reliquary

[wldnst]

.reliquary
ariadne remembers too much. yusuf doesn't remember enough. written for this prompt.
pg . 5284 words



I miss every piece of my dead. Every piece is stacked high like cordwood within me, and my heart, both sides and all four parts, is their reliquary.

-By-And-By, Amy Bloom

At night in Paris, Ariadne rides her bicycle down empty streets until her feet are a blur, quick and invisible in the night. It’s the best thing; it’s the only time her worries completely drain away, and she’s comfortable just existing, complete in a place between the past and the future, indebted to neither.

But bicycles are hard to get on planes, which maybe explains the graffiti and maybe doesn’t, but it starts when she’s away, when her bicycle is locked up in her apartment and she’s on a job.

They’re in Chicago, doing something corporate. Which makes it sound like she doesn’t know the details of the job, which is--false, patently. But their extractor, Julius (“as in Caesar,” he tells them, seriously), is as stiff and corporate as the work, and likes to keep their architecture the same. It’s the first time since she’s entered dream sharing that it hasn’t pushed her, and it makes her itch in the back of her knees, like she needs to be moving.

She starts watching trains at night, in lieu of bicycling. Their warehouse is near a vast expanse of tracks, a freight yard, maybe, although Ariadne’s not entirely sure.

She watches the trains at night, the smooth slide of their lights and the rumble of their wheels, and then she starts watching graffiti, instead. The freighters have nearly all been tagged, and Ariadne finds she likes it--chemically bright colors, cryptic phrases. Mostly she likes the fact that the tags might be from any of the towns strung along the train tracks, from some flat state directly to the west or east or from further afield, the mountains, one of the coasts. All the tags were thrown up in some particular place at some particular time, and now they’re crossing tracks in time and space, here, for a moment, while she stands witness.

She starts painting graffiti in her dreams when they’re preparing for the job. The dull architecture Julius insists on is brightened by sharp jolts of color, and when he complains Ariadne tells him that it will make it more authentic, and she repeats pieces to ensure they can’t be used as landmarks in the maze. The corners of his mouth move towards his chin, but he apparently can’t think of a good reason to fight her on this one.

It keeps her happy, until it doesn’t.

So Ariadne buys her first can of spray paint at the hardware store, and doodles a messy maze on the side of one of the freighters that night, because it’s the only thing she can think of. She doesn’t sign it. It doesn’t look like a tag proper, and as a maze it’s too easy to solve, but it’s satisfying.

She goes back nightly for a week, honing her skills on rotating canvases. Ariadne finds she prefers to work in red; using one color of paint saves her the trouble of switching. It saves money, too, because even though she has funds now her mind is still stuck on grad school, and she doesn’t know what to do with wealth. The money she has doesn’t seem to exist in the realm of reality, and instead accumulates as numbers on slips of paper, strange and foreign to her.

The architecture for the job is nearly done, but she goes to the warehouse most days, anyway, tries to ignore Julius and discusses new developments with Eames, to make sure her architecture is still--relevant, for lack of a better word.

The job’s straightforward enough, developments few and minor. Julius persists in being Julius. Their pointman, Ella, is on the phone most of the time, then consulting with Julius and issuing orders to the peons.

“Why do you work with them?” Ariadne asks Eames, once.

“Job’s a job,” he tells her. “Pays well.”

They’ll be running it in two weeks.

Ariadne switches from mazes to landscapes, from train cars to walls. She knows there’s questionable legality, here, but since inception everything’s blurred, and there are just things she likes to do and other things, things she doesn’t particularly care for.

She likes creating things, likes dreaming, likes trains, likes the heavy darkness of the night, lightened and lifted by intermittent street lamps. Being awake at night is better than sleeping, now that her dreams are sparse and shrouded.

So that explains the graffiti, in a very small way. It doesn’t seem like much more than way to keep herself busy, until Eames catches Ariadne when she’s leaving the warehouse one evening.

“Drinks, tonight?” he says. “Yusuf’s in town.”

“Yusuf,” Ariadne repeats.

“I told you about this, yeah?” Eames asks. “Some sort of chemistry conference, at the University.”

“Yusuf?” Ariadne says, because in her memory he didn’t seem--

“He’s always been involved with research,” Eames says. “The money just freed up his time a bit.”

So they go for drinks, the three of them. It’s mostly Eames and Yusuf reminiscing about Mombasa, people they know and places they’ve been, and Ariadne lets their words slide over her. It’s comfortable, surprisingly so, but in her head she’s painting walls. There’s a place, an abandoned garage, on the west side of town. She’s saving that one.

