iâm terrible at building things but you could pay me to disassemble shit instead. but less disassemble and just break. got that dog in me the way iâll be tearing at those table legs and chewing your wires. youâd have to euthanize me.
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iâm terrible at building things but you could pay me to disassemble shit instead. but less disassemble and just break. got that dog in me the way iâll be tearing at those table legs and chewing your wires. youâd have to euthanize me.

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Tabled 7
And with this at-long-last final part, Tabled (my lengthy @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange offering for @barbarawar ) comes to an end. Does that end justify the tortuous (and torturous) trip? Probably not, but something something journey destination... it all began with âMyka sits at tables and tells lies,â and part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6 gave what I hope was a reasonable explanation for how Myka might have so fallen, as well as how she could have begun to scramble up (spoiler: with a lot of help). Anyway, sheâs just got back to South Dakotaâhaving come to a tentative understanding with Helenaâonly to find Mrs. Frederic waiting for her at the airport (!!).
Tabled 7
Myka has spent an evening, a night, and the entire subsequent day on her trek back to South Dakota, so her trip as a whole has now stretched to over thirty-six hours, during which sheâs had emotional nadirs, shocks, and acmes; adrenaline overloads, ebbs, and re-overloads; minimal amounts of minimally palatable airport food; and far too much coffee, both interior and exterior. She desperately needs a shower, clean clothes, and, above absolutely all, some sleep lying down in a bed. Some sleep that way.
So sheâs having trouble processing what she sees. Has Mrs. Frederic divined her ultimate intention and thus appeared here to prevent her from burning it all down? This possibility should strengthen her resolve; instead, it makes her want to turn and run away.
Unfortunately, sheâs now through security, and she canât turn around. Thanks a lot, DHS.
But please, she goes on to pray, not another table. And: Extra-please, not another lecture about children.
Can the people around her in the airport see Mrs. Frederic? They seem to be moving more slowly, less noisily, than reality usually offers. Or are they? Itâs hard to know, here in this quiet, draggy little transit-place...
Mrs. Frederic puts a bow on the weird by pronouncing, âI have spoken with several people today. Yet you are my determinative interlocutor.â
That sounds like Myka might be a very few words away from being sent to a penal colony. Or, no: bronzed. The ultimate irony. Utterly Warehousian.
âI have for you the following salient information,â Mrs. Frederic continues, and Myka doesnât even bother bracing herself, because sheâll have to take it, regardless. She might as well be rattled by the full impact. âI am prepared to have words with Agent Lattimer.â
She should have braced. âYou are?â she asks, wishing she could sound indifferent about the prospect, wishing the idea of such words didnât add fuel to her gutâs terror that Mrs. Frederic knows all about Mykaâs meeting with Helena, a terror now compounded by the prospect of her telling Pete of it, and the further prospect that his having been told will be an additional, far higher bar over which Myka must clamber.
âShould those words occur,â Mrs. Frederic says, and now Myka does brace, âyour brief liaison will seem but a dream to him.â
What... what? No bar, no clamber? Instead, deliverance? Myka, whiplash-befuddled, is struck dumb.
Mrs. Frederic waits. Her patience, as long as it lasts, is admirable, if surprising. Then she quirks an eyebrow.
It makes Myka think of Helenaâand that allows her to breathe. To soften.
Mrs. Frederic softens too: she lowers the eyebrow. âIs that truly what you wish?â she asks, carefully, as if sheâs prepared also to withdraw credit from the source who conveyed to her the substance of Mykaâs wants. As if Myka, given one last beneficent chance, can surely be gentled into exercising her better judgment and choosing the certain path.
The sliver of solicitude allows Myka to consider Mrs. Fredericâs motives with a new charity: she may have been driven not by stereotype, as Myka has suspected, nor malice, as she has feared, but rather by a thoughtful assessment of availabilityâi.e., here are the Warehouseâs extant resources, and here is how they may best be deployed to ensure an acceptable balance of efficacy and safety.
Myka has spent a great many hours on airplanes and in airports preparing herself for the burn-it-down possibility, but the fact of the matter is that she, too, cares about efficacy.
She cares even more about safety.
The additional fact of the matter, however, is that she wants a future untethered from such calculationsâexcept as reckoned by, and between, her and Helena.
So if Mrs. Frederic is willing to help fix what she had a heavy hand in breaking? Thereâs probably a downside, but Myka will suffer it for this unexpected upside.
âYes. It is. Thank you,â she says.
âNo,â Mrs. Frederic says, now differently severe. âAgent Jinks.â
âSteve? What about him?â
âThank him.â
****
Myka finds the B&B dark and silent, lacking even a video-game glow and hum from Claudiaâs room. Sadly, the quietude doesnât yield sleep; rather than knitting up her exceptionally raveled sleeve of care, she tries and fails to keep âhereâs how this might goâ scenarios from playing in her head until she can reasonably go downstairs and begin making morning noises.
As the others appear, she tries to act as if nothing has changed.
Claudia enthuses, âStorms no match for you!â which is flattering but of course entirely untrue.
Pete is in his too-early-to-do-more-than-grunt mode, but he seems to care more about his bowl of Lucky Charms than he does about anything to do with Myka, which tells her that Mrs. Frederic has almost certainly had the promised words with him. The way that buoys herâher shoulders move down and away from her ears, where she hadnât even realized theyâd taken up residenceâis probably unseemly, but she doesnât care.
Then Abigail walks in, and her eye-flick between Pete and Myka suggests she knows everything, which she probably does, but even if she all she might have had were suspicions, theyâve probably been confirmed by Mykaâs radical change in posture.
A twinge of guilt at having allowed her body to reveal her relief visits Myka... but she quashes it. That guilt is about parts of the past sheâs supposed to be ignoring. Practice. Practice.
When Steve emerges, he busies himself with the first steps of making scrambled eggs. Myka reads this as a tactic, for on workdays Steve generally eats two unheated Pop-Tarts at speed. On lazier mornings, he might undertake toast, but eggs are the rarest of production numbers... and indeed, no one but Myka waits through his meticulous preparation.
âYou want some?â he asks, but heâs already sliding his results onto two plates. âAirports,â he says, handing her one.
