Wire Work

“Thus by lack of specificity regarding portion size am I slain. Or rather, left to starve. Incidentally, why couldn’t we have fought over breakfast? In their presence, one or both of us storming out in a huff... far less misdirection required.” She crosses her arms, leans back a bit.

The relax of posture lessens the physical anticipation that is building, inevitably, between them; the grace of it is for Myka a relief. Almost always, but especially today, she needs more runway than Helena does. “Because neither of uns can sell that, not when we’re in the same room and not actually fighting. And even this time, Pete accused me of a cover-up. Said it’s always worse than the crime.”

“Is it? What was the crime, then? Presumably not ‘misrepresenting ourselves to steal time.’”

“It should’ve been that; ‘steal time’ sounds more crime-y. But actually they went with wasting time. That’s what they worked around to, once they got over being disappointed we aren’t becoming jewel thieves.”

“Oh but we could—”

Myka cuts off that glee with something that is not exactly regret. “We could not.”

“Are you certain?” That’s a wheedle.

Charming, but: “We don’t need to.”

That occasions a not-quite-pouty jut of lower lip. “Well of course no one needs to become a jewel thief. Unless one has no other way of making a living, I suppose. Which would seem odd, wouldn’t it... surely there would be other career paths. Although it isn’t inconceivable one might be coerced onto the nefarious path.” She pulls up, like she knows it’s a dangerous verbal wander.

Myka’s been trying, lately, to acknowledge, then shift, those rather than ignore them (as she tended to do in the past, for fear of pain). She’s glad to be able to perform that shift now. “What if I were to coerce you onto a different path? ‘Coerce’ loosely defined.”

“I believe you have done, haven’t you? But—as Pete would say, ‘back up’—why were jewel thieves invited to the party?”

Here we go. “Because of diamonds.”

“What about them?”

“Their metaphorical utility. The extent of it.”

“Ah. Our ‘argument,’ I presume? We do disagree about the most stimulating topics... diamonds as metaphors.” Helena shakes her head, an exaggeration of amazement, as that sly smile once again steals over her face.

“Their formation more than themselves,” Myka says, for accuracy... well. Accuracy only in the sense of keeping her stories straight.

“The production of the gem via pressure?”

I know something you don’t. It’s always a surprise. “Except that isn’t scientifically accurate.”

“Isn’t it?”

The avidity again. Myka would like to imagine she’ll “blow her mind” as Pete would have it, leading not to Helena being mad at her but grateful for new knowledge. And so: “I won’t go into detail, but it has to do with crystallization. Table salt–esque, but carbon in the mantle. From the mantle.”

“Precipitation? Distillation? More common, as processes... thus perhaps indeed of more pedestrian metaphorical utility. Was that your putative position? If so, I certainly understand why my failure to agree might have been considered a crime.”

The wrinkle in Helena’s brow is all it takes to suffuse Myka. “See,” she says, and now she’s the avid one, the one who can’t hold back. “This is why.” This is why. Steve would have no trouble with this either... which demonstrates, hugely and unfortunately, that she’s made him into her internal lie-o-meter. Obviously that has to stop.

“I can’t say that I do. See, that is. Why what?” That’s genuine confusion.

“You will. See, that is.” There a real satisfaction in being able to ape Helena, ape her to a purpose, even if that purpose has to remain obscured. For just a bit longer. “What I’ll say for now is, we have had that disagreement. In the past.”

“Have we?” That’s further confusion.

Speaking of metaphors: “Implicitly,” Myka says. “Diamonds. Pressure. Whether a difficult situation was necessary for a positive outcome.”

“You’ve eased my mind considerably. I’m not you of course, but I might nevertheless have been concerned about my failure to recall. And I do take your point, given my position as the... purveyor. Instigator? Of a number of difficult situations.”

The verbal wander again... and again, Myka has a different path to hand. Today of all days, a different path. “Anyway, come downstairs.”

Helena lowers her eyebrows and opens her hands. “The entire point of the subterfuge was to avoid the assemblage, was it not?”

And now Myka is just a bit giddy. “Was it? Anyway, they’re gone.”

Eyebrows reverse; hands do too. “Are they.”

Myka nods.

“Then why in the world would we go downstairs?”

“I have something to show you.”

Flirtatiously: “Couldn’t you show me something here?”

Myka’s certainly not immune to that tone, and under other circumstances... but no. “Not the same thing.”

“Aren’t you being strangely insistent about this?”

“In a way.”

“Is this ‘thing’ time-dependent?”

Productive... “In a way.”

“Are we playing Twenty Questions?”

“In a way?” Myka is giving Helena reasons to wonder, and Myka herself wonders, briefly, if she could have made a better plan... too late now.

“I suspect ‘animal, vegetable, or mineral’ would not yield a useful answer.” You have no idea, Myka thinks toward that, but Helena doesn’t receive the psychic emanation; rather, she says, “Do you feel well?”

Myka goes back to what was working: “In a way.” With a twist, one that she hopes will be enticing: “In another way, check back with me after a bit.”

“After what bit?”

Yes, she’s enticed, but trying not to seem so. “The bit that happens downstairs.”

The glory of the back-and-forth. If Myka didn’t also worship their physical connection, she’d be happy to talk like this forever. But this and that happiness aside: how well will she feel after that bit? No better than this, surely... but, perhaps, somewhat differently well than this? In another way, so to speak...

Impossible to predict.

Helena’s reaction to Myka’s leading non-answers, however, is not. She heaves an obviously fake long-suffering sigh and says, “I don’t know why I reward you for such nonsense... however, my curiosity is piqued. I suppose I had better accompany you downstairs after all.”

“I suppose so.” She offers Helena her left hand, palm up, as if inviting her to waltz; Helena places her right hand delicately—she can be so delicate when she chooses (with that hand, with her self entire)—inside the invitation, in acceptance.

Offering and accepting: Myka lets a certain hope rise that their hands, now together, are a precursor.

“Never mind how unbelievable that is,” Claudia says. “The important part is, why didn’t I know about this ‘Warehouse stuff’? And does she need help with it?”

“I don’t have good answers for those questions,” Myka says.

At that very moment—timing!—Helena breezes in, hello-ing everyone but Myka, then swans upstairs.

Silence falls.

Myka waits it out, even as she ponders the mystery of even the briefest experience of Helena’s presence. That she gets to breathe, from moment to moment, in the presence of that presence will never cease to be a miracle. Warehouse-infused, and thus not without its difficulties; Myka’s no theologian, so for all she knows, that’s simply the way of miracles: Here, says the deity, but by the way, you might want to watch out for—

“That Warehouse stuff,” Pete interrupts into the void. “What exactly was it?”

“And did it involve getting whammied by an artifact that turned Myka invisible?” Claudia asks.

“I can see her,” Pete says. “She’s right there. She’s got a blob of oatmeal on her shirt. Or am I hallucinating?”

“To H.G.,” Claudia clarifies. “I mean you could also be hallucinating. What’s on my shirt?”

Pete waves a hand. “Whatever vampire band you’re into today. Wouldn’t she have asked why a blob of oatmeal was floating in the air where Myka usually sits?”

“My musical choices beat yours, boomer, but do you really think floating oatmeal moves the needle on the weird-o-meter? Around here?”

“No, but H.G. ignoring Myka does, so hey Mykes, what gives with that?”

Myka’s been waiting for it, and she’s prepared. As prepared as she can be. “We had a disagreement,” she offers.

That gets silence again, as well as glances between Pete and Claudia.

“Why’d you try to cover it up?” Pete asks.

“You’re honestly asking me that? After this interrogation?”

Pete shakes his head. “Not after it. As part of it. Because you know what they always say.”

“I could not begin to know what ‘they’ could possibly ‘always say’ in this situation.”

He taps his nose. “The cover-up’s always worse than the crime.”

It really is something, she thinks, that after this many years he can still surprise me. “There is no crime.”

“There’s definitely a cover-up though,” Claudia says. “Of a disagreement? Which was about...?”

This is what she’s been locked in for. “Diamonds,” she says.

Claudia clasps her hands, and her eyes go starry. “OMG!!” she exults.

Myka snorts, both because that’s exactly where she’d expected Claudia to go, and because it’s helpful. “Please.”

“Fine,” Claudia pouts, even as Pete waves his hands like a pick-me-pick-me crazed hyena.

Do hyenas have hands? Myka wonders, but “Yes, Pete?” she says, because why not. “Something to share with the class?”

“A heist!” he sings out.

“You’re so right,” she tells him, dry as the Badlands. “We’re quitting the Warehouse and becoming jewel thieves.”

“Bet that’s what the fight was about though: H.G. wanted to, and you turned her down. Because you’re the law.”

“H.G. fought the law,” Claudia says, “and the law... got ignored?”

