
“You know I appreciate you, Arthur,” Eames says, squeezing his shoulder and then leaving his arm draped around Arthur’s back.
“You two,” Ariadne says, shaking her head. “Eames, you owe me hardcore.”
“So you’re taking credit for Arthur’s overwhelming attraction to me?” Eames asks.
“I’m taking some credit for the fact that Arthur stopped running away,” Ariadne replies.
Arthur frowns at her, and Eames grins.
“What about you?” Arthur asks. “You let your lease run out. Where are you living?”
“Here,” Ariadne says. “For now.”
“Arthur’s not the best person to emulate,” Eames contributes. “No offense, darling.”
“He’s right,” Arthur adds.
“I got sick of it,” Ariadne says. “I was just there because I thought it’d be the opposite of Indiana.”
“So where next?” Eames asks.
“I was thinking my scarves would be well suited to Seattle,” Ariadne says, trying to sound bright.
“You could do better,” Eames says. “Amsterdam? Moscow? Seoul?”
“I’m terrible with languages,” Ariadne replies. “That was the other problem with Paris. Which movie, tonight?”
They let it slide, after that, and Ariadne’s silently grateful. Because she’s not like Arthur, even though she understands that it might look that way given the circumstances. She left Indiana in the first place was because she wanted something that wasn’t there, and it wasn’t in Paris, either, so now she’s going to try another place. She’ll take out another lease in another city, and figure it out. She’s not going to job hop. She’s not going to cross borders in car trunks.
The next morning she sleeps in, and when she wakes up Arthur and Eames are gone already, and she eats cereal, and makes a grocery list for when they get back. Because all they have is cereal, no milk, leftover tamales. And they need mouse traps, because mouse droppings are disgusting.
Neither Arthur nor Eames have returned by lunch, and so Ariadne spends most of the day working on models, and eating cereal. Arthur shows up in the late afternoon, and Ariadne’s sitting on the floor watching the scorpion in the corner of the living room and trying to make a decision.
“Aren’t scorpions nocturnal?” she asks, and Arthur looks down at her, and she points into the corner.
“Maybe it’s sleeping?” he offers. “Do you want me to kill it?”
“I can kill my own insects,” she replies, and Arthur sits down on the couch, setting his suitcase beside him.
“Why did you leave Paris?” he asks.
“I just didn’t fit,” she replies. “Why couldn’t you sit still?”
“I like moving,” he says.
“Still?” she asks, and Arthur shrugs.
“Job’s rough, if you don’t,” he says.
“So where should I try next?” she asks him, and Arthur grins.
“I’ll see if I can think of anything.”
“Want to see the architecture?”
They talk through the level, which moves from Abigail’s childhood home into banks of safe deposit boxes and back again, and then they leave a note for Eames and go to the Safeway.
“So are you going to cook for us?” Arthur asks. He’s pushing the cart and he looks like Arthur pushing a grocery cart, which is a strangely entertaining image.
“I’m just going to make sure we have something to eat,” Ariadne says. “Other than dry Froot Loops.”
“Eames bought those,” Arthur replies, sounding disgruntled.
When they get back, Eames is there, eating the rest of the cereal out of the box.
“I don’t know why you thought we needed to go grocery shopping,” he says.
“I’ll cook you eggs tomorrow,” Ariadne offers.
“If you wake up on time,” he counters.
“How’s James Barton doing?” Ariadne asks.
“Early to bed, early to rise,” Eames says.
“Is it weird, to follow someone who knows he’s being tailed?” Ariadne asks.
“Sometimes you wonder,” he replies.
“But Eames is that good,” Arthur says, and he manages to make it sound not complimentary at all.
Eames just grins, and Ariadne puts a pot of rice on the stove. Twenty minutes later, she burns it, and eats it anyway.
Eames shares his cereal with Arthur.
The job’s in a week, and Ariadne’s scraping burnt rice out of the bottom of a pot with a spoon, and she still doesn’t trust James Barton but she’s going to trust Arthur and Eames on this one. Because she said she trusted them. Because James Barton is an eldery man who wants to access his senile wife’s safe deposit box, and maybe it’s just that.
“Will James be there for the job?” Ariadne asks anyway, crunching rice.
“It’s not going to be a problem,” Eames says.
“Why not?” Ariadne says. “Just tell me why you know it’s not a problem, and I’ll shut up.”
“Ariadne--” Eames starts.
“Ariadne,” Arthur says, cutting him off. “We think it’s not going to be a problem the same way you think it is.”
Ariadne sighs.
“I didn’t take you for a gambler.”
“I know it’s not going to be a problem,” Arthur says, looking at her. “It’s not going to be a problem.”
Ariadne puts the pot in the sink to soak, goes upstairs, lies flat on her bed, on top of her blankets. She’s not sure if she’d feel more respected or less if she worked with a different team, people who weren’t Arthur and Eames, because she understands empirically that she’s young, and new to dream sharing. She just wants an explanation. She just wants it to be clear, and safe, which is--
Not this job.
Ariadne was on the team that performed fucking inception, and she’s worried about an elderly man.
She goes to sleep.
She dreams about Mal, and a train, jumbled together with the lyrics to a Tom Waits song her father used to listen to. Mal wakes her up. Mal says, “you’re waiting for a train--a train can take you away from here, but a train can’t bring you home--you can’t know for sure. It doesn’t matter.”
When she wakes up, it’s because someone’s knocking at the door. It’s Eames.
“Good morning,” she says, blinking.
“About yesterday--” he starts, and she shakes her head.
“I was pretending dreamsharing was a different kind of job,” she says. “Tell me about Mal.”
“I don’t actually know that much about Mal, Ari,” Eames says.
“Tell me that if I trust you and Arthur, I’m not going to end up like her,” Ariadne says, looking at him. “Tell me that.”