“Ariadne,” someone says--Eames, she realizes, when she shakes herself awake.

“What have you been up to?” Yusuf is asking her.

“Sorry,” she says, looking between the pair of them, who are looking at her. “I’m finishing school, you know? In Paris. It’s--”

“School,” Yusuf interjects, lips quirking.

“It’s exactly like school,” she tells him, grinning back. “Precisely. What’s it like, being a proper chemist now?”

“Proper,” Eames guffaws, and slaps Yusuf on the back. “Yusuf’s hardly proper.”

“I just have time, now,” Yusuf says. “And besides, this is a good conference. On chemistry and memory.”

“He still doesn’t publish,” Eames adds, then waves his hand towards Yusuf’s head. “Paranoid.”

“Good cause,” Yusuf counters. “I can do a fat lot more than the other dumbasses in this business.”

“Been like this,” Eames says. “Vain. Ever since inception.”

“Shut up,” Yusuf says easily. “You put up with this, Ariadne? He’s one of the prize dumbasses in this business.”

“Blue ribbon,” Eames says.

“Huh,” Ariadne says, looking between them. “Good to see you again, Yusuf, I need to--go. I just thought of something for the dream.”

“Right,” Yusuf says, waving his fingers, and Eames raises an eyebrow.

Ariadne goes to her room, and gets her paint.

“Working on the dream level?” Eames asks her the next morning.

“That was a lie,” Ariadne says, because she can’t think of a better lie to cover with.

“So you were--”

“Not your business,” she says.

“Secrets,” he says, and makes a disapproving noise.

“Not big ones,” she offers, and then Julius decides he needs to talk at them.

She knows Eames is watching her, after that.

“Drinks tonight?” Eames asks her after work.

“Sure,” she says. “Of course.”

And so it’s the three of them again, at a different bar--one with pictures of the White Sox on the walls and tiny, dark booths. Someone apparently feels guilty for last time, because Yusuf and Eames make a point of asking her questions and explaining their in jokes to her, and Ariadne doesn’t have it in her to tell them that it’s nothing to do with them, she wasn’t trying to ditch them, there are just things she likes and things she doesn’t particularly care for.

Feigning interest--she doesn’t particularly care for feigned interest, either giving or receiving.

But she lets the conversation wrap around her. There’s a certain fraternity to the inception team, since the end of it, and she’s appreciated it; Arthur’s curt, peculiar voicemail messages, Cobb’s long-winded, illegible letters, wrapped up with drawings by Pippa and James, and Eames and Yusuf, here, buying her pints. Not to mention Saito, the only person who could have possibly been behind the new drafting table that appeared at her Paris apartment a month after she got back from California.

She’s polite this time, makes no excuses and stays until they’re all pleasantly tipsy.

“You should come by,” Yusuf says, waving an arm. “Both of you. U of C’s nice.”

“You’re staying in a dorm room,” Eames says, and snorts with laughter. “Nice.”

“I’ll call,” Yusuf adds, extending his thumb and pinkie and holding the feigned phone up to his ear, and Ariadne and Eames take the El back to the warehouse, rattling along the tracks in an empty car.

The next night, Ariadne paints another landscape, gracious hills and spartan trees. It looks like somewhere she’s never been. She paints a girl on a bicycle, passing through. She looks at it, for a moment and then for a little longer, and then she leaves it.

It’s a message in a bottle, a beautiful thing she created that she can’t keep. It’s as ephemeral as dream architecture, but by contrast this is real, physical and tangible in a way the things she makes in dreams aren’t.

“Yusuf’s place?” Eames asks, in the morning, so they go there in the evening.

He is in a dorm room. It has a bulletin board, and there are pictures pinned up--little glossy ones, of walls. Graffiti.

One of the pieces photographed is done entirely in red.

“I like street art,” Yusuf says, when he notices she’s looking.

“Why?” Ariadne asks.

Yusuf shrugs.

“C’mon, let’s go on a tour,” he says, instead of answering.

The campus is big, dark buildings, green vines. It looks like it’s trying to be someplace else.

“America,” Eames says. “It’s a sorry imitation.”

Ariadne punches him lightly in the arm, but otherwise lets it slide. She wants to ask Yusuf about the graffiti--street art--but doesn’t want anyone to bring up the splash of red paint on the knee of her jeans.

“Street art,” Yusuf says, when they’re walking back. “It’s egalitarian. Anyone can make it, anyone can view it. It’s like the artist is hiding in plain sight.”