âSo hard to find something normal,â she agrees, âand even when you think you might have, youâre still in a place that isnât.â
âSounds like youâre talking about every day here.â
His affect effortlessly encompasses both âperpetually surprised new guyâ and âperpetually resigned old hand.â Myka loves him for that facility. âNot about these eggs, though,â she says around mouthfuls, âso thanks.â She pushes her empty plate away. âAnd, also, thanks.â
âIâve never seen anyone eat food that fast, so thanks back for the demonstration. But also thanks why?â
âYouâre welcome, and also you know why: I have you to thank. Or so I hear from someone who miraculously shifted her thinking about whatâs best for me,â and she concludes, âyou miracle.â
He gives a little smile and head-shake. âYou said to protect you, so thatâs what I did. Differently. Once I figured out you were telling me things had changed.â
His figuring? Correct, regardless of anything Myka might have intended to be saying. âThings did change,â she acknowledges, âlike you said they would. But listen, what you did. The risk. You shouldnât have taken that risk for me. In fact people in general should stop taking risks on my behalf.â
His smile grows wider. âWe will when you will. Reciprocally.â
âNo, no,â Myka says, âI need to take more. On my behalf and everybody elseâs.â
âAll the more reason you should have the right backup.â
âWell, so should you,â Myka says, fully aware, and fully remorseful, that she hasnât provided any such thing.
Steveâs smile shifts in a way she doesnât understand. âI think Iâm going to. Maybe in not too long? You know Claudâs doing a lot more Caretakering now.â The doorbell rings. âOooh, if thatâs who I think it is, somebodyâs timing is something.â
âIs it?â Myka asks. She trails, a confused duckling, behind Steve as he heads to the door.
âI think youâre about to meet my new partner,â he says.
Myka doesnât bother asking âAm I?â as he swings the door open, because questions are not being answered sensically.
Her exhaustion is comprehensive, so itâs no surprise sheâs hallucinating. She says it aloud, directing a slack-jawed âIâm hallucinatingâ at both Steve and the doorway-framed Helena as they stand before her, their smiles bizarrely rhyming blends of sheepishness and pride.
They donât respond. This supports the hallucination conclusion.
Myka moves her right hand, minimally; in this way, she touches Steve, a little backhand to his torso. The purple cotton of his shirt is softer than her knuckles expect.
With her left hand, she reaches out, reaches through the doorway, and pushes, probably harder than she should, against Helenaâs right shoulder. Nothing there is soft. The shoulder resists.
Fine. Not a hallucination. Not even a hologram. Everyoneâs physically here, breathing and taking up space.
âHer timing,â Myka says to Steve. Sheâs not quite ready to speak directly to Helena. âItâs definitely something.â
Helena says, âSsh. Let me reveal my shortcomings to my new partner in my own time.â Sheâs surpassingly beautiful, here in this moment: glowing with mischief and morning sun.
Itâs too much. Myka squints and looks away, back to the comfort of Steve. âYour new partner?â she asks him. âReally?â
âSeems so,â Steve says, right as Helena offers, âAs I understand it,â and Myka hears a harmony as their voices overlap. She hadnât seen this coming, but she might have heard it, if she had thought to listen close enough.
But how could she have thought to, before today? âYou both make the world turn a little faster than Iâm comfortable with,â she tells Steve.
His smile persists. âCall me on that, no problem. But you really want to argue with H.G. Wells, who by the way is standing right hereââand he gives her a little âyou really are, right?â look, which she answers with a minimalist palms-up âI supposeâ shrug; more harmonyââabout how time moves?â
âIf history is any guide,â Helena says to him, âthat and many other elements of the oeuvre.â
âI just didnât think Iâd be doing it this morning, is all,â Myka says. Sheâs trying to bring herself to speak to both of them, but Steve remains her direction of safety.
His brow wrinkles. âIf this isnât okay...â
It would be nice to be able to reassure him, but. âNo idea if itâs okay.â
His face clears. âI appreciate your telling the truth. And I guess your voice is less agitated than it could be.â
This garners a snort from Helena. âMy dear new partner. Your understatement is a balm.â
âWeâll see if I can keep that up,â he says, visibly nervous.
Myka is, now, able to address Helena. About Steve. âHe can. Not always understatement, but the balm part.â
âIâm glad to know it,â Helena says, directing at Steve a formal incline of head.
That incline. Its sweet propriety. Glad. Glad. âIâm glad youâre here,â Myka tells her.
âThank you,â Helena says. She doesnât need to add âfor saying.â Her hair is shining, hereâhere!âin this morning sun that illuminates the entryway. Such light visits this space every morning, but Myka has never before seen it ignite Helenaâs hair.
This day: new.
âI have something in the car for you,â Helena goes on. âWait.â She exits the doorway, moving out of the sunbeamâs path. A bright loss.
Myka turns back to Steve. âWait,â she echoes, shrugging. âThereâs not enough time in the world for me to explain to you why thatâs ironic.â
âYour own private irony.â
âBut you did spare me some waiting. Some not-knowing waiting. And way more than that,â she says, because it needs saying, âyou spared me the hard part.â
âI donât know her very well yet, but Iâm pretty sure I didnât.â
âOh,â Myka says, because of course sheâd meant detaching herself from Pete, but Steve is (also of course) wise and right: each day, however few or many she and Helena manage, will no doubt have its hard parts. Each day of those few or many might itself be the hard part. âBut how did you... I mean, did you have this plan all along? Partner and all, and Mrs. Frederic started nodding along as you said it all out loud?â
âOh god no. I was just trying to ease her away from the you-and-Pete thing, as gently as possible. Turns out she wanted H.G. back ages ago.â
No. No. âShe what.â
Steve nods, looking sick. âButâand I hate to be the one telling you thisâshe thought you didnât want H.G. back.â
Myka feels sick. The non-sense of this day... no: of these days. âShe what,â she says again.
âBecause you left her in Boone, she said.â
âHelena was forced to stay in Boone!â she protests, or tries to.
âBut you didnât fight anybody on it. So she thought you were okay with it.â
Of course. Hereâs Mykaâs inaction again, kicking her legs out from under her. âBut if she wanted to bring Helena back, why didnât she just... do that? Once she decided it was safe to let her out of Boone?â
âLike I said, she thought you didnât want H.G. to come back. So she was trying to make sure it wouldnât matter so much to you. If it happened. If you had something else to focus on.â
âPete,â Myka says, the very idea a heaviness. âKids?â
âIâm not saying I can read her mind, but yeah, I think thatâs how that went. I can tell you she was really surprised to hear you were meeting with H.G. yesterday.â
âIn a hotel room in an airport in Chicago,â Myka says. The base fact of it. âDo I want to know how you explained that?â
âAll I explained was the airport in Chicago,â Steve says. âI didnât know about the hotel room part.â
Right. Myka hadnât said that part out loud. âItâs not what it sounds like.â
âInteresting utterance,â he says, cocking his head, like heâs waiting for more. âNot an immediate lie, But the eventual truth-value, plus my possible eventual headache, depend on what you think I think it sounds like.â
Itâs a privilege, this glimpse into the complications of his gift; nevertheless, Myka winces. âI think you think it sounds like what I think it sounds like,â she says. âLike I wish it didnât. Because I swear to you, itâs not that.â
She prepares herself to dig in and hash out the truth-values, but Steve says, âI get it. No dirty work in those words.â
No dirty work: itâs a diploma. In reverse. Disqualification.