“She’s the order too,” Pete says. “H.G. fought the law and the order, and so I’m wondering if she beat Dick Wolf.”

“So, but diamonds?” Steve asks. “Disagreement?”

Myka can’t thank him aloud, because normally she’d be glad that the conversation was derailing. So she says, “Yeah. How they form.”

Claudia scratches her head. “You disagreed about how diamonds form? I thought that was just... science.”

“It’s science,” Myka agrees, “but it’s not the thing people think they know, about subjecting carbon to extreme pressure; the science really, they’re pretty sure now, is that they form when carbon crystallizes out of superhot fluid. From the mantle. Mostly. Also they don’t even all form in the same way.”

“Well, blow my mind why don’t you,” Pete says. “So H.G.’s mad at you because you blew her mind about diamonds?”

“No. Because we disagree about whether the popular idea is a useful metaphor.”

“For...?” Claudia asks.

“Positive results from difficult situations.”

Claudia twists her face, then demands, of Steve, “Is she telling the truth?”

“She tends to,” Steve says.

Pete looks doubtful too. “Is that the story H.G.’d tell, if we got her down here?”

Myka says, “I can honestly say I have no idea.”

At which Claudia sniffs. “I don’t even need to check the lie-o-meter on that. Who ever has any idea about what story H.G.’ll tell?”

“By the way,” Steve says, mildly, “I’m not actually a lie-o-meter.” He has to offer a version of this reminder at least once a week, generally to Claudia and/or Pete; Myka knows he doesn’t mind it hugely, but. It’s like when they treat her as a memorization machine: an irritant.

“I’m getting a vibe,” Pete announces.

Myka braces herself.

“Or maybe it’s just me seeing what’s clear as day.”

She braces harder.

“Fighting about metaphors is the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

Bullet: dodged.

“It really is,” Clauda says. “Don’t you two have better things to do with your time?” Myka opens her mouth to take this golden opportunity to agree, but Claudia’s on a roll: “Don’t bother answering, because you absolutely do. Because you know what? Wasting time... that’s the crime,” she concludes.

“Plus it rhymes!” Pete enthuses.

“Not a selling point,” Myka tells him. “But you’re both right. I should go apologize.”

She tries not to look back, over her shoulder, to see what sort of landing has actually been achieved.

****

Myka’s decamping leaves Steve in charge of the situation.

Claudia looks at him and at Pete, searchingly. “Does she think we bought that?”

“The cover-up’s definitely stupider than the crime,” Pete agrees. “If there even was a crime at all.”

“Doesn’t Myka know we know how much she hates apologizing?” Claudia says. “She’s always sure she’s right. Like she never even really argues; she just says stuff and acts like everybody always already knows it’s true.”

“Even with H.G.?” Steve asks. “I think we don’t know enough about their relationship to make that judgment.”

Pete says, “I think we know way too much about their relationship. Thin walls. Thin floors. Thin ceilings.”

“So thin I’m surprised the Big Bad Wolf—or at least some South Dakota gust—hasn’t blown us down by now,” Claudia says. “What’s the over-under on how long it takes for them to start ‘making up’ from their pretend argument?”

“I’m going to the Warehouse,” Steve says, as abruptly as he can.

Claudia stares at him. “On Saturday? In the A.M.? Who do you think you are, H.G. in a fake fight with Myka?”

“I don’t want to trade bow-chicka-wow-wow bets with you two. And I also don’t want to go upstairs, because you’re not wrong about this place being the flimsiest.”

“Not the flimsiest,” Pete says, “because the flimsiest is Myka’s sad excuse for stealing time with her sugar bear.”

“Come with me,” Steve suggests. “It’ll beat sitting around here with earplugs in: I’ll let you play with the artifacts that need exercise.”

Pete gasps. “Sold!”

“They do tend to be the fun ones,” Claudia says, but she still looks a little pouty.

“And we can stop for doughnuts on the way,” Steve offers. He’s been keeping that in his back pocket, and fortunately, it seals the deal.

As they depart, Steve sends a thought both into the universe and upstairs, a little hope that Myka’s part of her plan will go as smoothly as his has.

He shakes his head.

“Then how are you playing basketball?”

Now he taps his temple. “I’m thinking real hard about playing basketball.”

“You never think real hard about anything. Also that’s not how it works.”

“Huh,” he says, taking his Watch Me Do The Thinker pose, which is what he usually does in order to pretend he’s thinking real hard. “So you’re saying that thinking real hard about a thing isn’t the same as actually doing the thing?”

Myka doesn’t know what’s going on... but something is. “Why do I feel like you’re setting me up?”

“Because you’re a really suspicious person. Sometimes you just need to take stuff at face value.”

“I tell you and tell you, that’s a mistake. Particularly here. You never listen. Are you sure you haven’t been whammied?”

“A hundred percent sure, no. Ninety-nine-point-nine, yes.”

“So what’s going on?” Obviously he is setting her up. All that’s left now is to find out why, and try to take it with a reasonably good attitude.

He grins. “Got your Christmas shopping done?”

“I got you that football shirt you asked for, if that’s what you’re hinting.”

“We call it a jersey, but thanks. What’d you get Claudia?”

“I got her the concert shirt she asked for. Did she put you up to this? And what are you, the Christmas police?”

“No. And no, that’s that weird elf we didn’t have when we were kids. Bet Claudia called it a concert tee though. For somebody who says she cares about words, you don’t seem to care a whole lot about words.”

“Is this going somewhere?”

“What’d you get for H.G.?” He says this with a little hitch: a here’s the setup giggle.

Oh. Great. Can’t we run through Steve, Artie, Abigail first? Even though they’re gone for the holiday, can’t we run through them? “Maybe she asked for a shirt too,” Myka grumbles.

“Bet she called it a doubloon if she did.”

“Do you mean doublet?” Maybe she can divert him from wherever he’s headed. “That’s not Victorian anyway. I was reading about one called a Garibaldi, named after a—”

“Doesn’t matter,” he interrupts, “’cause she didn’t ask you for a shirt. Bet she didn’t ask you for anything.” Wherever he’s headed: Myka doesn’t know, but she’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to go there with him. And yet diversion doesn’t seem even vaguely possible, as he continues, “Because even if she did ask you for a doubloon, I know what you should give her instead.”

“Good for you,” she tells him. “I don’t want to know.”

“Words.” He sounds impossibly self-satisfied.

She has to concede that it makes a weird sort of sense. Conceptually. Myka has a flash fantasy of giving Helena all the words, all the jargon, argot, slang she missed while bronzed—Myka can tell when she’s confounded by contemporary terminology—and hearing her talk her way through the vocabulary, a word at a time, as Myka luxuriates in the music of it. But she would never say such a thing to Pete. “I told you, I don’t want to know. Like I said, you never listen.”

“Words,” he repeats. “And not ones for shirts.”

Myka steels herself, because she’s pretty sure he’s about to explain.

“I do listen. To what you’re not saying: how you feel. Because I know you’ve been thinking about saying it, thinking about it real hard, but like I said, thinking real hard about a thing isn’t the same as actually doing the thing.”

“You didn’t say that. I did.” Now she’s wishing she’d never said anything at all—that she’d seen Pete sitting still and given thanks for it: a Christmas miracle.

“Don’t change the subject,” he says.

Not a bad idea: “You hate her!” Myka tries.

He hand-waves that. “What’d I just say? Anyway I got over that. Literally a million years ago.”

Keep trying... “Figuratively. I don’t believe you, but figuratively a million years ago.”

“Correcting what people say.”

“What about it?”

“That’s where thinking real hard about a thing is the same as actually doing the thing.”

That does make her laugh a little. “Says the guy who was literally just correcting my words for shirts? Because, no it isn’t.”

“Proving my point. So say the words instead of just thinking real hard about them.”

“I’m thinking real hard about smacking you,” she tells him, which wins her a similar bit of laughter.

She knows he doesn’t hate Helena. But it’s a convenient excuse: I can’t say anything, because disaster for the team.

Trying to get accustomed to what Pete’s said. What he knows. He thinks he knows, and he sort of does, but he doesn’t, not really. Not fully. First, because it would hurt him to know fully. But second, because Myka herself doesn’t know fully.

Pete, meanwhile, is saying, “Yet here I sit, unsmacked. Is this my fault?”

“That you’re unsmacked? No, it’s my fault, because I’m an adult who can exercise restraint,” Myka says. “Luckily for you.”

“Not that. Not any of that, really. I mean, once bitten, twice shy.”

Oh. That. Aloud, she says, “You didn’t bite me.”

“Maybe that was the problem,” he muses.

“Don’t be weird.”

“If she bit you, you wouldn’t think it was.”

“What did I literally just say?”

“Beats me. Somebody who’s a lot smarter than me keeps saying I never listen.”