“He likes that it’s illegal,” Eames says.

“It is kind of badass,” Yusuf adds.

“There’s usually good stuff in the train yards,” Ariadne says. “I can take you.”

“I’m colorblind,” Eames says to excuse himself when they invite him along.

Yusuf is quiet, mostly, after they leave Eames at the warehouse. If Yusuf were younger, Ariadne would say he might be shy. As it is--he’s quiet, suddenly and unexpectedly, but he looks at the trains very seriously, and after they hop the fence he walks quietly through the trains and looks at them each intently, pointing out details Ariadne had overlooked--the intricately curving letters of a particular tag, the way one resembles a face.

They get chased off the freight yard eventually, because it’s daylight and people are around, conductors or something. Ariadne lies an apology, and Yusuf grins at her out the corners of his eyes.

“Here,” he says when they’re at the warehouse. “Give me your mobile number.”

“What?” she asks.

“I’m leaving tomorrow. I’ll text you pictures,” he says, fishing a phone out of his pocket. “Of street art.”

Ariadne doesn’t actually expect him to do it, but then she gets them. The first one’s titled banksy, someone in an orange vest removing cave art, and then there’s one from Mombasa, a sprawling tag that Ariadne can’t actually read, but the colors are bright and whirling. She starts sending him pictures back; from Chicago, Los Angeles when she visits the Cobbs, Paris when she returns for the semester, London when she goes there to visit her sister, Mexico City when she’s there on a job during winter break. Sometimes she sends murals, too, and to those Yusuf always returns pictures of his cat titled grumpy.

Her life becomes those snapshots, taken with a phone and then sent to Mombasa via means she doesn’t entirely understand. With the Cobb she takes a picture of one of Shepard Fairey’s pieces, decides she doesn’t like stencils, and tries to deal with her and Dom’s weird relationship of mutual concern--Ariadne worried that Dom can’t handle the children, Dom guilty for pulling Ariadne into a business that’s unsafe and illegal.

Ariadne doesn’t mind that, really.

In Paris she finds graffiti on old buildings, places where the bold paint seems incongruous, and Miles pulls her aside and asks her if she accepted his son-in-law’s proposition, almost apologetically, and she wants to take him by the shoulders at tell him it’s okay, she can follow her red thread out, Cobb was so much less threatening than the minotaur. Mexico City is a whirl of color, graffiti and life and brightness and a job that goes off like fireworks.

And then it’s school again, and Paris, riding her bike on streets that are icy in the mornings. She goes back to the graffiti she photographed for Yusuf to check on it, and then she starts painting again. She picks locations she won’t feel guilty for adulterating; bad architecture, buildings slated for demolition. When her favorite cafe closes she paints the windows bright with an imitation of life, people inside, loaves of bread and cups of coffee. Someone smashes the window and leaves it all shattered glass on the sidewalk and a tiny part of her wants to cry.

But graffiti is temporary. She knew that, all along. She sees her paintings demolished and wiped off walls, and she always leaves the fragments on the ground and moves on--it’s refreshing, in a way, because she paints her memories and she’s always remembered too much, things she tries to forget.

Something similar happens when she graduates, life smashed apart and left on the ground, and Ariadne moving on. She decides to stay in Paris, because she can, because it’s as central as anything and she likes her apartment and her bicycle. Her parents smile wanly through the graduation ceremony and then ask her if she’s sure that’s a good idea.

She says yes, she’s sure. They’re walking down the sidewalk, and Ariadne runs her fingers along a wall painted red.

The next job she takes is in Nairobi. When she sends Yusuf a picture of wall painted with bold stripes, he texts her to say she should stop in Mombasa before she leaves the country. She looks at the text for a few minutes before deciding why the hell not, and then she changes her flight.

Yusuf’s place is not what she expected it to be. He lives in a vast, walled house outside of the city, and more of the rooms are superfluous than not. The superfluous rooms are left empty: bare walls and floors, locked doors.

“Why?” Ariadne asks, when she’s standing in the middle of the empty room adjacent to the living room. Her voice echoes off the bare walls,

“I always wanted a big house,” Yusuf says, and Ariadne’s not sure if that’s a good explanation or no explanation at all, but she takes it.

She spends the night, and it’s mostly uneventful--Yusuf is quiet, again, and when they talk they talk about graffiti.

“Do you ever want to paint it?” she asks him, and Yusuf shakes his head slowly.

“Oh, no,” he says. “I’m terrible at that sort of thing.”