“Fuck, Ariadne,” Eames whispers, putting his hands on her shoulders. “Arthur said you trusted us.”
“Yeah,” she mutters. “But maybe I’m young.”
And then he hugs her, fierce and tight. He smells like Arthur’s cologne.
“You aren’t,” he says. “You’re just right, and you’re the best damn architect I know, and you’re going to make me eggs for breakfast.”
“Shut up, you” she mumbles, bracing her arms against his chest to push them apart.
Then they go downstairs, and she makes eggs. Arthur appears from somewhere eventually, so she makes him eggs as well, and promises french toast tomorrow against her better judgment.
She hopes they understand the food means thank you, because there are others thing that could be said.
The thing about Mal, and Ariadne, is that Ariadne has never wanted to give control of herself over to someone else. The idea of someone planting a seed in her mind without being able to reject it--there’s that. But there’s also the idea of being not herself, of being something in someone else’s mind that’s her image and her words and their subconscious understanding of her, a murky stew things she’s not, not really.
Ariadne wants to hold onto herself. It’s part pride and part something else, part stupid fear, but it’s the same way she pulls away from her parents because their expectations chafed, left Paris because it didn’t fit. She’s knows herself, as well as she knows anything, and she doesn’t want that to slip away.
Putting it like that makes her wonder about Abigail Barton.
Before they perform the extraction Abigail is nervous and wide-eyed, asking who they are, asking where she is. They’ve all donned scrubs and Eames keeps explaining how they’re nurses, here to take care of her, and she blinks at them and says, “oh,” very quietly, and then tells a story they’ve already heard, using the same words.
They go under. It’s easier than going to sleep under normal circumstances, as easy as slipping underwater.
When Ariadne opens her eyes in the dream, everything’s blurred. It takes her a few blinks to realize that’s just how it is, how it’s going to be.
Eames, as James Barton, is with the mark. Arthur catches Ariadne’s eye, and they go.
As they move through the dream the architecture eventually comes into focus, pulling together into something coherent, or at least visible. There are the dark blurred spots from Eames’ dream, and Ariadne tries to avoid looking at them. Ariadne avoids looking at the projections, too--they limp, and those with whole bodies have blank faces, and those with perfect faces are missing limbs. Ariadne sees one woman with a blank face whose ribcage pierces her skin, and it makes her think of a turtle, the way their shells are an extension of their ribs.
They find the safe deposit boxes, find the one whose number aligns with the mark’s actual safe deposit box.
“It’s empty,” Ariadne says, glancing at Arthur.
“Stay here,” he says. “It might fill, if Eames can jog Abigail’s memory.”
And then Arthur disappears into the maze, and Ariadne’s left to wait. She leaves Abigail’s box open, and looks at the other boxes, which run in no particularly order. They might have run in order when they arrived, but now the numbers are off.
Which probably means something.
Ariadne knows some things about Abigail Barton; not much. She was an art dealer in Santa Fe. She is married to James Barton. She grew up with horses.
The numbers on the safe deposit boxes shift again, going blurry and fading to blank, and then they come back as words.
This dream makes Ariadne dizzy, in a way they usually don’t. She wants to catch it with her mind and hold it steady, make the safe deposit boxes hold their numbers, and the turtle woman’s ribs reenter her skin.
But that isn’t what the dream is for. It’s not Ariadne’s dream, it’s Abigail, and Ariadne slumps down to the floor and lets Abigail take over, in a swirl of blurriness and nonsense.
The safe deposit boxes flicker momentarily. The number on Abigail’s box changes, and then there’s an address, and then it changes again.
Ariadne thinks the extraction might be done, and when the kick comes she gives Arthur and Ariadne the number and the address, and when they bring Abigail home Arthur gives the information to James Barton.
And then it’s done, so quickly. The job is done, and it wasn’t a problem, and Ariadne needs to figure out where she’s going next.
They drive back to the house, Arthur and Eames in the front and Ariadne in the back. Everyone’s very quiet, and Ariadne wants nothing so much as to go to sleep, but when they reach the house Eames insists on watching a movie, some western he got at the rental store, and they all fall asleep on the couch midway through, when everyone’s riding through the desert on horseback.
Ariadne wakes up with her head pressed between Eames’ back and the couch, and Eames’ arm is wrapped around Arthur’s waist, and all three of their legs are entangled, and Ariadne’s not even sure how they all fit.
She goes back to sleep, and wakes again to someone nudging her.
“What’s for breakfast?” Eames asks, and she blinks up at him.
“What do you guys do without me?”
“Eat cereal,” Eames says.
“Eames cooks,” Arthur says, coming up from behind. “He’s just being lazy.”
“And taking advantage of me?” Ariadne says. “I hate you both.”
She tries to bury her head in the couch, but it smells like must and she’s hungry and not sure when Arthur and Eames intend to leave, so she may as well make breakfast.
“Where should I move?” Ariadne asks Arthur when shes cooking the box hashbrowns.
“I’ve actually drawn up a list,” Arthur says, and then he goes upstairs and reappears with an actual sheet of paper, folded triplicate.
“I helped,” Eames contributes from the couch.
“Thanks,” Ariadne says, and sets the paper on the counter while she finishes the eggs.
She opens the paper later, when Eames and Arthur are doing the dishes and she’s sitting on the couch.
Auckland’s somewhere in the middle, between Yellowknife and Zagreb. It actually reads like a list of every city Eames and Arthur have ever been, but it’s something.
“Auckland,” she says, walking back over to the sink. “They speak English there.”
“Sophie Albert is based in Auckland,” Arthur offers.
Ariadne’s there within the week, with immigration papers courtesy of Arthur, and she rents a shoebox of a flat and spends a lot of time sitting on benches and looking at the ocean.