But it’s soft, how he says it, and Myka softens a little in response. He’s doing something good—something Christmas—something that he thinks will help her. Because he thinks she needs help.

He isn’t wrong. About that, he isn’t wrong.

****

Myka ponders all of this in her heart. Not in a sacrilegious way, just... pondering.

Pete isn’t wrong. But he isn’t right either.

Myka has always envied adept givers of gifts.

Equally, she’s envied recipients of gifts from such givers.

Such giving and receiving seemed—still seems—to bespeak understanding, knowledge, even intimacy, the latter at least with the workings of want and provision.

About anything, usually, but now: about what she should give Helena.

Pete isn’t right. He can’t be.

That would be the fulfillment of a wish, and Myka has been working overtime, particularly when she’s in Helena’s presence, to quash any bit of belief that wishes come true.

So Pete isn’t right. He can’t be.

But what if he is?

****

She’s pondering—still—on Christmas eve, sitting in the surprisingly-yet-blessedly silent living room, sinking into the sofa with a throw pillow over her face.

She hears footsteps approach.

So much for blessed silence. Please don’t be Helena is her first thought, followed swiftly by Or please do be Helena, and concluding with I have no idea what I’m pleading for.

“Are you sick?” she hears.

It’s Claudia.

“Or do you think I can’t see you?” Claudia continues.

“Pete lectured me about words and thinking,” Myka says through the pillow.

“That doesn’t sound like him. That sounds like you.” Claudia, unlike Myka (or Pete) is sick: she has a cold, and it’s mangling her usual tone, making her words seem wrenched from some chthonic depth.

“Am I that bad?”

“Only when you’re trying to change the subject,” Claudia says. “So let’s stay on topic: Pete’s at the Warehouse. I’m going there too.”

“The topic is who’s at the Warehouse? Or going to be?”

“No. Somebody’s got something for you.”

This is getting stranger by the second. “A Christmas present?”

Claudia pauses. “You’d think,” she finally says.

Myka moves the pillow down to her chin, because she needs to look; she has no idea what Claudia means. It’s a different sort of deep utterance than Mrs. Frederic would produce, but it seems commensurately weighty. Claudia’s congestion is probably leading Myka to attribute extra heft to it, but still...

Claudia’s face is no help. That could be due to the cold too—her nose is as red as Rudolph’s—but Myka is nevertheless left without a path to interpretation.

Nothing becomes any clearer as Claudia pulls a tissue from her jeans pocket, blows her nose (that seasonal nose), barks “Okay!”, and leaves the room.

After a bare few seconds, the front door slams, and Myka is alone, still without clarity.

After a few more seconds, Myka is not alone: Helena enters the room and says a soft “hello Myka.”

Something is about to happen.

Myka is still without clarity.

And she is reminded: I have no idea what I’m pleading for.

The judge is... Artie?

This can’t be the real trial. Can’t be.

This is... something else.

A dream?

****

Myka’s eyes are closed.

She hears a door open, then an exclaimed, “Hey Mykes!”

She readies herself to open her eyes and deal with whatever Pete needs, or thinks he needs—though she does, for a second, consider not opening her eyes, either pretending she hasn’t heard or confessing, “Pete, I’m tired.”

But before she can decide, she hears something else: “Pete!” It’s a harsh-barked, yet womanly, whisper.

Helena. She’s here too, in Myka’s... hotel room? Is this where she is, where they are? Must be.

Helena doesn’t follow her caution to Pete with further words, but Myka, eyes still unopened, indulges in imagining her silently calling attention to Myka’s possible nap.

The indulgence in turn leads her to ponder, further indulgently, a question she once read, and to which the Warehouse gives her recurring reasons to return: “Isn’t there always a possible elephant lurking just at the edge of the frame?” The edge of the frame, where anything, everything, could be happening... naps, but not only naps...

“Sorry,” Pete stage-whispers, followed by a receding version of the particular steps he takes when he’s being “quiet.”

Nothing else happens. But Myka feels Helena’s presence persist, like a weighted blanket’s comforting, protective hold.

This feels good, she tells herself, to mark it. But the mark itself feels... unearned? She probes it, sounding its depth, finding the slip: This feels too good.

She knows it; she knows it—but her knowledge is struggling against a strong force, one offering neither comfort nor protection, something holding her down, under; she twists against it, spinning, redirecting—

****

Myka’s eyes are closed.

She feels asleep. Almost. Mostly. Al-mostly. Conscious of hearing, not (yet?) seeing.

“What exactly happened?” That’s... Steve’s voice? Wait, why is Steve here, what is the timeline, when did Steve—

“You still haven’t said.” That’s Pete. “Why won’t you say?”

“Because you won’t allow me the opportunity.” And that’s Helena. Dignified. That tone: Myka believes, but does not know, that Helena uses it when her voice is the extent of her arsenal. When she has only tone to deploy. Helena goes on, “She stumbled.” This is said more gently; she must now be speaking to Steve. “She was looking for my locket.”

“Why would it be here?” Pete demands.

“This is the container aisle,” Helena and Steve say in unison.

“I bet you tripped her,” Pete accuses. Myka knows that tone too: it’s the surliness with which he resists any looming challenge, particularly one he’s likely to lose.

“And how do you imagine I would I have done that?” Helena asks. Weariness now. Flat.

“I don’t know!” Pete says. “Wake her up!”

This isn’t how it went before. When I was asleep, before. I liked it better then.

“I can’t! I’ve tried!” Helena: fretful.

(Definitely better before.)

“She isn’t lying, Pete,” Steve says.

“Then she should shut up! She isn’t even really here!” Pete shrieks. It’s almost—almost—enough to jolt Myka to full awareness.

“Thus rendering your opprobrium evidence of insanity, perhaps?” Helena retorts. That’s more like it; Myka relaxes again.

“She’s here enough to be telling the truth.” Steve again. Calming.

“I don’t care,” Pete says, still high key, but modulating. “She should go away.”

Surprisingly, there’s no rejoinder. Myka wants to see Helena’s face, but the want isn’t itself a jolt; she can’t muster the effort it would take to push herself to presence... she’s still so tired. And the pressure, the force, it’s still there, now more of a pull-across than a pus- down, as if some other place (of sleep?) is drawing her, physically claiming her...

An elsewhere-sense, some consciousness near but not her own, intrudes: Just a bit longer.

Apologetically?

****

The first witness called—by whom, Myka doesn’t know—is... also Artie?

“Objection,” Myka stands and says, but she’s not sure why, because objecting about Artie to himself can’t possibly be sustainable. “This seems very unfair.”

It seems also extremely Warehouse-y. But how, and why, and—

“Overruled,” Judge!Artie snaps.

Okay. Fine. She’s got to start getting herself somewhere, anyway, so as Pete would no doubt advise, she’ll go with it.

“Who retrieved the artifact in question?” she asks Witness!Artie.

“MacPherson and I.”

Unreliable... she hears, as a whisper in her ear, from that as-yet-unplaceable elsewhere. To getcha ready, she (re?)hears Pete saying.

“How would you characterize the artifact?” she asks.

“In what sense?” Witness!Artie asks this as if he’s probing where to deploy his unreliability.

“In the sense of what is the artifact?” It strikes her that at base, she is—has to be—arguing for the repatriation of all artifacts, regardless of what this one is. Which she still doesn’t know.

“Objection,” Helena says, though she is less than emphatic. Laconic, even: leaning back i her chair.

Is it wrong of me to want to see her leap to her feet, to hammer on the table?

Her want occasions a whisper: Movement... but like that?

“Grounds?” Judge!Artie asks; he, for his part, sounds eager, ready to sustain.

Helena doesn’t bother, even now, to rise. “What an artifact is is far too existential a question. Certainly for this witness to answer.”

Witness!Artie nods. Then he straightens in the box. “Wait a minute. Are you impugning my philosophical bona fides?”

Helena offers a blink of innocence, and Myka takes the opportunity to pile on: “And is that really grounds for an objection? Excessive existentiality?”

“It is if I say it is. And I say it is,” Judge!Artie harrumphs, clearly interested more in foiling Myka than in defending Witness!Artie’s epistemological prowess.

Well, that all went poorly. “Fine,” Myka says. “I’ll rephrase. Literally, what is this artifact?”

Oh all right, she receives from the elsewhere, a capitulating flounce.

Artifacts—and now she is certain this is all directed by an artifact—can be such divas.

Witness!Artie takes his time answering... but given the flounce, Myka knows it isn’t his time.

The pause stretches. This is beyond dramatic, Myka is thinking.

She must have been heard, for Witness!Artie raises a hand and points directly at her, focusing upon her an uncanny, unfamiliar gaze.

“A dreamcatcher,” he says.

Rendering: this renders Myka speechless. In the moment, but not in her head. So I am asleep. Aren’t I?

From elsewhere: If so...