He doesn’t return the question. Ariadne’s not sure whether or not she would have lied, if he had.

She goes back to Paris, paints more. Occasionally she hears people discussing the artist who paints all in red, and she’ll allow herself a small smile, but she keeps the secret close to her chest, and she never sends Yusuf pictures of her own work.

They keep exchanging pictures, though, at a sort of irregular rate. She goes to Krakow and sends him pictures every other day. She’s back in Paris and doesn’t send him anything for a month. She has a job in Lima and sends him five snapshots in three days.

Yusuf, for his part, remains steady: always in Mombasa, pictures at least once a week. It becomes like a clock Ariadne can set her life to, when the weeks and days run into a blur from her intermittently hectic work schedule.

And then they stop coming. After two weeks, she calls Eames. She skirts the issue for half the conversation, and then is ashamed of herself for doing so, and asks directly.

“Do you know what Yusuf’s doing?”

“Right now?” Eames asks.

“I just haven’t heard from him for a couple weeks, and I was wondering--”

“He left for a job last week,” Eames says. “Something in in the Czech Republic. He’s probably just been busy.”

On the third week, Ariadne starts making other calls. She has contacts, now. Ella tells her Yusuf was working with Markus Trent, and so then she calls Timothy Barber.

It takes three days and a threat from Arthur to get him to return her calls.

“Job went off, a week in,” Barber says. “They’re all fine, though. I think they’re hiding somewhere in Serbia.”

Ariadne calls Eames to let him know.

“Why’s Yusuf doing field work, anyway?” she says. “I thought he retired on the profits from the inception job.”

“Hell if I know,” he replies, and Ariadne can hear a long exhalation of breath. “Yusuf does what he likes.”

Ariadne doesn’t actually know much about Yusuf, except that he likes graffiti and lives in a big house outside Mombasa, owns a shop in the city. She’s not sure if she wants to know, now; something in Eames’ voice suggests layers of unknowns, layers one atop another like paint.

She sends Yusuf a picture of walls of peeling paint, not graffiti at all, and leaves it at that.

After two more weeks, she goes to Serbia. Barber told her where the team probably was, because Trent had certain places where he liked to lay low, and Barber thought they were at a hostel in Belgrade. She finds Kyra, who had been running point, first--Ariadne tails her back from the hostel to a bakery, and then stands behind her in line.

“I know you’re there,” Kyra says without turning around. “And I have a gun. I don’t know why architects always think they’re smarter than everyone else.”

“I don’t--”

“Shut up,” Kyra says mildly. “What do you want?”

“I’m looking for Yusuf,” Ariadne says, and then Kyra turns around.

“Yusuf,” she repeats. “He split.”

“And you guys didn’t split?” Ariadne asks, glancing around.

“He split,” Kyra hisses. “When we found out he was being paid by both sides. Thought he could make a little extra money, yeah?”

“By doing what?” Ariadne asks. “What sort of thing is a chemist going to pull? Bad Somnacin?”

Kyra’s glare turns withering.

“You think Yusuf was always a chemist?”

And yeah, actually, Ariadne had kind of thought that. She considers asking, but Kyra’s turned towards the baker, and Ariadne senses that their conversation is over.

She twists it around in her head. Yusuf has always been the chemist to her, complete in that identity. She’s not sure what to do with him if he has another identity, another role within the team. He seems to lack the compulsive watchfulness necessary for pointman, or the extractor’s need to maintain control of the entire team.

Which leaves forger and architect, the two positions that make Ariadne the most uncomfortable to project Yusuf into. Arthur, she knew, had moved from architect to pointman--a natural progression, given his skills. But there was something disconcerting about seeing Yusuf as an architect, and there was something worrisome about a forger who didn’t identify himself as such.

She wants to ask Yusuf himself, but she has no idea where he’d be, so she lets the idea buzz around the back of her head. She paints the idea--walls covered with the same person in different silhouettes, different shapes. She’s not sure if it’s clear to passerbys, but she knows what she’s depicting, and that’s what counts.

It’s at night, when she’s painting, when someone calls the police on her. Maybe the only surprise is that it hasn’t happened sooner.

She runs across town, down an alleyway, rides her bike maniacally through the streets back to her apartment, and when she gets there she breaths and remembers something Yusuf said about graffiti artists hiding in plain sight.

That night, Ariadne books a flight to Mombasa, the cheapest one she can find.

Of course Yusuf is at his house.

“It’s been awhile since I’ve heard from you,” Ariadne says when Yusuf opens the door.