She meets up with Sophie Albert over curry, sitting at a table on the sidewalk while people bustle past, and suddenly Ariadne is going with Sophie to Hong Kong, designing a corporate level for a simple single-level extraction, working with Sophie and a man called Goran. They don’t have a forger, but the job is simple enough even for Ariadne, it goes off without a hitch, she returns to Auckland and sleeps for a day.
She doesn’t miss Arthur and Eames, except sometimes she does; Goran had asked her if she was the girl who was working with them, and if his eyes weren’t so opaque she might’ve asked him the same. Was she the girl who had been working with them? Did that mean anything?
She knew she should tell Goran she wasn’t a girl, she was old enough, but it didn’t seem worth it. She and Sophie could take him, anyway.
She wonders if she should’ve told Goran that she wasn’t having sex with them, she was just working with them, but maybe that would be presumptuous.
When she wakes up after getting back from Auckland, her apartment smells like eggs and bacon, and Eames is in the kitchen, cooking.
Arthur’s there, too.
“Congratulations on Hong Kong,” Arthur says, and Ariadne stares at him.
“You need to teach me to be paranoid as hell,” she says. “Because I have a feeling waking up with strange people in my apartment isn’t how it’s supposed to go.”
“We aren’t strangers, Ari,” Eames says.
“Is my door okay?” she asks.
“Of course,” Arthur replies, looking offended.
“Aren’t I supposed to come out waving a gun and shouting?” she says, and Eames grins.
“No,” he says. “That’s Arthur.”
“I wouldn’t shout,” Arthur replies. “I’d just shoot.”
Ariadne sits down the table and looks between the two of them, Eames frying eggs shirtless, Arthur with his hands on the table.
“Where’s your shirt?” she asks, and Eames shrugs.
“You didn’t have an apron.”
“Why are you here?” she asks, and Arthur smiles, not sardonic at all.
“Can’t we visit our friend?”
“You live in Mombasa,” she says.
“Yeah--” Eames says. “About that.”
“You don’t live in Mombasa?”
“Arthur thought it was too warm,” Eames says.
“But you’re from Hawaii,” Ariadne says, and Arthur scowls.
“Low blow, Ari,” Eames says, sliding eggs and bacon onto plates and then sitting down. “Anyway, how do you like Auckland?”
Ariadne shrugs.
“Because we were going to try Reykjavik,” Eames continues. “And we were thinking we could use a flatmate.”
Ariadne hadn’t expected to fit between Arthur and Eames; not because the pair fits together perfectly by any stretch of the imagination, but because three’s a crowd.
But it turns out it’s rather less than a crowd, and that when they expand their partnership into a team it makes about as much sense as anything else. And if the places don’t always fit, at least they fit together.
They leave the deposit on Ariadne’s Auckland flat and fly out that night.
As usual, this is un-beta'd, so call me out on that shit, or any shit. Also, there is some discussion of the impact pot use and Alzheimer's would have on dreams, and I feel the need to note that, while I'm plenty familiar with Alzheimer's and slightly less familiar with pot (my life--both of those things have very long and strange stories associated with them, which I will not tell here), I have never taken a psych course. I did some brief reading to try to keep things plausible, but that doesn't mean things are actually plausible (and the truth is mostly I ignored my reading and did what I wanted--shame).
.wanderlust
sequel to homesick. a story about ariadne.
pg13 . 6025 words
Ariadne lets the lease on her apartment run out. She sees it coming and she watches it roll past, packs up her belongings and sells or gives away what doesn’t fit, and books a flight from Charles de Gaulle to Indianapolis by way of Amsterdam and Memphis.
When she’s back on American soil, sitting in the Memphis airport watching planes take off, she calls her mother to tell her, and Ariadne can hear her quiet inhalation over the line. She’s probably crossing herself. She’s probably sending thanks skyward, standing in her tiny kitchen with the phone wedged between her head and her shoulder and the cord spiraling off towards the refrigerator.
“You can pick me up at the airport?” Ariadne asks, and the response is a flurry of affirmatives, the sort of exuberance that makes Ariadne both guilty and scared. She’s been gone too long. She hasn’t been gone nearly long enough.
Landing in Indy, looking down at the expanse of suburbs and city and cropland, is like landing in Indy always has been. Ariadne tries to trace the cul-de-sacs and interstates to her house, like she did when she was eighteen and flying home from college on the east coast, where she’d thought she might learn to be something other than a girl born in Indiana to a second generation Greek-American mother and a father whose family might’ve been French, or, more likely, French Canadian.
Ariadne’s mother is at the terminal, scanning the crowds with sharp eyes, and when Ariadne appears she lets out a small, high-pitched sound and rushes to embrace her, pushing Ariadne’s head into her shoulder and stroking her hair.
Ariadne’s mother has always smelled the same: like soft white soap, like mint and flour. Ariadne breathes it in for a moment, then extricates herself.
“It’s good to see you,” Ariadne says, and it’s not a lie.
“I’m so glad you’re home,” her mother says, and they go to the baggage claim, watch bags wheel around in a circle while Ariadne’s mother interrogates her and Ariadne lies.
Ariadne’s mother asks if she’s met any nice men, now that she’s working, because Ariadne’s mother asks these things. Ariadne says no, but she wants to tell her mother that she’s met plenty of men, and the only woman she met was a projection in a man’s subconscious, and that worries her.
But that would be hard to explain, because Ariadne’s mother thinks she graduated and is a proper architect.
Ariadne’s father is there when they get home, and Ariadne’s eldest sister with her two children in tow. They sit around the table and eat until they’re sick, and Ariadne tells the children stories she’s made up, and the adults likewise.
It’s not terrible, actually. Ariadne and her father have twinned senses of the humor, and it flashes to the surface occasionally, bright and quick.
“How long are you here?” Ariadne’s mother asks that night, when she’s making up the bed in the spare room and Ariadne’s sitting at the desk, watching her and thinking she should help, even though her mother would refuse.