âAnyway I donât think I made a lot of sense explaining any of it to Mrs. Frederic,â he finishes.
âEnough to save me,â Myka says.
âYes. Because if you could be happy.â
âYou said that before.â
âI did. But now I mean, if you could be happy.â
âIf... then?â she asks, logic being what it is.
âThen maybe I could too,â he says.
Myka wants to put an immediate stop to the idea that he would look to her, for that canât help but end in abject failure. But she gets out only a weak âDonâtâ before he continues, âBecause I was thinking of a saying: âHappy wife, happy life.ââ
âIâm not your wife.â
âBetter for both of us. Iâm just saying itâs a saying. About a person and somebody else. There might be a better word for where you and somebody else areâor, I guess, where you might be headed?âbut it wouldnât rhyme with life. And itâs probably important to rhyme with life.â
Mykaâs heart hears him, but she shies away, scoffing, âThatâs a leap. Not the rhyming. The saying.â
âIsnât it always?â
âI donât want to give you false hope.â
âBut if we could both acknowledge that there is hope.â
Sheâs not sure. Sheâll probably never be sure, but in the face of doubt and fear (and âendless wonder,â that misleading canard), she determines to acknowledge it. For Steveâs sake. âOkay,â she says. âIn the full knowledge that youâre the one who made the hope possible.â
âNo,â Steve says. Serious. Simple. Unfraught. âThatâs not what I did.â
Myka has no counterargument. All she can do is say âthank youâ yet again, quick and quiet, for suddenly Helena is appearing in the doorway, taking over the space. Myka suspects sheâs been waiting for their conversation to endâspeaking of timing, this reminds her of the hotel lobbyâand she doesnât know whether to hope Helena was eavesdropping their words or simply their tones.
Sheâs holding two cardboard coffee cups. Myka gestures for her to hand one over, but Helena shakes her head. âYou havenât texted me.â
So Myka dashes to grab her phone, and âGhâ says the message, the first purchase her fumbling fingers could find, sent as fast as she could remind those fingers how to do that.
Helena sets the cups down on the hall table when her own phone noises (and now Myka doesnât know whether to be pleased or distressed that a text from her yields a generic ding). She extracts it from the interior of her jacket and smiles. âI bought these, in hope, in the Sioux Falls airport,â she says, âbut theyâre now cold. No doubt terrible.â
ââWorth every penny,â I once heard someone say about coffee,â Myka says.
âFewer pennies here. In any event, worth to be determined.â Helena is jaunty; itâs very her, but on the edge of too her, hinting that sheâs less certain than her initial doorway presentation implied. As Myka now meets Helenaâs gaze, she imaginesâbut hopes she isnât only imaginingâthat their vulnerabilities might for once be commensurate.
Helena doesnât look away.
Steve says, âYou know, âI was making eggsâ buys you only so much late-for-work in this job.â Itâs a transparent attempt to excuse himself, but he does add, âIâm really looking forward to getting to know you, partner.â
âI hope to impress you,â Helena says.
He snort-giggles, then composes himself. Minimally. âH.G. Wellsâwho isnât lying!âhopes to impress me. Okay.â
Myka canât begrudge him his surprised delight, even if it does delay his departure. âWelcome to a world of endless... surprise. She kind of wrote the book.â
âA lot of books,â Steve augments.
Helena waves a hand. âThat was Charles. So wordy.â
Steveâs brow furrowsâwhich Myka reads as a bit of confusion over how to negotiate the Helena/Charles disjunction. He says, âOkay. Iâm going to the Warehouse,â clearly (smartly) choosing not to start now.
This time he does leave, though Myka is tempted to stop him, to cling to the surer footing afforded by his buffering.
Coward.
But. Then.
Alone, precariously so, Myka and Helena situate themselves across from each other at the dining room table, their promised-coffee cups before them.
Myka supposes she should have foreseen this arrangementâtable, coffeeâand she should at the very least have queried the book as to what would ensue. Not that sheâs had any time for that, which probably means she should now do that, should go and do that, before she finds a way to undercut its foreseen future and make blunders that will prove unsatisfactory.
âSurprise,â Helena says.
âYes,â Myka concurs, trying for Steve-ish understatement. It doesnât work; she knows she sounds distressed.
âMay I explain?â
âI wish you would.â That comes out better, but Myka realizes that she is literally on the edge of her seat. She sinks backward, trying to make the movement look like relaxation. That probably doesnât work either.
âThe invitation from Steve,â Helena begins, but upon saying his name, she stops. âBefore I continue: âH.G. Wells who isnât lyingâ?â
âHe can tell if you are,â Myka says, and sheâs gratified to see in Helenaâs ensuing eyebrow contortions that sheâs conducting the âwhat exactly have I said to Steveâ inventory everyone does when introduced to that fact.
Its result: âWell. Then itâs fortunate I havenât. To him.â She seems inclined to reflect on the revelationâs full compass.
Myka does love (love!) to watch Helena think. But right now... âExplanation?â she prompts.
âIt isnât complicated,â Helena says.
âThatâs unusual.â
Helena bows her head; she smiles, from that bow, up at Myka. Itâs flirty. Itâs beautiful. âIt is,â she says, and she seems to be affirming Mykaâs words and her thoughts. âSteve and I had a conversation during which I explained how you and I had left our... situation. And then, a bit later, came his invitation, which I understand was extended at the behest of Mrs. Frederic. The opportunityâthe freedomâto be myself again? It was too enticing to refuse. Of course I never would have accepted in the absence of our rapprochement, but given that? Steve was so convinced, and convincing, that all would be well.â She raises her head fully now. âAnd it cut short the waiting.â
âI said I would hurry,â Myka says, resentful, unsure of why sheâs jumped to that.
âYour return required so many flights. Any number of delays might have ensued.â
âDue to the flights?â Myka asks, but she canât unhear the clear disjunction between those sentences.
âAnd everything else,â Helena acknowledges, with a head-duck.