****

Disorientingly, a new scene (though Myka is becoming soft-acquainted with these wrenching shifts): she is in a conference room, one from the same genre of space as the hearing room itself, its paneling, long table, and chairs seemingly obtained from the same warehouse.

Warehouse? The very thought... something is laughing at her.

Helena is here too, but Myka has no idea how to process that.

And is that more laughter? At Myka’s incapability?

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she admits, hoping Helena will... be her guide? Help her manage a bit of processing? Just stand there and look irresistible? Well, she’s already doing the latter...

That is not helpful, she admonishes whatever is controlling these scenarios.

“A caesura?” Helena posits, further unhelpfully.

Oh, thanks. Did she say it aloud? But if this is a dream, what could it matter? “No, I mean in the trial,” she says, this time intentionally. “But I think it’s the Warehouse.”

Helena cranes her neck in her characteristically look-at-my-neck way. “Isn’t everything, in the end? Existentially?”

That’s both characteristically Helena and... not. Myka is questioning, questioning, but she has to concede, “Well, yes. But no, I meant the museum.”

“Think faster,” Helena says.

Now a non sequitur? “What? Why?”

An insistent wham-wham on the conference-room door answers her.

It certainly doesn’t speed her thinking; instead, it shifts her to a different what-why as she voices a weak “Who’s there?”

“The judge in this case!” It’s in stereo: Helena from inside the room, Artie—some version of him—outside.

Outside, with only a door, some flimsy (and probably imaginary) hollow-core wood-veneer—focus! “We can’t be seen together!” Myka whispers to Helena with as much emphasis as possible.

“Can’t we?” Helena responds, conversationally. “Then we’ll need to be invisible.”

“How? I’m not some scientist who made bad choices and went nuts, and neither are you.” She’s trying to be clever. Why sis he doing that, that and not... finding a closet to hide in? Finding a mallet to render herself truly insensate with? Finding some explanation that will make sense of a contrived court and a tenuous trial and a hypothetical Helena—

“Arguably, I am,” Helena says, because of course she is more clever, no matter how questionable her presence.

The racket at the door intensifies, battering-ram, inescapable. “Play along,” Helena advises.

“With what?” As if she were innocent...

But then Helena’s lips are at her neck, at her neck then traveling, up her jaw, to her ear, then ultimately finally at last on her mouth, opening there, and she is molten.

It’s a dream, it’s what she’s always dreamed, and the dream is, the dream will always be, to stay here in this, ignoring all else... for a time... a time of length... the temptation... but Myka wrenches away: “Someone will see! Someone will judge!”

No! Caesura! For you! This, no one will see! This, no one will judge!

And yet that other sense is wrong: Artie will see; Artie will judge... them. He always has, and now—now, here he is, barging in, judge and witness, exactly as Myka predicted, his face red and raging.

Myka feels her own face red and racked. This is not invisible. No mad scientist, but a man would not need to be rendered invisible here, not as he was in that manic scream masquerading as a novel... and Myka finds it painful, spiritually and even physically painful, the redness internal now, hot and rough and suffusing, to actively want to be invisible as a woman. Invisible as women. To want to, to need to, and to not know how to.

The floor refuses to swallow them.

Well. “Them.” Myka knows, too, that Helena is not really here, that her dream remains a dream, no matter how real its physical effect may have seemed. Did seem. Still seems, in aftershocks.

Paradoxically, she cannot similarly dismiss the physical effect of Artie’s hostility.

Maybe some people can shake off nightmares. Myka can’t.

Other-sense: No... this was for you!

Nevertheless Myka is certain, certain, certain that her wanting, her wanting and, worse, the ease with which it was read and extracted, will be weighed. And certainly not for her.

“I know it was about me,” Helena says.

“That doesn’t justify whatever else you seem to think you know.” Myka hadn’t liked who she was when she and Pete were together, and she hadn’t liked who Pete was either. But this Helena, the person sitting here today, never met that Myka or that Pete. And this Helena was never ever interior to, or even a witness to, the dysfunctional dynamic Myka and Pete had wrought together.

“I concede,” Helena says, with a bow of head. “Intimacy. For example, Giselle and I—”

“No. Please.”

“Surely if I have to know about you and Pete, you can—”

“I can’t,” Myka says, and if Helena thinks less of her for this—so what? That will cause her less pain than having to hear whatever words would follow intimacy for example Giselle and I. “Not when you’re...”

“Involved,” Helena finishes for her.

There’s nothing more to say, not after that. In silence they sit, regarding the flames that don’t consume.

Burning and burning and burning.

It seems foolish now, even ironic, but Myka had once thought that’s what love might, should, ideally be: a fire that doesn’t destroy. That just... is. In perpetuity.

So much for that idea. She thinks herself back to only days ago, to the point at which Claudia had asked Helena, “So when do we get to meet your lady friend?”

Claudia hadn’t even glanced at Myka as she articulated the question. Testimony to how far everything had traveled—from Tamalpais, from even Myka’s leaving the Warehouse. Myka wasn’t, now, even a factor.

That Helena had given a noncommittal answer made it worse, as if time for such meeting would be infinitely available... and thus, for Myka, infinitely torturous.

She forces herself back farther now, to a similarly torturous but opposite pressure: a factor that Myka certainly, and Pete apparently, had tried to pretend wasn’t one. Until they couldn’t... “we fought,” yes, but it was nastier, more specific, than even that admission allowed.

Completely alone at the B&B, the two of them, in the kitchen, for the first time in some time not compelled by the presence of others to hide their... problems? But “hiding their problems” wasn’t really what they’d been doing by putting on happy faces; they—or at least Myka—had been trying to steady, so as to ultimately unmake, a shearing geological fault by sheer force of it’s-better-this-way will. When that will collapsed, it cratered all of the ground into an on-and-on collapse, a harsh, sour, unnatural disaster of anger and accusation.

Myka finally said, in utter weariness, “What do you want from me.”

“To make me feel like you’re not cheating on me,” he said, but not in the attention-mongering whine he’d been using. These words were genuinely pained, battered by that unignorable factor.

Being so honest must have unnerved him: while in his initial shrill snit he’d paradoxically been bodily, solidly confrontational, now he became fidgety, pacing, sitting down, standing. Sitting again. He pushed his fingers through his hair, that longer hair, which Myka didn’t like; it seemed a calculated reach for boyish charm that landed instead as a flail, an untrained windmilling backstroke in search of past waters.

Past waters: a clash in a kitchen. Myka’s mind had then sliced back to a long-ago kitchen-set fight, one with her father—but no, the fight had been all hers, all internal. He’d been telling her that she had to take Tracy’s shift in the bookstore that weekend, and Myka was making a silent, meticulous argument as to why her own plans to read Nabokov were just as important as Tracy’s to lead cheers at a basketball game. But Tracy’s activities were, to Myka’s introvert father, exceptional and thus worthy. Myka’s were familiar, boring, and thus easily supersedable.

However: even deep as she had been in both the fight with Pete and the father-memory-cut (Nabokov! Nabokov!), she had seen she’d got the throughline wrong. The kitchen setting wasn’t it; rather, the damage done by comparison, that was the blade. She’d never expected to turn into her father, of course never wanted to, but there she was with Helena-over-Pete uppermost in her mind, just like Tracy-over-Myka had preoccupied her father. Attending to (in her case yearning for) the exceptional, rather than really seeing (in her case being satisfied with) the familiar.

She ideated and discarded several responses to Pete’s “cheating” beg, ranging from “I’m not cheating on you” through “I can’t be cheating on you; the person I would cheat with isn’t here” to “I am cheating on you.”

They were all true.

She finally settled on, “I don’t know how to do that.”

“I thought you were the smart one,” Pete sneered in return.

It was something her father might have said.

“No wait that’s her,” he sneered on.

Yes, Myka had wanted to agree, smart. Because she’s not here. But her mouth found only attenuated ash, an aftertaste of the fire that had burned when Helena—smart to be gone, so smart—was here.

No fire now. Nothing to feel.

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” he ended, the words a coarse blow.

The irony of such a grievance was yet another clout. “I can’t talk to you at all,” she said, as her head and heart pounded a dull refrain of get out get out get out. She bore it as Pete said nothing, bore it as he did nothing but stare, bore it until it became unignorable, and then she did get out: out of the argument, out of that present kitchen and all the past it imposed.

It had taken her far too long to understand that the get out drumming had been there all along, the accompaniment to the entire Pete situation. It too became unignorable... and even then, in the end, Pete mostly did the getting out for her, though she had to suffer the weight of his disappointment, which again put her in mind of burdens her father imposed on her. But then again, she had made Pete suffer the weight of Helena. So as for her father and burdens, she was multitasking: the better to see him and be him.

It had been entirely dispiriting.