“Five days,” Ariadne says, even though she doesn’t have anything lined up. But five days is the amount of time she can stay at home before her parents’ expectations begin to chafe, and Indiana starts to look like Indiana, instead of like home.
After three days of walks around the block after dinner, and driving to the grocery store for her mother, and sleeping with the cat curled against her back, Ariadne gets a call from Arthur at three in the morning.
“Arthur?” she mumbles into her phone, looking up at the crack in the ceiling. It starts in the corner, and lances towards the center before fading.
“Were you asleep?” he asks. “Aren’t you in Paris?”
“I’m in Indiana,” she says. “In my parents’ house. Don’t you keep track of these things?”
Arthur makes a noncommittal noise, and Ariadne stares at the ceiling in silence for a moment.
“I might have a job for you,” he says.
“Huh,” Ariadne replies. There’s a water stain on the ceiling as well, and it looks like a sleeping cat, or maybe a sheep.
“Eames and I need an architect for a job near Albuquerque.”
“Huh,” Ariadne says again. The spot on the ceiling might look like an ice cream cone.
“Ariadne,” Arthur says. “What time is it there?”
“Three.”
“Call me back when you’re coherent,” he says, and hangs up.
When Ariadne wakes up she’s not entirely sure it wasn’t a dream, but she checks the time zones and calls Arthur back.
“Do you think I’ll flake out again?” she asks when he picks up.
“It’s not like Auckland,” he replies.
“I can be there in a couple days,” she says. “Tell Eames I say hello.”
“Sure,” Arthur says, and they hang up without Ariadne asking any of the questions she intended to ask. She books a ticket to Albuquerque, instead, and sends the information along to Arthur, and then goes downstairs to help knead bread and listen her mother tell an elaborate story about the neighbor’s daughter.
When Ariadne gets to Albuquerque, Arthur is there to pick her up in a rental the color of vomit.
“Eames is cleaning your room,” he says, and Ariadne glances at him and refuses to ask.
It turns out they’re working out of some dilapidated adobe building outside the city limits, a house that appears to have been empty for at least as long as it was ever occupied. The last occupant apparently up and left all the furniture; thick layers of dust on a sagging china cabinet, a tired desk.
“Look out for scorpions,” Eames says when he greets them at the door. He catches Arthur’s hand in his and gives it a squeeze, like they’re being subtle.
“Wear shoes inside,” Arthur adds.
So it begins auspiciously.
Arthur and Eames sit Ariadne down between them at the kitchen table, which has been polished clean and smells like acrid citrus disinfectant, and explain the details of the job, not picking up each others’ sentences, but interrupting one another, cutting one another off, making exclamations of incompetence when one thinks the other is unclear.
The job is straightforward, and Ariadne looks between Eames and Arthur slowly, because Arthur doesn’t take straightforward jobs unless there’s a good reason for it.
“Is it really this easy?” she asks. “We’re just lifting information from some woman’s subconscious for her husband?”
“It’s a little more complicated--” Eames starts.
“Alzheimer’s,” Arthur interjects. “She has Alzheimer’s.”
Ariadne doesn’t even know what that means, in this context, and she waits for them to tell her.
“Alzheimer’s tends to distort architecture,” Arthur continues. “It’s not a hard job, precisely--we’ll only go in one level--but it’s an unpredictable job.”
“We need some elasticity in the architecture,” Eames adds, almost lazily.
It occurs to Ariadne that Eames is rolling a joint, his square fingers wrapping the skin tightly around the weed.
“The effect isn’t quite the same,” he says when he sees her watching, when he’s lifting the blunt to his lips. “But if you haven’t worked in a compromised mind--.”
“It’s an approximation,” Arthur says, reaching across the table to give Eames a light. “I assume you have some architecture we can use?”
“Sure,” Ariadne replies, still watching Eames, who takes a long drag, then smiles expansively at them both.
“The thing about Alzheimer’s,” Arthur continues. “Is that the information will be there, but not simple. Your architecture might be compromised, but, beyond that, things almost always end up in the wrong place.”
“So we can’t just put in a safe and expect what we need to show up there,” Ariadne says for him, as the pieces fall together
“Yes, well, no we can’t do that,” Arthur says, waving a hand through Eames’ smoke. “With Eames we’ll be able to see some distorted architecture, but the safe thing would still work.”
“If you were actually performing an extraction on me, darling,” Eames contributes, and there’s some bite to the last word, which makes Ariadne wonder if it’s possible that they extract information from one another rather than talk.
“We don’t,” Arthur says, catching her eye. “Not after Bells Beach.”
“Arthur’s teaching me how to surf, though,” Eames offers.
“He’s terrible,” Arthur says flatly.
“He’s distracting,” Eames counters, jabbing his thumb in Arthur’s direction.
Ariadne just laughs, breathing in Eames’ smoke commingled with Arthur’s cologne, the lemon polish on the table, the desert air, years of dust.
“It’s good to be back,” she says, and Eames arches an eyebrow.
“In New Mexico?”
“Never been before, actually,” she says, looking around the room again. There’s a calendar by the door dated March of ‘75. “What is this house?”
“Furnished,” Eames offers.
“I know someone,” Arthur says, like that’s any sort of explanation for working out of a house that’s apparently been unoccupied since the Vietnam War.
“I fixed up the creepy children’s bedroom for you,” Eames says. “We’re going to pretend you’re our daughter.”
Arthur looks as discomfited as Ariadne feels, which is something of a relief, and he blinks at Eames.
“I think we can go under,” he says.
“Lovely,” Eames says, stretching and rising to his feet. The joint’s almost burnt down, but he squeezes the end between his fingers and sets it on the table.
“Ready to see my mind on drugs, Ari?” he asks, glancing at her sidelong.