Myka knows that duck; itâs worry. âYou didnât trust me?â she asks, but in the question she finds the reason behind her resentment: offense at the idea that Helena had such worries to begin with.
âCan you blame me?â Helena asks this with a little flinch, as if Mykaâs judgment must be harsh.
âYes I can,â Myka says, but soft. âYou were supposed to be ignoring all that.â
Her answer causes Helena to raise her head again and smirkâor, no, this isnât her smirk; rather, itâs a lip-twist thatâs more... conspiratorial. She says, âAnd yet the foundation of trust is past experience. If I ignore the past, on what basis could I trust you?â
Playful, but a jab. Myka retreats into sarcasm, acknowledging it hit the mark: âThereâs a flaw in my big idea? Shocking.â
Helena nods, slow with a sigh, as if in sadness at Mykaâs imperfection. But she turns serious to say, âIn any case, after all thatâs happened, I certainly didnât trust fate either.â
Fate. How theyâve been subject to it... but are they now trying to chivvy it, in a way that will backfire? Myka pushes her fear into words: âWhat if itâs too soon?â
âThen regret will haunt us to the end of our days,â Helena says, and Myka has to nod to the truth of it. âBut consider this: rather than wasting precious time on such questions, shouldnât we rather be grateful that, after such complications, there is even a whisper of a chance that it may not be too late?â
Too late, too late, too late. Those words have truly haunted Myka. Miraculous that they might not apply. âI donât want coffee,â she says. Truly.
âWhat do you want?â Helena asks, like she might really not know.
Well, maybe she doesnât anymore, given the vast conceptual distance between Mykaâs initial saying and now. âI did tell you. I donât know how many hours ago; I havenât counted. Iâd have to use my hands.â
âSave your hands, but tell me again. I challenge you, however: change the vocabulary.â
Myka can do that. Only a little, here and now, but she can do that. âTo save the world. Our world.â
They are breathing at each other and the table is in the way; Myka ideates the drama of grasping its edge, flinging it sideways, clearing her pathâbut thatâs not who she is. Now, more than ever, she needs to be herself.
She stands up and steps decorously to the side and around, slow, savory, even as her body threatens to effervesce.
âCan we do this?â she asks, but she knows, through her inexorable movement, with all its effervescent potential, that they will. Regardless now of consequences.
âI have no idea,â Helena answers.
These could be words of delay, but not here and not now, because regardless, regardless, they willâand at once theyâre both moving, as if pressure from a familiarly heartless authority will relegate Helena yet again to disembodiment if they donât make this fast, and thank god, god, god this once theyâre fast enough; they meet and hands are at waists but theyâve touched with hands before... even so, the infinitesimal pause they both take before those hands pull and define is understandable but then over, and their at-last kiss begins as an action but swiftly transforms into a state of being: pressure, presence, soft, sharp, warmth, weight, low, lasting...
After some timeâhow much time? is this kind of time measurable?âthey break apart into staring silence, in the stunned after of the prospect they have spent so long before.
âI can die now,â Myka is moved to murmur, even as she feels its banality as a response to this experience, this knowledge. Because she has at last truly gained the knowledge: she had hoped to gain it, and yet she now understands she had never fully believed she would, if only because fundamental questionsâe.g., âwhat would it feel like to kiss Helena?ââarenât often answered.
âYou most certainly cannot,â Helena ripostes, bracingly practical. âOne kiss is no culmination.â
Myka might object to the description of what just happened as âone kiss,â but sheâs too busy being unable to process how an actual culmination might feel.
In fact sheâs unable to process anything. âI have to sit down,â she says. Of all things, lightheadedness had not been among her expectations. It should have been: because of course her blood is nowhere near her brain.
Passing out will help nothing. Probably. So she backs awkwardly around the table, her logic, such as it is, being: I have to sit, and that is my chair; if I reach it, then I can sit. Fortunately, her reasoning bears out. She breathes into the relief, as she sits, of still being conscious.
Helena says, âIf you canât stand, then Iâll sit beside you.â More logic, here spoken as indulgence.
She situates herself in the closest chair and scoots it nearer, inch by accommodatingly sweet inch, and then sheâs in fact sitting beside Myka, like theyâre on a carnival ride together, and now theyâre both turning sidewaysâwith Myka devoutly grateful for her continued (seated) consciousnessâas they steal (back) these kisses, these presses and exultations, that should so long before this have belonged to them.
âThis is not enough,â Helena breathes, sultry against Mykaâs mouth.
Myka makes a noise of agreement, and she moves for more, to start the movement to more.
Her hands have made their way to Helenaâs shoulders, and are anticipating her hair, when she and her hands are startled by a crash-clatter from across the room.
Myka wishes she could simply ignore whatever such noise signifies... but that wish is unrealistic. She removes her hands and opens her eyes.
Claudia is standing in front of the sideboard. Much of the china that had previously adorned it lies around her in ruins. âI swear to god, this is not what it looks like,â she says. She glances down, then shakes her booted foot. A teacup handle falls from it, producing a tiny clink of pain as it hits the floor.
âIt looks like you were trying to blink in but got the coordinates wrong,â Myka says. âThatâs happened before. But this time you got tangled with the plateware?â
That yields an eyebrow-raise and a finger-point, then: âWhat I shouldâve said was, âThis is not what it looks like even to someone who knows all the words to my extensive back catalog of Caretakery mistakes.â The thing is, I blinked in, saw something I was in no way supposed to be seeing, turned my back on thatâfaster than fast, and I swear I wouldâve tried to blink back out but I canât reset that quickâand I guess I did Wonder Woman arms, because...â She waves down at the china. âThis stuff. Or exâstuff. Unless youâve got a lot of glue? Which you might. You were pretty stuck to H.G just now, like in a way Iâve never seen before and like I said was in no way supposed to be seeing, but itâs the most spectacular news of this century or any other because all the feels I canât even!â She clasps her hands up high and squeezes her eyes shut, as if the scene Myka and Helena are presenting is too glorious to behold.
Myka turns from this emotional show to look at Helena. A half-beat later, Helena turns to Myka. Lacking any ready response, they both turn back to Claudia, who opens her eyes, drops her hands, and says, âYour faces are telling me all those words happened out loud.â
âUnfortunately,â Helena says.
âHi?â Claudia offers, with an apology face.
Helena smiles. âHello, darling,â she says, warmly.
Their interaction is lovely to witness, but: Warm, Myka thinks, because thatâs how Helenaâs body is, next to hers. Why, why, why has Claudia appeared now?
