#illicit-like

“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.