Arthur and Eames are apparently sharing the master bedroom, because everything there is suspiciously cleaner than anything anywhere else in the house, and there’s a Moleskine notebook on one bedside table, Eames’ reading glasses on the other.
Also, a PASIV in the middle of the bed.
They line up on the bed with Arthur and the PASIV in the middle. They go under.
When Ariadne opens her eyes, they’re underwater, which is not how the level is supposed to go. And it’s not entirely underwater; the water stops short in a vertical plane, only to reappear again further off, where it looks like Eames is swimming in sloppy circles.
“The water thing doesn’t usually happen with Alzheimer’s,” Arthur is saying from the dry side. His voice is burbling and distorted, and Ariadne swims towards him.
“Yeah?” Ariadne says after she’s tumbled out onto carpet. The level’s supposed to be a sort of office building, dry and corporate, but it’s gone soft and blurry about the edges, and where there should be an elevator there’s just a swath of blackness, and Ariadne blinks at it, her eyes unable to focus properly on that point.
“That’s what happens with Alzheimer’s,” Arthur says. “Only more. Pieces just fall away--things don’t connect.”
“With marijuana there are Penrose steps where you didn’t put them,” he adds. “You’ll have to pay attention. That doesn’t happen with Alzheimer’s--but with advanced cases, the projections aren’t whole.”
“They aren’t--” Ariadne starts, and Arthur nods.
“Parts fall off,” he says, and it occurs to Ariadne that there’s a reason he knows all this, and she’s not entirely sure she wants to ask.
They walk towards Eames’ bubble. Arthur catches his arm and pulls him out, dripping on the carpet, and Ariadne realizes she’s dripping on the carpet, too, but it hadn’t seemed like--she hadn’t noticed.
“I’m dripping on the carpet,” Ariadne says, and Eames laughs at her.
“Don’t worry about it,” Arthur says.
They walk around, the three of them, and eventually Ariadne and Eames dry off, but it happens abruptly, and leaves Ariadne bewildered again.
“What happens if you go in one of the--” Ariadne asks, waving a hand at one of the black spots and Arthur shrugs.
“You die,” he says. “And wake up.”
They do that, to wake up. It’s not the worst way to die.
Ariadne’s been making a list, but she’s only experienced the dramatic ways, so no disease, no old age. Stepping into the swath of black felt like dissolving, like all the tiny particles of a body spreading apart and then reforming in the waking world. Ariadne wriggles down to the foot and sits up, looking back at the other two.
“Where’s my room?” she asks, and Eames waves one hand around in the air until Arthur lifts his head up and looks at her.
“Second door on the left,” he says. “And the upstairs toilet isn’t hooked up, so you need to fill up the tank with a bucket.”
Eames was lying; the room is not a child’s room. It’s a desk by the window, and a thick wool blanket, and nothing on the walls.
She goes to sleep. There are other things she could and maybe should do, but now she wants to sleep properly; neither on an airplane, nor as a means to do work.
She checks her totem when she wakes up, and goes downstairs to find Eames sitting on the kitchen table in his underwear, eating a bowl of cereal.
“Thanks for that,” she says, and he glances up.
“Like you haven’t seen it before.”
“No, I mean thanks for putting something between your ass and the kitchen table.”
Eames just grins.
“Aren’t you wondering why we disinfected the kitchen table?”
“God, no,” she says.
“It was the dust, actually, and mouse droppings. Arthur didn’t want to eat off of it. What were you thinking?”
She shoves him in the shoulder, then pours herself a bowl of cereal, sitting in a chair and eating it dry.
“How have things been?” she asks after a moment of companionable crunching.
“You know,” he waves his spoon. “We’re doing alright.”
“Any jobs?” she asks, and Eames gives her a look.
“You think we wouldn’t have asked you?”
She shrugs, looks at her cereal in the bowl. It’s comforting, to hear that from Eames. She knows she lacks anything resembling military training, and she flaked in Auckland, and there are maybe a dozen common sense reasons to hire someone else under certain circumstances. Arthur himself is a serviceable architect and--
“Don’t overthink it,” Eames says. “We like you.”
“Thanks,” Ariadne replies, and they finish their cereal in silence.
Eames goes upstairs when he’s done, and Ariadne flops across the couch and flips through the old issues of National Geographic on the coffee table. When Eames returns, Arthur’s with him, and she glances between the two of them.
“What are we thinking for architecture?” she asks. “Something to jog memories? Or I was thinking maybe a bank, since we’re looking for information about a safe deposit box.”
“I have some pictures of the mark’s childhood home,” Arthur says. “But the bank could work, too.”
“Well, don’t hold out on me,” Ariadne says. “Give me the photos, Arthur.”
“Talking shop already,” Eames says, shaking his head. “And I thought we were going to watch a movie.”
“We are going to watch a movie,” Arthur intones, settling on the couch next to Ariadne. “I’ll give you the pictures later.”
Eames fiddles with a laptop, and Ariadne looks between the two of them, wondering if this is actually a job or just an excuse to sit around a house in New Mexico full of dust and scorpions and mouse shit. The pot and the movie suggest the latter, but the fact that the house is full of dust and scorpions and mouse shit suggests the former.
It might not be worth pursuing. Ariadne edges into the couch’s elbow, and Eames sits down between her and Arthur, and they watch the movie. The architecture can wait until morning. The architecture will wait until morning, truthfully, and it does--she starts the mazes the next day, spreads them out on the floor in the living room while Arthur and Eames are out.
Two days later, they’re invited to have dinner with the mark.
“Does this happen often?” Ariadne asks. “Meals with marks?”
“No,” Arthur says.
“But it makes my job much easier,” Eames contributes. He’s doing something at the sink that might be washing dishes, but most of the water is on the counter, spilling over onto the floor.
“We can only do it because the mark will forget,” Arthur adds.
“What if she doesn’t?” Ariadne asks, and Eames laughs.