So is the unholy silence, right now, between her and Helena. “Why was watching the Yule Log your other choice?” Myka noises into that lack of sound, seeking comfort, or something, in a dichotomy not her own.

“I don’t know,” Helena says.

Myka believes her, but... the logistics. On what channel, here in South Dakota, is she watching it, anyway? Myka directs her attention to the lights on the additional electronic boxes in the vicinity of the television. The cable tuner display is blank, as is that of the DVR. On the oldest component, however, a blue “play” arrow is illuminated.

Now Myka knows something is entirely afoot. “Seriously? A videotape?” she scoffs, and she would raise her voice and demand, “Pete, get down here!”, but she has absolutely zero interest in adding his actual presence to this difficult situation he’s wrought. Particularly as she’s just revisited the rough edges (not yet scars) of the fight.

She does, however, eject the tape from the VCR and deposit it in a static bag, from which she is unsurprised to see sparks fly. “What did it do to you?” she asks Helena. “How do you feel?”

“You watched it with me,” Helena points out. “How do you feel?”

“Exhausted,” Myka blurts. She tries for a softening quirk of lip in apology. “But that’s not new.”

Helena raises her eyebrows, then closes her eyes. “Oh god so am I. Also not new.”

If the artifact’s effect were to elicit honesty about overwhelming fatigue, surely they would have exchanged such words before now. Nevertheless, a spent calm settles briefly upon them both; they inhabit that fatigue for a moment, then another, as if breathing its shared burden together.

But they are not, in fact, together. “I should go,” Myka says, reminding herself of it. It’s necessary. It hurts.

A little huff escapes Helena, a sigh and/or the first syllable of a laugh. “You’re giving up on me...” she says. A statement and/or a question.

Myka responds the same way: “What choice do I have...”

Helena closes her eyes again. “Any of many. Choices abound.”

Myka snaps, “Don’t be cryptic. You’re involved. I’m trying to stay out of that.”

“Your attempt is noted,” Helena says, and the schoolmarm is back. “But involvements aren’t static. Yours wasn’t.”

Trying for the same formidability, Myka says, “Yours has been. Since you came back. That tells me all I need to know.”

“All you need to know. Which includes nothing about the other party to the involvement.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Have you never been in a situation in which breaking with someone might cause harm? And refrained on that basis?”

That sends Myka careering into a ditch of petulance: about harm, about people on whom Helena might be inflicting it, about who should take precedence in any refraining-from sweepstakes.

Trying to drive herself up and out, back into something like reason, she says, “Only once.” Pete, she means, but then she realizes that’s inaccurate. Also Sam. Differently, but also Sam.

“But so, that once,” Helena presses, pushes, “for that while, you did refrain.”

It swipes Myka right back into the ditch, where she explodes, “So what are you saying? Honestly, what are you saying? That you’re going to break up with her... when? When she can take it? And were you ever going to mention this?” Her voice is rising, along with her agitation.

“You indicated no interest in the situation. No interest, in fact, in anything about me. Relative to the situation or otherwise. “

“Don’t you dare try to tell me that lack of indicated interest wasn’t mutual,” Myka fumes.

“Given the stilted nature of our final interaction in Boone, and given your subsequent—I might have called it politesse, but now I see it as a lack of candor—surely you can understand a certain reluctance on my part.”

“A certain reluctance,” Myka mimics, and she snorts. “Sure. But given all of Boone, and given your subsequent involvement, I bet you can understand why there was even more reluctance on my part.”

“Why there was. And now?”

“Don’t parse me. You’re the one who’s involved.”

“And that disqualifies me from attempting to ascertain your meaning?”

“Shut up.” Maybe that, intemperate as it is, can end this intolerable back-and-forth.

The look Helena slides her way—technically obeying the dictate—is an insouciant lift of eyebrow coupled with a purse of lips that’s utterly enraging. And inflaming. Every single blood vessel in Myka’s body fills, her face heating, viscera roiling, hands swelling, rising. She could do this, right this second: push Helena back against this sofa and—

She thinks those hands back down. Crosses her arms. Maybe Helena is trying to provoke her into acting and maybe she isn’t, but Myka is not going to be the person someone cheats with. Not again.

Then she makes the mistake (no, the inevitability) of looking at Helena again, Helena who is leaning forward, her hands gripping her knees.

They are without question feeling—fighting—the same impulse.

Would fighting it out loud help or hurt? Myka has to try something, so she says, “This isn’t right. It shouldn’t be artifactual.”

Helena breathes out through her nose in audible frustration. “Well, it would be, regardless. How else, in the end, am I here?”

Conceding that... it would be conceding. So Myka objects, “But if something happens now.”

“Oh,” Helena says, like Myka just said the most unexpected thing. She sits back and breathes in. “I take your point. Proximate versus ultimate.”

It’s a release. And a relief. A bodily disappointment, to be sure, but also a relief.

But also annoying. “I do not want to have to smack you,” Myka says, in part to mask her appreciation. “But I’m seriously inclined to do it, and it will most likely be satisfying.”

“Perhaps the artifact’s effects include disposing one to violence?” Helena jousts.

“No, I’ve been thinking for some time that smacking you would be satisfying.” She hasn’t. But she should have been. Should have been thinking that rather than miring herself in mortification.

Helena shakes her head. “I don’t believe you,” she says, as if disappointed.

“Maybe the effects include Steve-ifying you,” Myka acknowledges.

“If that’s so,” Helena says, the artifice abruptly seeming to leave her voice, “I’ll ask this: where are we?”

Myka looks at Helena to try to ascertain whether her ears are deceiving her. Or whether Helena is, although her face seems veneer-free. Seems.... but Myka has no good answer. “On the sofa, Steve. Other than that, I don’t know.”

“On the sofa together?” Helena says. It’s no prod; rather, a tentative assay.

“No. At the same time.” This answer isn’t good either, but it’s accurate.

“Would it be possible to be on the sofa—or anywhere—together?”

“I’m not the one who can answer that,” Myka says. More accuracy. “Steve,” she adds, to hammer home the truth.

“Stop calling me Steve,” Helena sulks out—but with a touch of light.

“Stop trying to make me commit when you won’t,” Myka whips back, responding to the light without thought or censor.

Helena freezes. “That is...” she begins, then stops. Offended? Ended?

Now Myka freezes.

“Fair,” Helena concludes.

A concession from Helena? Regarding someone else’s read of a situation in which she was doing her Wellsian best to gain the advantage? Myka’s blood begins to rise again, but she says a calm, “Thank you.”

“You are welcome. Though not quite yet.”

Quit giving me hope, says every contrary bit of Myka’s heart. The rest of her is busy creating a new spreadsheet to track that hope.

Helena stands up and says, “I’ll see you soon.”

“Will you?” The cells are filling up quickly.

“Ideally.”

Which leaves Myka to stew in the fact that nothing is ever ideal.

Neither time nor tide... in ironic illustration, she waits for Helena’s footsteps to fade. Then she takes the bagged tape upstairs to confront Pete.

“How could anyone forget Agent Bering?” Helena asks, in unknowing yet ringing counterpoint, with a tone that Myka desperately wants to be correct in hearing as unironic. (Which may or may not stretch fully to “sincere.”)

“You got that backwards,” Pete tells her. “It’s ‘how could Agent Bering forget anyone.’ Or anything. And the answer is, she couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t she,” Helena says, looking at Myka. Looking intently, like Myka’s leapt a quantum of consequence, and is that good or bad?

Myka doesn’t want to find out. Not now. “We don’t need to get into that,” she says.

Helena blinks at her. “What do we need to get into?”

It sounds suggestive only because, Myka assures herself, everything Helena says sounds suggestive.

No, wait, that’s terrible. Try again: only because Helena can make anything sound suggestive.

No, that’s bad too: it puts the blame on Helena, whose intent can’t be assumed.

So, back to the first: everything Helena says sounds suggestive... to Myka. That’s at least accurate. Accurate and damning.

And speaking of damning, she’s let Helena’s question sit unanswered too long... but, for good or ill, Artie steps into the breach.

“Working the case,” Artie says, stepping into the breach, and is he saving Myka or damning her further? “That’s what—that’s all—you need to get into.”

“All...” Helena echoes, drawing the word out, sinuous syrup in Myka’s ear. Damning, damning, damning.

“Also court,” Claudia says, the “t” an obstructive retort, as if to stop any such flow. “You need to get into that.” Another shot, for emphasis.

But Claudia’s plosives won’t be putting up barriers once Myka and Helena do.

****

Steve likes to wander the aisles of the Warehouse. If he’s being honest with himself (although sometimes he’s not honest with himself, if only because he can in fact lie to himself without pain; it gives him a little zing of illicit pleasure, like not quite triggering an allergy) he feels more at home here in this building that should be overwhelming than he does in the B&B. In this building, he’s anonymous; at the B&B, everyone wants to, or feels that they already, know him too well—too well too soon. He hadn’t signed up for that.