âIâd run over and hug you,â Claudia says, âbut I see that seatâs taken. Instead Iâll just say I missed you.â
Myka canât help herself; she accuses, âNot enough, you spy.â
âShe called me. Was I supposed to be like âoh, itâs H.G., I better not pick upâ?â
Mykaâs immediate thought is YES. She says in its place an umbrage-laden, âYou could have told me.â
âMaybe you donât understand what you looked like every time you came back from seeing her,â Claudia says. âYou think I wanted to make you look like that?â
Helena shifts position beside Myka, legible as a âyou are failing to ignore the pastâ caution; Myka adds to it a self-admonitory on this day of all days. âFine,â she says. âNot fine at all, but fine.â
âAnyway Artieâs already shouting about how youâre both late for work,â Claudia says.
Myka sighs. âArtie. Shouting. So everyone knows?â
âWell not about this. Which I double-pinky-swear I never meant to know about, even though it was always something to hope about. All Artie knows about, and probably even hopes about, is who works here. There. At that place. And is late. For it? So I guess we should get going?â
Myka can easily imagine agreeing that yes, yes they should get going: result being that she and Helena would proceed to the Warehouse. That place. Additional result, as history has shown, being that something would happen to once again put the promise of this day out of reach.
She sees, now, that she has to act against such results. Act against them. Act.
And she sees something else, something both sickening and enlivening: all her lies, those interventions against truth? They were acts. Sinful ones, but her agency in telling them has fortified her with the necessary heft for this moment.
Her lies were practice.
Morally inexcusable practice, but: she was a feral little fabulist. Now she must put ends before means. Use the muscle; ignore the exercise by which it developed.
So. âNo,â she says.
Her refusal disturbs the space, shaping it into a new kind of silence.
In its wake, Claudia offers appraisal: eyes narrowed, jaw tilted. Eventually, she says. âNot entirely sure who Iâm talking to now.â She squints tighter, sly-red-fox. âBy the way,â she says, calculatedly casual, âyour book buddy says hi.â
If anything could knock Myka out of her certainty... certainly, itâs guilt. âOh god,â she says.
Claudiaâs narrow tension relaxes. âSteve and I figured out you were the one doing âunauthorized use.â And it took us a while, but we also figured out what you were unauthorized using.â
âThanks for not telling on me,â Myka says.
âI literally would never. And neither would Steve.â
Silence again, until Helena breaks it with, âMyka used an artifact? Was this for personal gain?â She doesnât look at Myka.
Myka wants to say Could we ignore that too. Instead she confesses, âFor personal... desperation.â
Now Helena looks. âSo at last you understand,â she says. Itâs a softer condemnation than Myka might have expected, not that she had expected anything, because until this moment she hadnât made the connection. Not through the clean line of âso at last.â
But then a new connection, or rather consequence, strikes her: âWhatâs its downside?â she asks Claudia.
âYou donât know?â
âI didnât care.â At that, Helena grasps Mykaâs hand, tight, and Myka knows sheâs going to have to think very hard at some point about this newly realized kinship between them. Right now, though, sheâd rather think about the fact that Helena is holding her hand. But for that niggling consequence. âDo I need to care?â she asks.
âItâs a downside, so yeah? But with this guy, itâs a downside-with-a-twist.â She pauses, as if waiting for... guesses? Applause? When neither Myka nor Helena responds, she says an aggrieved, âAnyway, itâs the same as the upside.â
This baffles Myka. âSeeing the future? How is that a downside? I mean maybe in the Cassandra sense, if nobody believes you, butââ
Claudia interrupts, âOOC of you to get that wrong. But I guess OOC is your new IC thing, Ms. âNoâ? Anyway I donât think you grokked what the artifact is.â
âA book,â Myka says, because... it is? âA future-seeing book.â
âBook, schmook. And future-seeing... schmuture-seeing? Itâs an oracle. It doesnât see the future; it predicts it. Literally, it says in advance: you ask it a question about the future, and it answers. It says it. In advance of that future.â
Helena chuckles. âEtymology strikes again.â
To which Claudia nods. âRight?â
âI still donât get it,â Myka says. âSaying versus seeing? In my defense, Iâm very tired.â She is sorely tempted to put her head down, heedless, here on the table, but she feels Helena tighten her handhold again, a press intelligible as Stay with me. She breathes deep and refocuses.
âIts answer is a decision,â Claudia says. âAbout the future.â
Helena looks at Myka, then at Claudia. âNow that is power.â
âAlso right,â Claudia says. âBut it canât make that decision if nobody asks it to. Myka.â
âI did ask it,â Myka concedes, âbut now my head hurts. Are you saying that if I hadnât asked, then none of this would have happened? Would be happening?â She canât argue with the outcome, but: upside, downside? Her head does hurt.
Claudiaâs face empties. She says, âAsking questions has consequences, Agent Bering.â
Has Claudia been taken over by... something? Myka canât help it now: âWhat?â she asks. The word rings a little less desperate, here at home, as a thing she tends to say. But sheâs no less lost.
âSorry,â Claudia says, turning back into herself. âI was trying on my spooky-Mrs.-F suit. Bad fit so far.â
âThe art of the gnomic utterance,â Helena intones. Her own utterance doesnât quite rise to gnomic, but Myka can see more clearly than ever the helios toward which Helena-as-Caretaker might have troped. Losses. Gains. How can Myka place herself in relation to so many competing ledger columns?
âDid you just insult Mrs. F?â Claudia asks, her obvious confusion breaking into Mykaâs reckoning. She might as well have said her own Myka-esque âWhat?â
âWhat?â Helena then asks, thus squaring that circle.
âThe red hat?â Claudia says, gesturing at her own head. âAnd doing magic or whatever in your garden?â
Sense at last. Myka doesnât quite suppress a laugh. âGnomic,â she says. âMeans terse. Mysterious. Not gnome-related... or actually, it is, but not those gnomes. Different derivation.â
âEtymology strikes yet again,â Helena says. She suppresses her own laughâMyka hears it behind that overly serious observationâbut not her smile.
âIâm really glad youâre here,â Myka tells her. The fact and experienceâcorrect, appropriateâof their speaking together. âClaudia,â she says (and Claudia is looking at them like theyâve both lost their minds, which they probably have, but not about this), âgo to the Warehouse. Keep everybody there. All day. Please.â
Claudia brings her hands together once again in a dramatically audible clap. âI get it. I mean Iâd say something about a booty call, but I know thatâs not it. You need your day.â
Our day? Our days. Our days, our weeks our months our years.
âYes,â Myka says.
Helena follows up with, âWe do.â
âHey, but Iâm no oracle,â Claudia says. âNo predictions here.â
Myka and Helena give her incomprehension again.