“Hope she doesn’t,” Eames says.
They wear neat, nonthreatening clothes to dinner, and it makes Ariadne feel like maybe her job might actually be neat and nonthreatening. She’s just an architect, or she would be if she had ever bothered to finish her degree. But that had seemed foolish, when she had work elsewhere.
Even so, all she does is fiddle with models.
The mark, Abigail Barton, is an elderly woman with leathered skin, brown eyes turned down at the corners. She watches all of them, and asks her husband, James, who they were periodically. She asks James who he is, too. She asks Ariadne which of these young men she’s with, and Ariadne almost says both before she says neither.
Ariadne is terrible at guessing ages, she would lose so much money if she worked for the fair, but the husband’s a younger old than his wife. He’s terrifically polite, constantly touching their elbows and asking if they need anything else, but Ariadne doesn’t like him at all.
They make small talk through three courses, and when they’re driving home in the sick colored rental car Ariadne doesn’t ask about James. She wants to, she just--doesn’t.
“How’d you like that?” Eames asks.
“The tomato bisque was good,” Ariadne replies, and presses her head against the window.
Arthur is driving and Eames is flipping through stations on the radio and stopping on the country ones until ads start, and this isn’t their fault, really, and she trusts them, but she does this to herself--wedges herself into people’s business. Maybe she should stop. She did that with Cobb, and she’s not even sure what that got her.
Memories of Mal, that’s what it got her. And maybe it helped the job, but she’s not even sure about that.
She trusts Arthur and Eames. She doesn’t trust Miller’s husband. But she’s running on something visceral, something strange, and she doesn’t want to try to explain it right now, because it’s not something she saw clearly on the surface, it is maybe complete nonsense developed from bad past experiences mulled together. There was some guy from high school, her sister’s deadbeat ex-husband.
“What’s in the safe deposit box?” she asks, and Eames meets her eyes in the rearview mirror for a moment.
“Does it matter?” he asks, and Ariadne suspects he’s remembering Auckland.
“I can’t confirm,” Arthur says. “But James says it’s something he gave her a long time ago. A piece of jewelry.”
“He won’t tell you anything else?” Ariadne asks, and she feels her brow wrinkling.
“No,” Eames interjects. “I told him it would help, but.”
“I don’t think he’s taking advantage,” Arthur says. “They’ve been married for sixty-five years, Ariadne. I have their marriage license.”
Ariadne hums noncommittally, and Eames catches her eyes in the rearview mirror again and shakes his head. She makes a face that might read as innocent on another planet, but here--well, Eames laughs at her.
Arthur stops somewhere to pick up tamales on the way back, returns to the car muttering in Spanish and carrying a paper bag.
“Still can’t cook?” Ariadne asks, and Eames snorts.
“What do you think?” he mutters, and Arthur gives him an elbow to the ribs before starting the car.
The tamales are good, soft cornmeal outers with the filling all grease and spice, and they peel them out of their foil wrappers and their corn husks by turn. There are tacos as well, messy ones in small round tortillas, and the three of them eat together at the kitchen table.
“Your cooking’s improved, Arthur,” Ariadne says around a mouthful of food.
“Thank you,” he says dryly. “Especially given Eames’ comments in the car.”
“You know I appreciate you, Arthur,” Eames says, squeezing his shoulder and then leaving his arm draped around Arthur’s back.
“You two,” Ariadne says, shaking her head. “Eames, you owe me hardcore.”
“So you’re taking credit for Arthur’s overwhelming attraction to me?” Eames asks.
“I’m taking some credit for the fact that Arthur stopped running away,” Ariadne replies.
Arthur frowns at her, and Eames grins.
“What about you?” Arthur asks. “You let your lease run out. Where are you living?”
“Here,” Ariadne says. “For now.”
“Arthur’s not the best person to emulate,” Eames contributes. “No offense, darling.”
“He’s right,” Arthur adds.
“I got sick of it,” Ariadne says. “I was just there because I thought it’d be the opposite of Indiana.”
“So where next?” Eames asks.
“I was thinking my scarves would be well suited to Seattle,” Ariadne says, trying to sound bright.
“You could do better,” Eames says. “Amsterdam? Moscow? Seoul?”
“I’m terrible with languages,” Ariadne replies. “That was the other problem with Paris. Which movie, tonight?”
They let it slide, after that, and Ariadne’s silently grateful. Because she’s not like Arthur, even though she understands that it might look that way given the circumstances. She left Indiana in the first place was because she wanted something that wasn’t there, and it wasn’t in Paris, either, so now she’s going to try another place. She’ll take out another lease in another city, and figure it out. She’s not going to job hop. She’s not going to cross borders in car trunks.
The next morning she sleeps in, and when she wakes up Arthur and Eames are gone already, and she eats cereal, and makes a grocery list for when they get back. Because all they have is cereal, no milk, leftover tamales. And they need mouse traps, because mouse droppings are disgusting.
Neither Arthur nor Eames have returned by lunch, and so Ariadne spends most of the day working on models, and eating cereal. Arthur shows up in the late afternoon, and Ariadne’s sitting on the floor watching the scorpion in the corner of the living room and trying to make a decision.
“Aren’t scorpions nocturnal?” she asks, and Arthur looks down at her, and she points into the corner.
“Maybe it’s sleeping?” he offers. “Do you want me to kill it?”
“I can kill my own insects,” she replies, and Arthur sits down on the couch, setting his suitcase beside him.
“Why did you leave Paris?” he asks.
“I just didn’t fit,” she replies. “Why couldn’t you sit still?”
“I like moving,” he says.
“Still?” she asks, and Arthur shrugs.
“Job’s rough, if you don’t,” he says.
“So where should I try next?” she asks him, and Arthur grins.
“I’ll see if I can think of anything.”
“Want to see the architecture?”