Not that he’d known in any way whatsoever what he was signing up for.

Not that he’d even affirmatively “signed up” for anything.

Should he have seen this life-wrench coming?

On his first day of fifth grade, the teacher, working her way through the alphabet of last names, had asked each student if they had thought about what they wanted to be when they grew up. After praising the ambition of Tony Gentry, who wanted to be the President of the United States and also a rock star, she’d moved on to Steve. “Steve Jinks? Ideas?”

“An advice columnist,” he’d answered promptly, with certainty.

His teacher had raised her eyebrows at that and pronounced it “very interesting,” but she didn’t press the point, instead moving on to the next name. “Jennifer Josten? Your thoughts?” Jennifer had declared an interest in lepidoptery, which then had to be defined for the class, thus fully washing away Steve’s answer... probably for the best, as he’d thought even in the moment.

When his mother asked how that first day went, he told her what he’d said. Unlike his teacher, she followed up: “Why an advice columnist?”

So he had to give reasons. His first one: he liked the words. Advice columnist. They were full and fun to say, and they made the job sound full too.

Then he worried that he was being presumptuous (a word he’d recently learned, though less recently than “lepidoptery”), making like he had some innate (ditto) ability to do such a full job. So he explained that it wasn’t that he thought he knew so much about people and their problems. But he liked the idea of having answers, ones that went beyond “lie” and “truth.”

His mother agreed that answers—nuanced ones—were good. And thus Steve also learned the word “nuanced.”

In retrospect, he suspects he’d been hoping that becoming an advice columnist meant being gifted with answers (other than “lie” and “truth”), wisdom from some advice-ether to which only such columnists had access.

His eventual Buddhism had, and has, served as the real version of that imagined advice-ether, offering him glimpses, even occasional grasps, of more-nuanced answers.

It’s possible, though, and maybe even likely, that answers of similarly greater nuance are to be glimpsed, and even occasionally grasped, here in this Warehouse. Steve’s found moments of unexpected peace in its immensity, and unexpected power in the peace.

But today, even more unexpected, he finds, or rather nears, un-peace, an aural variety, its location and source taking a moment to clarify: the container aisle, from which blares Pete’s voice, angry, demanding, and in response, a woman—but not Myka, not Leena, not Claudia. Not even Mrs. Frederic. An unknown woman in the Warehouse? Arguing with Pete?

Steve is not an advice columnist, which he’s had cause to semi-regret during his brief Warehouse tenure: all these misfit toys (a category from which he doesn’t exclude himself) need advice, and he’s totally unqualified to give it. So he does for a moment entertain the idea of turning away from Pete’s ire, avoiding whatever today’s kerfuffle is.

But he has a job, and while it’s not “advice columnist,” it often seems to lean toward something like “kerfuffle-handler.”

So he turns in the direction of the noise.

****

Layers, Myka thinks. Helpful in South Dakota. The winters, anyway.

Layers. This over that. This, then that. Again?

Pete sits her down and cues up Witness for the Prosecution.

You made me watch this already. Myka doesn’t say this aloud, but it’s... true? He did. Before. Before what? “Why are you doing this?” is what she does say.

“To getcha ready,” he enthuses. “For court. See, what’s a big deal here is Dietrich.”

“Well, sure,” Myka says, because when wouldn’t Dietrich be a big deal?

“Not because of that. I mean, sure, always because of that,” and he is looking at her like he might have just decoded some undercurrenty dit-dot-dash of what she never says aloud, “but. For right now: her testimony. Unreliable.”

“You mean like Rashomon.” Which he has also made her watch. Already. Before.

“Nope. That’s different versions. Everybody’s got different versions. This is about who to trust.”

He must mean Helena... he must be pushing her to not trust. Must mean, must be. Must must must.

But even as she resists that pressure to not, she can’t deny that Helena has an appeal that is by a certain measure Dietrich-esque, and thus what she can’t resist a quick riffle-shuffle, just for the thrill... Morocco (white tie and tailcoat...), Shanghai Express (chiaroscuro with Anna May Wong her mirror...), even Touch of Evil (into every life a little Well[e]s must fall...)...

“Are you showing movies to Helena too?” she asks, as much to talk herself down as to really find out. Helena, Pete, movies... would there really be time for that?

But how is there time for this?

“Why would I?” Pete asks.

“To get her ready? Too?”

“But I want you to win,” he says. “Whatever’s happening.”

Whatever’s happening. “Who’s unreliable?” Myka asks. She wants to know. Whatever’s happening.

She doesn’t really expect an answer, and Pete lives down to that: “Don’t ask me,” he says, busying himself with the DVD remote.

But whom should Myka ask?

Herself?

****

When Steve rounds the corner, both Pete and the woman—she’s beautiful, her face a pale marvel, but it’s her hair, a wash of darkest ink, that strikes him—look his way and immediately clam up.

The sudden silence spooks him. As does the fact that at their feet lies Myka, and she’s... taking a nap? She’s on her side, her head pillowed on her arms, like she’s illustrating “sleep” in the dictionary. It’s more than odd, but then again this is the Warehouse, where stranger naps have no doubt been been taken.

Steve certainly isn’t one to begrudge Myka, or anybody else, the rest they need, but...

...the silence continues, as if enforced.

Steve is patient, but uncanniness makes him antsy. So to the woman, who seems nonthreatening (she’s just standing there, arms crossed), Steve ventures, “Hi?”

“Hello,” she responds. Her voice, now not angry, is low. Rich.

“Right,” Pete says, a put-upon pout. “I always think everybody knows everything. Steve, H.G. H.G., Steve.”

“Delighted,” says the newly identified H.G. to Steve. “Who are you?”

“Same,” Steve responds. “And same?” There’s surely something he should be getting, but—

Pete sighs, still put-upon. “I always think.” To the woman, he says, “He’s the new guy they brought in to replace Myka, after you made her leave.” Then he turns to Steve. “H.G. Think about it.” Like Steve is a complete idiot.

And he is: immediately, realization. The embarrassment burns him, heating his gut, blooming on his face. “H.G. Wells,” he says, and tries to cover at least a bit of his flush by understating, “Claudia mentioned.”

Claudia has in fact woven tale after tale, all in the service of illustrating what she initially described as “H.G.’s good-guy-to-bad-guy-to-goodish-guy-to-who-knows-what status, with Myka all-in then crushed then mostly just sad and Pete really pissed off about all of it, but anyway we got you out of the deal, Jinksy, and maybe someday we’ll get H.G. back for real too, because honestly I miss her basically like I’d miss air.”

Steve adds to his understatement with, “She reveres you, by the way.”

“And I her,” says H.G., with a weirdly formal head-bow. “Not at all by the way.”

“Good choices all around, it seems like,” Steve says.

H.G. smiles, and he is rewarded.

“Meanwhile, Myka was unconscious!” Pete informs the world, full up again with all that anger Steve had wanted to turn away from.

“I don’t think that’s quite right,” H.G. says, quiet.

The way she talks... not trying to compete, but secure in her ability to. Steve feels himself proving his kinship with Claudia. More so than with Pete

“Who cares what you think?” Pete fumes, confirming Steve’s sense. “And you’ll say anything anyway.”

“She’s telling the truth though,” Steve says, because she is. “To me, Myka looks... asleep. Comfortable, even?”

H.G. nods. “That was my thought when—”

Pete breaks in, loudly, “Asleep?!? But I’m yelling!”

“We know,” Steve says, and he hears H.G. say the same, right in tune, and what is he to do with this instant accord? Is it disturbing? Or... flattering?

“She never sleeps through me yelling!” Pete yells on.

Myka, for her part, sleeps on.

Steve finds himself hoping that when the yelling stops—as eventually it must, even with Pete—H.G. will be able to express the as-yet-unarticulated when of her thought about Myka asleep.

He additionally hopes that builds to something like advice.

****

Who’s unreliable?

Myka, that’s who. Why else would Artie have sent Pete along with her and Helena on this retrieval, when he has no role to play in court?

Obviously she requires a chaperone.

Tamalpais was so different. Claudia is a lot of things, but “chaperone” isn’t among them, and anyway she was preoccupied with confronting her own insecurities, leaving Myka generally free to...

... well, to confront her own. While pretending not to, because of the incessant pressured wish to be present for every moment with Helena, whether collegial or clashy or both.

Paradoxically, looking is what Myka’s viscera remember of all that shared presence: for while their physical interactions made serious impressions, the gazes meant. They signified. They offered up the why of the physical.

And that why is obviously the reason for Pete’s presence. Myka supposes “backup” must have been, must be, the ostensible rationale for it, but that’s almost as troubling. Why wouldn’t she and Helena be each other’s backup? Why would they need more? It’s not like this is even a conventional, and thus possibly dangerous, retrieval.