“I had to lie low for some time,” he says.

“So,” she says, and Yusuf looks at her. He still hasn’t opened the door entirely, and he’s wearing a loose, soft looking shirt and shorts, something you might wear to sleep in, though Ariadne isn’t entirely sure.

“Yes?” Yusuf asks, and Ariadne doesn’t even know what to say: “So, what did you do before you were a chemist, because I really want to know”, “So, why couldn’t you send me pictures of graffiti while you were lying low”, “So, did you really double-cross an entire team, and, if so, why.”

“Are you a trustworthy person?” she says.

“I don’t even know who I am,” Yusuf says, and that about answers every question she had, though she’s still floundering around the graffiti, and what that has to do with anything. Maybe it doesn’t matter, but if it didn’t matter Ariadne’s not sure where she followed it to its source.

She stays the night, sleeps on the floor in one of Yusuf’s empty rooms. Then she goes home. It seems the simplest of infinite possibilities, to go back to Paris and wrap herself in her own blankets, to make coffee in the morning and tea at night and eat bits of bread and cheese like a mouse.

It’s one of Cobb’s ridiculous letters that grants some small degree of clarity, with one line--

I heard you found out Yusuf used to be a forger. We were all different people once, he writes, a digression from comments about Pippa wanting to get her ears pierced.

Ask Miles about it, Cobb writes when she presses him, which is how Ariadne winds up at Miles’ office hours, sitting on a tiny chair next to a girl who’s crying about her grade on--something. Ariadne feels so much older than these people, like school was very long ago. She’s not particularly older. When Miles sees her, his eyes widen incrementally, and he looks older, worn and weary in all the wrong ways.

“Hi,” she says, shifting on her feet.

“Sit down,” Miles says.

She does. And he tells her things, more than she expected.

“You know I invented totems?” he asks, raising a brow, and Ariadne has to shake her head, because she’s realizing that she knows very little of the twisting history of dream sharing, the lore of various teams and how they developed, the small affiliations and enemies that have formed over the years.

“It started out as something for forgers,” Miles continues. “So they could remember who they were.”

Yusuf was a forger, then. One of the first, one of the finest. He had been a chemist involved with the company that developed Somnacin, and when he went under he morphed and shifted himself--small changes and then larger, until he could be anyone he please, in dreams. He sloughed off identities like skin, rotated through them, became one person and then another and another.

“He taught Eames,” Miles says. “They were partners, for awhile. Why have one forger when you could have two? More ways to snare the mark, you know.”

But Eames had a better hold on himself than Yusuf did, for whatever reason. Eames shifted because he could, while Yusuf shifted because he needed to--because he didn’t like being in his own skin. He started having trouble remembering who he was when he woke up, going for lengths of time in a veiled confusion where he wouldn’t answer to his own name.

“So I started giving forgers something they could hold on to,” Miles says. “To keep track of who they were.”

“And it worked?” Ariadne asks, and Miles shifts his shoulders subtly, yes and no together.

“Yusuf can tell you the rest, if he wants to.”

Ariadne doubts he wants to. She goes home and makes herself a cup of tea, and thinks about it.

Yusuf is quiet. Ariadne doesn’t know much about him. He lives in an empty house that’s too big for him.

Ariadne’s seen girls and women who think they can heal a man just by loving him, that somehow they’ll change him from the person he is into the person they want him to be through sheer willpower. It’s usually quietly painful to watch--two people surging against one another, running on contrary tides.

Ariadne doesn’t think she can fix Yusuf. But she’s always remembered too much, and if he doesn’t remember enough, maybe they can work something out.

She books another ticket to Mombasa, and knocks on Yusuf’s door.

“How much do you know?” he asks, and she shrugs, one shoulder up, one down.

“I want to paint your walls,” she says, and Yusuf lets her in.

So Ariadne asks Yusuf to tell her stories. They start slowly, with Yusuf’s most recent job, and then they move backwards--through inception, through a series of jobs prior, through the development of Yusuf’s business and his decision to focus exclusively on chemistry.

“I thought I could bring it back,” he says one day, when they’re sitting cross-legged in an empty room. “If I developed the right variation on Somnacin, I thought I could find the things I lost in dreams.”

“That’s what Cobb did,” Ariadne says, and they both think about it like she’s said something sage, even though it really isn’t--just a fact, about the way individuals strive for things. Ariadne follows her bliss, down whichever channels she pleases. But she’s young, and hasn’t lost much, and maybe holds on to things too tightly. So now she collects the things Yusuf wants to keep in the basket of her brain, and paints them on his walls.