They talk through the level, which moves from Abigail’s childhood home into banks of safe deposit boxes and back again, and then they leave a note for Eames and go to the Safeway.
“So are you going to cook for us?” Arthur asks. He’s pushing the cart and he looks like Arthur pushing a grocery cart, which is a strangely entertaining image.
“I’m just going to make sure we have something to eat,” Ariadne says. “Other than dry Froot Loops.”
“Eames bought those,” Arthur replies, sounding disgruntled.
When they get back, Eames is there, eating the rest of the cereal out of the box.
“I don’t know why you thought we needed to go grocery shopping,” he says.
“I’ll cook you eggs tomorrow,” Ariadne offers.
“If you wake up on time,” he counters.
“How’s James Barton doing?” Ariadne asks.
“Early to bed, early to rise,” Eames says.
“Is it weird, to follow someone who knows he’s being tailed?” Ariadne asks.
“Sometimes you wonder,” he replies.
“But Eames is that good,” Arthur says, and he manages to make it sound not complimentary at all.
Eames just grins, and Ariadne puts a pot of rice on the stove. Twenty minutes later, she burns it, and eats it anyway.
Eames shares his cereal with Arthur.
The job’s in a week, and Ariadne’s scraping burnt rice out of the bottom of a pot with a spoon, and she still doesn’t trust James Barton but she’s going to trust Arthur and Eames on this one. Because she said she trusted them. Because James Barton is an eldery man who wants to access his senile wife’s safe deposit box, and maybe it’s just that.
“Will James be there for the job?” Ariadne asks anyway, crunching rice.
“It’s not going to be a problem,” Eames says.
“Why not?” Ariadne says. “Just tell me why you know it’s not a problem, and I’ll shut up.”
“Ariadne--” Eames starts.
“Ariadne,” Arthur says, cutting him off. “We think it’s not going to be a problem the same way you think it is.”
Ariadne sighs.
“I didn’t take you for a gambler.”
“I know it’s not going to be a problem,” Arthur says, looking at her. “It’s not going to be a problem.”
Ariadne puts the pot in the sink to soak, goes upstairs, lies flat on her bed, on top of her blankets. She’s not sure if she’d feel more respected or less if she worked with a different team, people who weren’t Arthur and Eames, because she understands empirically that she’s young, and new to dream sharing. She just wants an explanation. She just wants it to be clear, and safe, which is--
Not this job.
Ariadne was on the team that performed fucking inception, and she’s worried about an elderly man.
She goes to sleep.
She dreams about Mal, and a train, jumbled together with the lyrics to a Tom Waits song her father used to listen to. Mal wakes her up. Mal says, “you’re waiting for a train--a train can take you away from here, but a train can’t bring you home--you can’t know for sure. It doesn’t matter.”
When she wakes up, it’s because someone’s knocking at the door. It’s Eames.
“Good morning,” she says, blinking.
“About yesterday--” he starts, and she shakes her head.
“I was pretending dreamsharing was a different kind of job,” she says. “Tell me about Mal.”
“I don’t actually know that much about Mal, Ari,” Eames says.
“Tell me that if I trust you and Arthur, I’m not going to end up like her,” Ariadne says, looking at him. “Tell me that.”
“Fuck, Ariadne,” Eames whispers, putting his hands on her shoulders. “Arthur said you trusted us.”
“Yeah,” she mutters. “But maybe I’m young.”
And then he hugs her, fierce and tight. He smells like Arthur’s cologne.
“You aren’t,” he says. “You’re just right, and you’re the best damn architect I know, and you’re going to make me eggs for breakfast.”
“Shut up, you” she mumbles, bracing her arms against his chest to push them apart.
Then they go downstairs, and she makes eggs. Arthur appears from somewhere eventually, so she makes him eggs as well, and promises french toast tomorrow against her better judgment.
She hopes they understand the food means thank you, because there are others thing that could be said.
The thing about Mal, and Ariadne, is that Ariadne has never wanted to give control of herself over to someone else. The idea of someone planting a seed in her mind without being able to reject it--there’s that. But there’s also the idea of being not herself, of being something in someone else’s mind that’s her image and her words and their subconscious understanding of her, a murky stew things she’s not, not really.
Ariadne wants to hold onto herself. It’s part pride and part something else, part stupid fear, but it’s the same way she pulls away from her parents because their expectations chafed, left Paris because it didn’t fit. She’s knows herself, as well as she knows anything, and she doesn’t want that to slip away.
Putting it like that makes her wonder about Abigail Barton.
Before they perform the extraction Abigail is nervous and wide-eyed, asking who they are, asking where she is. They’ve all donned scrubs and Eames keeps explaining how they’re nurses, here to take care of her, and she blinks at them and says, “oh,” very quietly, and then tells a story they’ve already heard, using the same words.
They go under. It’s easier than going to sleep under normal circumstances, as easy as slipping underwater.
When Ariadne opens her eyes in the dream, everything’s blurred. It takes her a few blinks to realize that’s just how it is, how it’s going to be.
Eames, as James Barton, is with the mark. Arthur catches Ariadne’s eye, and they go.
As they move through the dream the architecture eventually comes into focus, pulling together into something coherent, or at least visible. There are the dark blurred spots from Eames’ dream, and Ariadne tries to avoid looking at them. Ariadne avoids looking at the projections, too--they limp, and those with whole bodies have blank faces, and those with perfect faces are missing limbs. Ariadne sees one woman with a blank face whose ribcage pierces her skin, and it makes her think of a turtle, the way their shells are an extension of their ribs.
They find the safe deposit boxes, find the one whose number aligns with the mark’s actual safe deposit box.
“It’s empty,” Ariadne says, glancing at Arthur.
“Stay here,” he says. “It might fill, if Eames can jog Abigail’s memory.”