âNot ruling out booty call,â she clarifies, laughing, but she backs away as she speaks, now blessedly making her exitâunlike her entrance, through the B&Bâs front door.
That means Myka and Helena canâmustâmake their move. And they do, rising from the table, stepping toward the stairsâbut not yet up them, for Myka canât wait; her hands are at last finding Helenaâs hair, and as they do, as she touches and feels, she says, in wonder, âItâs just us. Itâs never been like this.â
âWhy would you comment on it?â Helena demands, as if Myka taking even an instant to reflect threatens to make the entire situation evaporate. Her hands are busy too, running along Mykaâs arms, not quite grasping, but then grasping, and then Myka canât comment on anything, because her lips are busied, back in that new state of being.
The journey to her bedroom: she had in the past allowed herself to imagine such travel, but carefully, the fantasy within strictures. Policed possibility. The walk, but not its end... not, in fact, the culmination, the sense of which had increasingly eluded her, a frustratingly constant receding of possibility, as if her body were teaching itself over time to echo Helenaâs incorporeality, her sensation waning, from body to limbs to fingertips alone, until all vocabularies of touch became words not near enough the tongue.
But now everything is nearing, nearing and blurring, boundaries dissolving, everything her body, her body everything, the stairs the hallway the room the clothes the hands the lips the skin the stumble the fall...
****
Myka slow-motions into consciousness, unable to discern where she is, knowing at first only that wherever it is, she was exhausted before she got there. Got here.
Thatâs mostly because she canât remember the preceding events, and experience has established that extreme fatigue is one of the few states that interferes with her otherwise reliable recall.
So she begins to sort it out, blinking sleep-weighted eyes. Her initial perception is that sheâs lying in a bedâa bed blessedly recognizable as hersâyet she also seems to be perceiving something else, something absurd: that Helena, of all people, is speaking to her. Speaking unclear words, near to her, while she is in this bed that is hers.
Iâm dreaming.
The words resolve: âAre you all right?â Helena asks, and Myka snaps to.
Not dreaming.
She is in her bed, and Helena is here. Their skin is... together. Helena, propped on an elbow, is regarding Myka in full recline.
Myka wants to answer Helenaâs question with a strong âyes.â But she isnât at a table and she doesnât want Helena to be reminded of her feral fabulisms, not here not now, so instead she dares to ask, âWhat happened?â
âI believe you fell asleep,â Helena says. âIn the middle of things.â
Mykaâs first thought is that she canât imagine a worse blunder. Her second is that of course she can. Her third, which she formulates second by second and piece on piece as her memory returns, is the one she says out loud. âIâm sorry. Iâm so, so sorry.â
Helena shakes her head. âI brought you coffee. That was all.â
Itâs a damning pronouncement. âYouâre saying I could have caffeinated, but instead I ruined everything.â Myka raises her left hand to cover her face. Sheâd use her right one too, but Helenaâs body is trapping that arm. Move, she wants to say. I need both hands. To cover her shame.
Helena uses her free, unpropping hand to remove Mykaâs, revealing her face. She interlaces their fingers. âYour sleep has addled you. Iâm saying that I brought you a small gift, but in return youâve given me a far greater one.â
New bafflement. âI have?â
âWitnessing your fulfillment of a bodily need.â
What could possibly be sufficient penance here? âNot the right one.â
Helena offers a considering head movement, a cerebral back-and-forth. âIsnât it? Proof that you trust me enough to lose consciousnessâin this wayâso near. Differently meaningful, but meaningful all the same. Particularly to someone who, as you know, occasionally forgets to âignore it.ââ
Her words have such depth, in sound and meaning, that Myka can barely process any of it. Particularly given that they are lying down in privacy... and far more.
âWhat am I supposed to do now?â she asks. Blunder some more, the book would no doubt reiterate... but sheâd rather get her guidance, here in this moment, from Helena.
âEnjoy it.â Helena says, and she laughsâthis sound not deep but high, high and so happy.
Myka has never heard this laugh from her. Itâs as much a directive as her words are. âEnjoy itâI didnât know,â she says. That comes out more terse than she intends... because she can barely speak. The joy in the roomâoccasioned by everything, but especially by that new, new laughâis so thick, interior and exterior to bodies and souls, that forcing words through it takes great effort.
âKnow what?â
Myka would worry about her answer sounding too intellectual, if this were anyone else. In her bed. But itâs Helena. Thank god, itâs Helena. So she feels safe to say, âItâs a corollary. Follows from âignore itâ? I think?â
âYes,â Helena says, gratifying Myka immensely, âyes, ignore it, about the past; enjoy it, about the present; and thus one additional corollary, this one about the future.â
âAsk an oracle about it?â Myka tries.
Helena frownsâexaggerated, comic. âThat doesnât follow, either poetically or epistrophically.â
âIt does follow epistrophically.â
âMinimally so,â Helena sniffs. The acknowledgment, itself minimal, further pleases Myka, even as Helena goes on, âBut it should scan as well. My proposal does.â She pauses, doubtless for effect. Myka tries to think out what the teased proposal might entail, but she doesnât get far before Helena pronounces, âAbsolve it.â
âThat does scan,â Myka acknowledges.
âThank you. This next doesnât, but I know youâll want to take on blame for how our future unfolds, so I add: absolve yourself as well.â
Ignore it; enjoy it; absolve it. These strategiesâdespite Mykaâs having insisted on the firstâare all antithetical to her way of being in the world.
But sheâs been unhappy, being in the world. Unsatisfied.
Now she is being satisfied, a new state that only this skin-to-skin with Helena could possibly have brought about.
She deliriously doesnât care whether Claudia has kept, did keep, is keeping everyone else away.
This is hers and she can and will enjoy it.
This is hers and Helenaâs and she can and will see to itâshe can and will ensureâthat they both enjoy it.
She has never before ideated such powerâcould never have, but here it is, in her hands, in her body, in giving and taking: power. And if sheâs still too tired to remember, on next waking, that she had it, itâs all right. Sheâll have another occasion to exert it. More anothers.
âDid you just say âmore anothersâ?â Helena asks, speaking and breathing with exertion.
Apparently thereâs still room, in and amongst the joy and the power, for embarrassment. âOut loud? Are you sure?â
Helena calms enough to say, with indignation, âMy hearing is quite good.â
âEvasive answer,â Myka says, recovering a little. âIâll take it as a no.â
âEvasive?â More indignation.
âIt wasnât a yes,â Myka points out.