She’s reminded of that as she stands before the bathroom mirror in a hotel room, dressing for court: buttoning up, smoothing down. This suit has always been what she would wear for such an occasion, this eyeliner and blush always what she would apply. As evidence. Of preparation.

Pete gapes at her when she emerges. “Are you wearing makeup?”

Why is he in her room? “I’m going to court,” Myka says. Did he forget?

“Who? The judge?”

Dangerous, dangerous... she knows who. So she says “What?” Playing as dumb as she can.

“And you’re supposedly the word nerd...” He shakes his head. Has he bought it? Surely even word nerds are allowed to plead (to feign) ignorance on occasion. “But seriously, do they judge on hotness now?”

Of course: at that moment, Helena sweeps in, as if doors and locks and privacy are nothing but easily disproved hypotheses. “I certainly hope so,” she says, and she too is buttoned up, smoothed down, yet perfectly so, the strictures fitting simple... also evidence, but of a dream Myka has been waiting till this very moment to dream. She looks Myka over... also not unrelated to several dreams Myka has been waiting, or in fact not waiting, to dream. “At the very least, I relish the competition.”

“I guess it’s time,” Myka says, hoping to send the idea of that sort of competition on its way. (Not that she knows where “on its way” would be. Probably some sort of boomerang trajectory, given everything.) “Time,” she repeats. “For court.”

“Court-ing!” Pete yelps, and Myka wants to sink into the hotel-room carpet, never mind what else those abused fibers have absorbed.

Helena takes it in her stride, not even raising an eyebrow. As she would. “Yes, it is,” she says, an affirmation of its being time, and/or actual courting being involved, and/or every possible jot of meaning in between.

Affirmation... why not affirm it all? All, all, legal boxers and all, because this is about (a bout?) competition, which Helena has said she relishes. Which Myka is ready—absolutely ready—to relish too.

Fisticuffs.

“I can’t help here. First, because I don’t know what we’re talking about, and B, because I was never one of those kids who wanted a puppy. But mostly because my helping skills are pretty much always under construction.”

Don’t run yourself down, Leena would admonish, but whatever those artifacts are up to is the more pressing issue, and anyway Claudia generally shrugs off explicit direction to acknowledge her value... unless, interestingly, it’s Myka who delivers it. So she goes slightly more opaque and functional: “Come with me. We can both figure out what we’re talking about, and maybe you can hammer at those skills.”

“Where are we going?”

Leena closes her eyes and concentrates on the disquiet, trying to orient. “Container aisle,” she determines. “Can’t narrow it down more than that.”

They reach the floor and walk for a bit. Then Claudia says, like she’s been thinking about it, “Container aisle? I’d rather go to the Container Store.”

“Need more organization in your life?”

“In Pete’s life.”

Leena waits for it.

Claudia delivers, “Because when I go to steal DVDs and games from his room I’d like to able to find them.”

It’s not the best. Leena waits again. This time, Claudia doesn’t deliver, instead saying, with a little mournful pout, “What’s the container aisle for, anyway? Boxes? Bottles? Tupperware?”

“Some of all of those. Generally, artifacts that hold. Catch and hold, or just accept to hold.”

“Hold. Hold... stuff?”

“Yes?” Leena isn’t sure what Claudia means by “stuff.” She’s often a little unsure about what Claudia intends words to mean, and she suspects she’s not the only one. Except for, perhaps, Myka? And possibly Steve? Still, Claudia does flummox Steve...

“But everything holds stuff,” Claudia says. “It’s what makes a thing a thing. A thing is just a stuff container.”

“Philosophy. Impressive.” Leena says it quietly, so as to keep Claudia’s ego in check, yet she’s delighted. However: “Things are stuff containers mostly by an accident of metaphysics. The aisle stores things designed for holding.”

“So this is the aisle we’d put the Warehouse itself in. If we could do that kind of freaky recursion function... or does that only work the other way, where it’d be recursion for the Warehouse to hold the containers?”

“The aisle’s already itself holding more than one Joseph Cornell box. That’s enough recursion for me.” Leena keeps her tone casual, but she’s further delighted that Claudia is so obviously thinking. Seeing connections and associations: it’s what she’ll need. For the future... Leena stops herself; she doesn’t want to be disturbed, today, by the future. There’s enough to puzzle out in the present, given her stumble, given what now seems to be an increasing disgruntlement in the artifacts’ hum.

And given the fact that the container aisle always gives her pause, for she does have particular friendships here. Certainly those Cornell boxes; artifacts that have true auras thrill her, especially when said auras have been so meticulously constructed. Leena wishes she could have met Cornell, could have sat him down so as to parse his ability to engineer these compact works of acquisition, accumulation: little Warehouses, all of them. Only a few are actual artifacts, but that’s more than most artists could dream of generating. If they ever did so dream... but it’s better that they don’t.

She also casts a regularly kind eye (and ear) on the Wurlitzer 1015 jukebox, because it’s a favorite of Mrs. Frederic from her past, and any window into Mrs. Frederic’s (relative) youth is inherently interesting; this jukebox likes to play the Marcels’ 1961 “Blue Moon” unprompted, and Leena has never gathered sufficient nerve to ask if it might have been a tendency of Mrs. Frederic herself to select the platter that catapulted the constellation of record and container-player to artifact status.

And then there’s the—

“Oh my god,” Claudia says, loudly but more deadpan than seems warranted, given the... unexpected situation? absurdist tableau? catastrophic scene? that now confronts them, and Leena blames her rumination on her aisle-friends for having distracted her from the sensory tsunami of auras that threatens, in this overpowering instant, to drown her.

****

“The artifact currently belongs to a... let’s call it a museum,” Artie is saying. “Well. ‘Belongs.’ I suppose we should say, ‘resides in.’ Hence the case. The argument.”

“Is this about repatriation?” Myka asks. It’s what she associates with museum objects and court fights—but in the next instant she sees she’s let slip from her grasp the idea that she’s supposed to be waiting, inferring. She seizes, freezes. Can everyone see the “oh no!” thought bubble above her head?

Luckily, no one seems to notice, so she forges on: “If so, I think I’d be more convincing making the case for it. Than Helena, I mean.”

“Why?” Helena asks.

“Because you’re British,” Myka says, but she can’t stop there; a babble is building, and with no dam in sight, she burbles on, “so no offense, but there was a lot of honestly indefensible taking and holding of other cultures’ stuff. And you’d be likely to bring that whole thing to mind... so, really, it’s because you sound British.”

“English,” Helena corrects.

“A distinction without a difference,” Myka says, and this time she achieves a levee; she congratulates herself on for once being succinct. Clichéd, but succinct.

“Now I’m offended.”

Oh god. “All I meant was—”

“I’m teasing.”

Her smile fills Myka’s vision. And the prickly pleasure Myka finds in being teased, in being the object of Helena’s smooth humor, fills her soul.

Artie’s voice breaks in, a buoyancy-deflating puncture: “It’s possible she’d be more effective. Implicitly acknowledging the error—no, the criminality—of colonial ways.” He gives Helena another pointed look.

This one’s nationalized, generalized, and Myka tries to dispute it that way: “Americans aren’t angels.” She realizes—too late?— that she’s undercutting her own initial reasoning. No saving that now. “But also, arguing that whatever museum I’m pretending to represent should keep it? I’m not comfortable with that.” As the words leave her, a that’s right shiver—unexpected, unusual—ripples her spine.

Artie says, “And the Warehouse cares intensely about your comfort level, so... oh wait. No. It doesn’t.”

Pete glances at Myka, then says, “Let her off the hook, man. I’ll do it.”

It’s sweet.

But she wants to strangle him for it—because adversaries. She should have kept her mouth shut. A good rule to live by, as she thinks about it. Wait, but is saying she should have done something actually a rule? She can’t live by something she should have done, can she?

“You’ll lose,” Artie says... answering her thought? No, reproving—informing—Pete.

“So what?” Pete says. “Then H.G. wins and we all come home.”

“Let me rephrase: you’ll look like you intended to lose. Judges get tetchy about tanking.”

Claudia mock-gasps. “Oooh, might get disbarred.”

“And then I’d be crying.” Pete says, brushing away imaginary tears. “If I was barred in the first place.”

Artie says, “Your tears won’t move a judge, who might throw the case out entirely, and then where would we be?” He doesn’t wait for an answer: “Without the artifact.”

“If nobody wins, everybody loses,” Claudia intones, sounding like the Delphic oracle. Or Socrates? Something classical, obfuscatory. Obstructionary?