She starts using colors, slowly incorporating them into her work. Memories Yusuf thinks are dreams are done in black and white, devoid of brightness. He remembers a childhood in a rambling house in England.

“Like a castle,” he says. “But my parents were ex-pats. And we we didn’t have money.”

Ariadne paints it, anyway--a little boy looking for secret passages, hiding in the bushes. She wants to ask Yusuf what he was running from, why he let these memories overtake his own. She wonders if he remembers.

She doesn’t ask. She remembers a time when she would’ve. When Cobb first recruited her, the questions spilled out in every direction, but now Ariadne’s learned to suppress them, because the answers are always more than she wants, strange answers that twist back on themselves and become more questions, the same questions over again.

“Why do you like graffiti?” Ariadne asks again.

“Because no one expects you to remember it,” he says.

It makes as much sense as anything.

The walls start to fill up, and Ariadne takes one of the blank rooms in the top of the house for her own, paints it deep red. The pair of them move around one another in the empty rooms, and footsteps still echo, but somehow Ariadne’s graffiti makes the rooms feel full, though it also makes it feel like they’re living with ghosts--the ghosts of Yusuf’s memories, and his dreams, and the people he forged before Ariadne knew anything about any of this. The ghosts of possibilities as to who he might be.

Ariadne doesn’t know how long it takes for the rooms to become anything cohesive. It feels like a long time--she leaves to do a job, one with Arthur in Antarctica, because the Americans were afraid some of the scientists were plotting something down there, inexplicably. Then she leaves to check on her apartment in Paris, make sure it’s still there, make sure her landlord will let her keep the lease. When she comes back Yusuf is still there, puttering through his lab notes, gathering stories to put on the walls.

It shouldn’t surprise her that Yusuf is still there, but somehow it does. Like maybe he’s tired of being forced to remember the things he’s forgotten, of trying to extract himself from an impossible tangle of identities.

Yusuf starts to tell new stories, ones Ariadne hasn’t heard before.

As Yusuf’s stories change, Ariadne starts painting over rooms, and the landscape of the house shifts and shifts again,

When Ariadne’s not painting, she goes downstairs, where Yusuf has his lab, and sits on one of the stools while Yusuf runs experiments.

“The other thing about chemistry,” Yusuf notes. “I know for sure I used to do it. I have all my old notes.”

“So you’re the chemist now,” Ariadne says. “But it’s still an identity you created. Kind of like a real world forgery.”

“What?” Yusuf says, and Ariadne grins at him.

“You could, you know, create any identity you like,” Ariadne says. “You could create new memories.”

“I have new memories,” Yusuf says. “Inception was new.”

Inception is painted in a room, Ariadne’s favorite and least favorite, all sharp angles and gradated colors, like a painting by Braque.

“You could make new memories that weren’t about finding your old ones, or escaping them,” Ariadne says. It’s the first time she’s thought of this. The first time it had occurred to her that maybe it doesn’t matter who Yusuf is, or was, that the memories he can’t hold in his head anymore aren’t as relevant as the decisions he’s made since.

“So, what, give up on the past?” Yusuf asks. “Live only for the future?”

“You already have a past,” Ariadne replies, and it clarifies before her eyes--she knows what she’s seeing, and she knows what to paint, and she knows what they need to do. “Your past is in trying to figure out your past. Your past is becoming the chemist.”

“I could paint something new,” Ariadne says.

So she does. She layers over the old walls the things they know are true: Yusuf’s shop, his experiments, the jobs he’s done as a chemist. She imitates the graffiti Yusuf likes, she paints Cobb and Arthur and Saito and Eames, she paints forgetting. She paints herself.

Ariadne avoided painting herself, when she was working on the streets, because it had seemed incriminating. And there was a degree to which, in painting Yusuf, she forgot about herself--about nights in Paris, about the mesh of her own memories, some true and some surely false, extrapolated from childhood dreams. Slowly entire rooms turn over to Ariadne, interspersed with the ones for Yusuf, and there’s a point where, in helping Yusuf forget, she allows herself to remember.

It makes perfect sense. Ariadne had thought they were complimentary in a vague sort of way, but she hadn’t realized that they had things to impart, one to the other. There’s an exchange happening here, clean and simple.

She paints over the walls in the red room and moves downstairs, into the room where Yusuf sleeps, where the walls are still blank.

“We’ll paint something new,” she says, pressing Yusuf’s thumb down into the nozzle of the spray can.