Helena runs a hand through her hair, as if in preparation for more argument. âI propose we table this debate,â she says instead.
âGood idea,â Myka says. âBecause instead of talking, or asking about talking, you should be kissing me.â
âSo should you. Vice versa. Me. Kissing.â
Transportingly charming near-incoherence... âYouâre right,â Myka says, her heart overflowing. âSo be quiet.â
âYou first,â Helena ripostes, with what sounds suspiciously like a giggle.
Myka wants to keep that sound active, so she doesnât comply. And they continue to speak together. Through it all.
This time, Myka stays awake. Thatâs probably a blunder tooâbut itâs most satisfactory.
****
In the weeks and months that follow, Myka takes time, as she finds it, to visit the book. Often, its pages ruffle and sigh, their invitation clear: Donât you want to know? To know more?
The temptation is real, compounded by what she feels as an exertion of pressure from the volume: Did I not gift you this future? it seems to whisper. Surely you could gift me the opportunity to exercise. To provide still greater definition.
Then again, that could simply be her guiltâher ongoing struggle to absolve itâtalking.
On one such occasion (though not the only one), she hears footsteps. The rhythm, the particular ring of heel-strikes: she knows the confidence of those strides. The knowing is calming, if not itself absolving.
âBack already?â she asks without turning around.
âAbsurdly simple retrieval,â Helena says. âSteve found the entire exercise an insult to the considerable intelligence he and I bring to bear on any mission we undertake.â
Helenaâs interpretations of Steveâs thoughts are often baroqueâoften, seemingly, more suitable to her own thoughts. But when she offers such interpretations in Steveâs presence, he doesnât wince. âReally?â Myka says, just to make sure.
âHe said aloud that he was bored.â
âThatâs something,â Myka concedes.
âAnd you?â Helena asks. âHave you contrived to place new parameters on the future?â
âI keep telling you I wonât.â
âAnd yet I continue to find you here,â Helena says. More seriously, she offers words that have become customary: âIf you could be happy.â Steveâs utterance, shared among the three of them, has become a mantra.
âYou know thatâs a work in progress,â Myka says, and although thatâs customary too, itâs also true: while she knows she can be, and while at certain times she genuinely is, she is by no means consistent in that achievement.
Nevertheless she has to admit, now as always, that the book has been right. The blundersâthe many, many blunders, even as sheâs perpetrated them, even as sheâs dealt with their aftermathâhave been satisfactory. Such are the components of that work. Of its progress.
Helena nods. She lays her hand upon the book, as it lies there on the shelf, as if swearing an oath. âEverything is,â she says.
****
Myka sits at tables. She tells lies. But the sitting and the lying, as activities, are now uncoupled.
Coffee, too, has shed its significance; itâs a beverage, not an event.
However: she keeps a stained shirt in her closet as a reminder of earlier, pained, connected timesâof, also, the work that was even then in progress, even as she was failing, spectacularly, to recognize it as such.
She needs the reminder, because with regard to the past, âignore itâ doesnât always work. Nor does âabsolve it,â as the future unfolds.
But on the best of present days, ignoring and absolving intersect. And on those best days, Myka does, in fact and in practice, enjoy it.
END
Instead of shoehorning thoughts into tags, hereâs what Iâve got:
Did both Myka and Helena get let off the hook too easily? Your call... but Iâm inclined to embrace the idea that instances of grace might manifest as the reward for hard work, and acknowledging culpability may be the hardest work of all. I mean, Elton John wrote a song about it, so put that on whichever side of the ledger works for you. Also, I like it when people help Myka in ways she doesnât know how to ask for. She seems (to me) to be very bad at asking for help. Or maybe I mean that she seems disinclined to ask for help even (or especially) when she should.
Generally the only way to come out the other side of the hard stuff is to go through. But sometimes you do have to set some things aside if you want to move forward... and thatâs what this story, at base, has been about. I hope. I offer all gratitude to @barbarawar for giving me the impetus to think it through in this particular way, at my snail-in-a-school-zone pace. Finally, if thereâs a timeline in which Helena becomes an agent again and she and Steve donât become partners, I donât want to know about it. The potential perfection of their pairing thrills the bejesus out of me.
#too old for this shit
New evidence for the Tower of Babel?
Tabled 6
âChange the vocabulary!â Myka has just exclaimed in a hotel room in an airport in Chicago, in a full-throated effort to bring Helena around to her newly realized way of thinking, here in this story occasioned by @barbarawar âs months-ago @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange request regarding what would have happened if Myka and Helena had had their Boone-proposed coffee. Much has ensued since then: meetings poor and poorer, rendering hopes faint and fainter, leaving potentials squandered and... squandereder? Seeing to it that emotional moves make sense is always challenging, I find. People want to make sense to themselves, want to make sense of themselves, and someone as thinky as Myka would, I imagine, double-want that. But while we all contain multitudes, we tend to bumble through situations as unfull representations of those multitudes: weird gotta-keep-moving sharks desperate to present consistency. I too keep moving: trying to land this thing, even as it fights against the stick, remaining *this far* above ground. Apologies as always, my strung-along giftee. See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 for the convoluted way we got here.
Tabled 6
âWhat?â Helena says, but itâs not her usual âwhatâ; sheâs obviously flummoxed, and her echo of Mykaâs characteristic bafflement is precious. Preposterous, but precious.
Myka had hoped for some spark of recognition at her transformation of âchange the rules,â but the confusion... it might be better. Sweeter. She tries not to make too much meaning out of this chime of similarity, even as she wants to pull that soft, bewildered âwhatâ from the air and cradle it.
âI was trying to be clever,â she says. âNever mind that. And never mind fixing it, because we can do something else.â
âRepair it?â Helena says: a cautious, skepticalâand, yes, still baffledâsynonym proffer.
Donât laugh, Myka instructs herself, but faced with the idea that Helena really might think theyâre playing a word game, itâs hard to follow her own order. âNever mind that too,â she says, a chuckle bubbling in her throat. âBecause never mind. Because thatâs it. Because you know what we actually can do?â
Helena raises her hands up, high, obviously in question, but really for all the world as if she were indeed being held at gunpoint.
This is not ending as it began, Myka tells the universe. Not as it began, or any other way.
She chambers the only bullet she has, aiming it right at Helenaâs heart.
She pulls the trigger with a smile: âIgnore it.â
Hands still high, Helena opens her mouth slightly, and she squints, as if Myka has morphed into a dangerously unidentifiable animal.