“Not the Elgin Marbles,” Myka says next. “Please, no.” Other than their classicality, she isn’t sure why she’s brought the  into the discussion... is it simply that it’s the biggest repatriation case she knows of—maybe even literally? Now as she thinks about it, though, surely it’s too big. Artie wouldn’t want to generate that kind of publicity, would he? She and Helena wouldn’t be able to fake their way into a case like that, would they? Then again, the two of them in the news... what news they would be...

“Agreed,” Helena says. “Please.”

Myka hadn’t expected the immediate backup—though she’s unsurprised to learn that Helena knows of those disputed rocks—but she’ll take it. She wishes she could reach out a hand and... what? Stroke Helena’s arm in thanks?

Well, why can’t she? Nothing classically obstructionary stands in her way.

So she does.

Helena slides a look her way, not with surprise (of course not); rather, with some cognate of the that’s right ripple.

Which in turn produces a recursive ripple, a catch-hold-echo of right... right... right...

“Artifactually inert,” Artie says as it fades. “As far as we know.”

“Better safe, though,” Claudia enthuses, “so let’s bring those babies in! Pete can carry ’em.”

Pete snorts. “Not even with these guns. Big rocks carved pretty are still big rocks.”

Since when does Pete know anything about the Elgin Marbles? But Myka is being uncharitable. Probably. And besides, she would rather let them have the dispute, for it lulls her back into her earlier reverie, that compelling scenario of she a judge and Helena an advocate... no: a supplicant.

Her reverie... but that not-really (if-only) supplicant interrupts it, saying, “So, not the marbles.” This makes it clear that Myka’s continued expressions of ignorance about “it” have not mattered in the slightest... apparently “it” was never identified? Neither Artie nor anyone else is holding a file, which Myka chooses to interpret as positive, for who could, in such absence, have read anything about whatever’s at stake?

Myka is safe.

And yet she’s not safe at all, for Helena chooses that moment to reach out a reciprocal hand toward Myka. It finds her right biceps, setting off electrical sparks and short-outs and terror—Artie will see! Pete will see! Claudia will see! and as the worst disaster: even Helena will see!—then trailing down to her elbow, fortunately a less sparkily reactive location.

Still. she is not safe at all. Because, among other potential catastrophes: what if Helena tries something like that in court?

****

Pete’s stalking the Warehouse aisles, looking for Myka; she’s been down lately, and he hates it when she takes off like this, like she needs to hide in a cave and lick some wounds she’s trying to pretend she doesn’t have.

But also: he has a vibe.

Sometimes, if a vibe isn’t too insistent, he can shove it onto the Vibe Bench. When he was a kid, he used to talk them away like that, saying it out loud: “Ride the pine, vibe!”

This one he can’t make sit down, and honestly? It comes down to how Myka-vibes sometimes remind him of Mom-vibes, the way they scream IMPORTANT!

Which is why he doesn’t really grok where he’s finding his way to, and that’s why he’s genuinely shocked, practically out of the vibe, by what he sees when he takes a hard turn into the aisle that’s clearly today’s Vibe Hub: it’s H.G., standing there like she belongs or something, like she’s never been gone, like she can just hang out and it’s no big deal.

But it’s definitely some kind of deal. “What are you doing here?” he demands.

She looks like she wants to bite him in half, but she wraps her arms around herself like she’s keeping that in check, like otherwise she’d actually do it. “Conducting a symphony,” she spits. “Weaving a tapestry. Piloting a dirigible. As if any answer could satisfy you.”

She’s totally not wrong. It’s almost funny how totally not wrong she is.

But then he notices that she’s unfolded her arms, that she’s gesturing at the floor. He looks down, down at that cold concrete Warehouse floor, and nothing nothing nothing is funny or even almost, because there, lying there out cold, is Myka. His vibe charges back into the game, and rage takes over: “What did you do?”

“You’re being sued for excessive curmudgeonation,” Claudia says with a sigh. “Had to happen someday.”

“I’m surprised we don’t have any,” Myka says, pretending that she can ignore what she’s waiting for.

Pete misses another marshmallow. “We’ve got a doctor but no lawyers?” he asks from under the table.

Claudia raps on it, right above his head. “We’ve got no accountants either, big guy, but I never saw anybody get surprised about that.”

“A blue moon!” he exclaims as he emerges, popping it into his mouth. “Because Artie’s worse than any accountant. Plus everybody thinks we’re accountants on account of being IRS.”

“I heard what you did there,” Claudia says.

Artie snorts. “Everyone did, unfortunately. But you’ve managed to bring me to my point.”

“Score!” Pete enthuses. “Maybe.”

“Thinking,” Artie says.

Pete deflates. “Aaaand I’m out. I don’t really do that.”

“Noted,” Artie says, looking over his glasses. “And you are out. This assignment requires making people think you’re a lawyer.”

“Mykes, I bet you’re up,” Pete says.

“I was pre-law,” Myka says, but with an internal I say things like this too often twinge.

“Two lawyers,” Artie continues.

Pete deflates again. “Aaaand you’re down. Even you can’t be two lawyers.”

“Agent Wells,” Artie then says. Music, that title and name are, which is certainly more than Myka would normally think of any words Artie utters.

Pete, however, gapes: “She can?”

With exquisite, yet hardly surprising, timing, Helena sweeps in. “Of course I can.” To Claudia, she asides, “What am I claiming the ability to do?”

Myka wishes she were the one Helena would so casually tap on the shoulder for a sidebar. Speaking of lawyers.

“Be two lawyers at once,” Claudia says.

Helena shrugs. “Haven’t tried. Certainly willing to.”

“Maybe you can be yourself and your evil twin,” Claudia proposes, which wins her an interested blink, plus raise of chin, from Helena.

Artie harrumphs at Claudia. “Don’t give her ideas.” Then he makes the same noise in Helena’s direction. “Though I don’t see how we’d tell one from the other.”

Helena’s face takes on an aspect with which Myka is thrillingly familiar, a “try me” challenge; it is the expression she wore—the memory flashes to life in Myka’s head—as she stepped close, closer, closest to Myka in that office in Tamalpais, and for the briefest instant, re-breathing Helena’s breath as her own, Myka loses the present plot...

...which she knows because when her hearing retunes, Pete is saying, “Aha. How do you gay-run-tee a win?”

Helena says, “Play both sides.”

They nod knowingly at each other. Myka seethes with jealousy at their consonance.

“Nevertheless,” Helena says, “couldn’t we simply steal it?”

Myka doesn’t know what “it” is, but she’ll infer, she’ll get back on board; she just needs to make sure she doesn’t blink out into some Helena-inspired reverie again.

“That’s the evil twin talking,” Claudia says, “because you’d end up in court for a whole different reason than ‘I’ve got the legal right to this artifact!’ Myka versus ‘No, I do!’ H.G.”

“We do try to avoid running afoul of the law,” Artie mumbles.

“That’s new,” Helena says.

“To you,” Artie snarks.

Myka always wants to step in; never knows how. Everything with Artie and Helena, speaking of sides, is double-dutch... which, honestly, Myka knows nothing about except as metaphor. She tries, “But we aren’t actually lawyers. And I’m pretty sure that runs afoul of the law.”

“Save your objections for court,” Artie says, ignoring the contradiction.

It’s what Myka would have wished him to say, so she admonishes herself about gift horses, trying to push the concern from her mind.

And then she forgets to try, for Helena catches her gaze, assessing then smiling, sly, then saying a single, satiny word: “Adversaries...”

The syllables envelop Myka as if embroiling her, paradoxically, in a conspiracy.

She hadn’t thought of the situation that way, but suddenly she sees it sees it sees it—then she sees it further, sees herself and Helena free of the Warehouse, if only for the length of a trial, if only in the space of a court, existing as adversaries with stakes high but not mortal... it’s an arena in which she might fight Helena and win... or at least play to a draw, for Myka knows she is good with precedent, with bringing the previous to bear on the present... then again, applying the volumes of information always available to her can be laborious—and Helena is, among other things, quick. Objection! Myka can hear her saying, feel her leaping to say, in response to some carefully crafted question from Myka. And the judge, any judge, would be captivated, would ignore Myka’s ensuing sputter entirely, would sigh “sustained,” chin in hand, gazing.

Myka considers casting herself as the judge, rather than as the now-hapless adversary. “In my chambers, Miss Wells,” she could order. Order! (In the court!)

She clicks back in as Claudia looks from Helena to her, back to Helena, back to her, tennis match–style. “Sparks are gonna fly,” Claudia pronounces, like it’s Solomonic wisdom... and maybe it is.

This, Myka thinks—printed in words, a silent-film intertitle in her head, each word appearing as she ideates it—is going to be fantastic.

TBC

Preview of coming attractions:

Pete to Myka: Are you wearing makeup?

Myka, exasperated: I’m going to court.

Pete: Who? The judge?

Myka: What?

Pete: And you’re the word nerd... but seriously, do they judge on hotness now?