And then Arthur disappears into the maze, and Ariadne’s left to wait. She leaves Abigail’s box open, and looks at the other boxes, which run in no particularly order. They might have run in order when they arrived, but now the numbers are off.
Which probably means something.
Ariadne knows some things about Abigail Barton; not much. She was an art dealer in Santa Fe. She is married to James Barton. She grew up with horses.
The numbers on the safe deposit boxes shift again, going blurry and fading to blank, and then they come back as words.
This dream makes Ariadne dizzy, in a way they usually don’t. She wants to catch it with her mind and hold it steady, make the safe deposit boxes hold their numbers, and the turtle woman’s ribs reenter her skin.
But that isn’t what the dream is for. It’s not Ariadne’s dream, it’s Abigail, and Ariadne slumps down to the floor and lets Abigail take over, in a swirl of blurriness and nonsense.
The safe deposit boxes flicker momentarily. The number on Abigail’s box changes, and then there’s an address, and then it changes again.
Ariadne thinks the extraction might be done, and when the kick comes she gives Arthur and Ariadne the number and the address, and when they bring Abigail home Arthur gives the information to James Barton.
And then it’s done, so quickly. The job is done, and it wasn’t a problem, and Ariadne needs to figure out where she’s going next.
They drive back to the house, Arthur and Eames in the front and Ariadne in the back. Everyone’s very quiet, and Ariadne wants nothing so much as to go to sleep, but when they reach the house Eames insists on watching a movie, some western he got at the rental store, and they all fall asleep on the couch midway through, when everyone’s riding through the desert on horseback.
Ariadne wakes up with her head pressed between Eames’ back and the couch, and Eames’ arm is wrapped around Arthur’s waist, and all three of their legs are entangled, and Ariadne’s not even sure how they all fit.
She goes back to sleep, and wakes again to someone nudging her.
“What’s for breakfast?” Eames asks, and she blinks up at him.
“What do you guys do without me?”
“Eat cereal,” Eames says.
“Eames cooks,” Arthur says, coming up from behind. “He’s just being lazy.”
“And taking advantage of me?” Ariadne says. “I hate you both.”
She tries to bury her head in the couch, but it smells like must and she’s hungry and not sure when Arthur and Eames intend to leave, so she may as well make breakfast.
“Where should I move?” Ariadne asks Arthur when shes cooking the box hashbrowns.
“I’ve actually drawn up a list,” Arthur says, and then he goes upstairs and reappears with an actual sheet of paper, folded triplicate.
“I helped,” Eames contributes from the couch.
“Thanks,” Ariadne says, and sets the paper on the counter while she finishes the eggs.
She opens the paper later, when Eames and Arthur are doing the dishes and she’s sitting on the couch.
Auckland’s somewhere in the middle, between Yellowknife and Zagreb. It actually reads like a list of every city Eames and Arthur have ever been, but it’s something.
“Auckland,” she says, walking back over to the sink. “They speak English there.”
“Sophie Albert is based in Auckland,” Arthur offers.
Ariadne’s there within the week, with immigration papers courtesy of Arthur, and she rents a shoebox of a flat and spends a lot of time sitting on benches and looking at the ocean.
She meets up with Sophie Albert over curry, sitting at a table on the sidewalk while people bustle past, and suddenly Ariadne is going with Sophie to Hong Kong, designing a corporate level for a simple single-level extraction, working with Sophie and a man called Goran. They don’t have a forger, but the job is simple enough even for Ariadne, it goes off without a hitch, she returns to Auckland and sleeps for a day.
She doesn’t miss Arthur and Eames, except sometimes she does; Goran had asked her if she was the girl who was working with them, and if his eyes weren’t so opaque she might’ve asked him the same. Was she the girl who had been working with them? Did that mean anything?
She knew she should tell Goran she wasn’t a girl, she was old enough, but it didn’t seem worth it. She and Sophie could take him, anyway.
She wonders if she should’ve told Goran that she wasn’t having sex with them, she was just working with them, but maybe that would be presumptuous.
When she wakes up after getting back from Auckland, her apartment smells like eggs and bacon, and Eames is in the kitchen, cooking.
Arthur’s there, too.
“Congratulations on Hong Kong,” Arthur says, and Ariadne stares at him.
“You need to teach me to be paranoid as hell,” she says. “Because I have a feeling waking up with strange people in my apartment isn’t how it’s supposed to go.”
“We aren’t strangers, Ari,” Eames says.
“Is my door okay?” she asks.
“Of course,” Arthur replies, looking offended.
“Aren’t I supposed to come out waving a gun and shouting?” she says, and Eames grins.
“No,” he says. “That’s Arthur.”
“I wouldn’t shout,” Arthur replies. “I’d just shoot.”
Ariadne sits down the table and looks between the two of them, Eames frying eggs shirtless, Arthur with his hands on the table.
“Where’s your shirt?” she asks, and Eames shrugs.
“You didn’t have an apron.”
“Why are you here?” she asks, and Arthur smiles, not sardonic at all.
“Can’t we visit our friend?”
“You live in Mombasa,” she says.
“Yeah--” Eames says. “About that.”
“You don’t live in Mombasa?”
“Arthur thought it was too warm,” Eames says.
“But you’re from Hawaii,” Ariadne says, and Arthur scowls.
“Low blow, Ari,” Eames says, sliding eggs and bacon onto plates and then sitting down. “Anyway, how do you like Auckland?”
Ariadne shrugs.
“Because we were going to try Reykjavik,” Eames continues. “And we were thinking we could use a flatmate.”
Ariadne hadn’t expected to fit between Arthur and Eames; not because the pair fits together perfectly by any stretch of the imagination, but because three’s a crowd.
But it turns out it’s rather less than a crowd, and that when they expand their partnership into a team it makes about as much sense as anything else. And if the places don’t always fit, at least they fit together.
They leave the deposit on Ariadne’s Auckland flat and fly out that night.