Yes, Myka thinks, wildly, trying to live up to that wariness, Iâve been genetically engineered right here in this island of a hotel room! A Warehouse agent crossed with a yawper who has her very own plans! Amorphous ones, but! This infusion of abandonâMoreau power?âgives her the strength to hold Helenaâs gaze.
The standoff lasts until Helena gets her language working again. âThat recommendation is... entirely specious,â she says. âAnd you sound uncharacteristically overwrought.â
Itâs a wobbly pair of objections. Myka draws even more strength from Helenaâs lack of conviction. âWhat if it is? What if I am?â
âI donât believe the slate can be wiped clean,â Helena says, a little more firmly. âNor do you.â
So you do think we know each other. âIâm not saying it can. Iâm saying I know itâs dirty, and so do you. Iâm saying we ignore it.â
Helenaâs face, from her âwhatâ until now, has been a study in something Myka honestly never expected to see from her: full (fully wrong-footed) incomprehension. Myka doesnât blame her, for sheâs finding herself pretty incomprehensible, but she presses on. âYou were ready to ignore my Boone-changed opinion of you. Werenât you. When you hoped Iâd know I was the someone else.â
After a pause: âThat was then,â Helena says, her resentment at Myka for having worked her way to that truthâand for having articulated itâvery clear.
âOh, not anymore?â Myka pushes. âEven though now we both know I was that someone, and that there wasnât a Giselle?â
âThat was then,â Helena repeats.
Wait... âThereâs a Giselle now?â Myka canât process it, if itâs so. If itâs so, she will have to let Helena leave, then bury her face in one of the expensive pillows from this roomâs unignorable bed and scream.
Another head-toss, the most dramatic one thus far, accompanies Helenaâs next words. âIâm of a mind to say yes. But pursuant to my previously articulated policy, Iâll tell the truth: there isnât, but there could be. In the future. I agreed to meet with you today to ensure you wouldnât mistake yourself over Pete, but I have no intention of stepping into a similarly mistaken place. Iâve done my best to let this go.â
Myka canât accept any of those words. âIgnore that too,â she says. She would like to point out that that whole litany was pretty rich, coming from Ms. To-Continue-to-Speak-Together, but instead she zeroes in on what seems the clearest contradiction. âBut if youâre letting this go, why do you care about me mistaking myself over Pete?â
âWhy did you care about me mistaking myself in Boone?â Helena counters, sour.
The response is uncharacteristically incompetent, particularly because Helena already knows the answer. âI could repeat something somebody once told me, about not walking away from what she called âyour truth,ââ Myka says, with what she hopes is a âthat was thenâ fillip. âBut I wonât. What Iâll really say is, I asked you first.â She allows herself a half-breath to marvel at how unusual it is for her to have this much of the upper hand.
âI could say the same thing.â Helena is visibly struggling not to acknowledge Mykaâs advantage, but she collapses, saying, âThe former, not the latter. I didnât ask you first,â her devotion to accuracy (or so Myka reads it) defeating her. âNevertheless I could repeat the something somebody once told you. As the why.â
Myka continues to press. âBut isnât repetition boring? You hate being boring.â She hopes this observation might visit upon Helena that kick of so we do know each other: âI bet you threw your coffee on me just so I wouldnât walk away thinking how dull youâd been.â
âThat was not the reason,â Helena says, but with a press of lips that suggests a ripple of otherwise.
Here, Myka shouldnât press. âThen what was the reason.â
âYou were being recalcitrant, and you know it,â Helena says.
âAnd what are you being now?â Myka asks, as laconicallyâas lean-back, as Helena-esqueâas she can.
That question causes Helena to scowl and move energy into her hands, extending and then bending her fingers; though she doesnât quite form them into fists, her intent is clear: she wants to deck Myka. Itâs glorious. Please, do it, Myka urges internally, so we can get this all out in the physical open.
But Helena resets her face and waves her hands, the flutter of fingers dispelling the energy and its threat. âRealistic,â she says, prim.
Quit acting like me, Myka would tell her, but for the fallout. What she says is, âI wish I still had this coffee,â pointing at the table, the tragic cup-ceremony of which probably now deserves replaying as farce. Or was it farce the first time? No surprise, really, that they would skip-jump their way over the natural course of history.
âYes, because stains solve problems,â Helena sarcastics.
Maybe; maybe not. Nevertheless, Myka says whatâs true: âYou seemed to think they would. And anyway, they redound to your benefit.â Helena greets this with a completely reasonable additional âwhat,â but Myka blows past it with, âMaybe because you ignore them? Anyway, this one hereââshe gestures to the now-dry coffee-map on her shirt (it looks like no country, and sheâs disappointed to be unable to name it as âthis Brazilâ or âthis Azerbaijanâ)ââkept me from walking away when you thought I shouldnât.â
âA delaying tactic,â Helena says, offering only bored disdain, as if the very idea of it had been in the end inconsequential.
Keep pushing. âHow long was that delay supposed to last, anyway?â
Helena doesnât have an answer; Myka knows it because she begins to pace. She starts, of course, at the doorway, then walks past the bed, over to the window, and back again: bed then doorway, doorway then bed, bed then window, back and forthâsix times, Myka countsâbefore she leans her back against the door, crosses her arms over her chest, and says, âWhy are you tempting me this way? Why this way? Whatâs changed? In this room, in the few breaths since resignation and coffee, whatâs changed?â Itâs a fret.
âWell, whatâs changed for you?â Myka asks, with no fret at all for once in her life. âMore breaths since, but why did authority let you out of Boone-prison?â
Helenaâs face produces an inscrutable scowl-smile hybrid. She thrusts herself away from the door, walks to the bed, rubs her hands together. Re-gathering energy? âI suppose I could offer a long-winded explanation about having been given to understand that the balance of safety and threat had shifted. But instead, to quote: âWhat Iâll really say is, I asked you first.ââ
âWell played,â Myka admits. In return, sheâs gifted with the little acknowledging bow of head she loves. (Lovesâyes.) It draws her physically closer, that head-bow: only a few shuffling inches, but enough that she can answer, more quietly, âWhatâs changed is I saw a future. And I saw how much Iâm willing to ignore to have it.â
âI do not understand your morality,â Helena says. This time, she sounds a note of wonder rather than censure.
So much recursion in what they say, think, feel, doâonce, then back again, and then again. Maybe theyâre bound to get something right, if they try everything over and over? This particular repetition-with-variation seems a little better than usual, tragedy repeated not as farce but as fairy tale... or, no: Warehouse tale. Because for better or worse, thereâs no escaping the Warehouse, the curse but also blessing of wonder. She and Helena are here together today only because of the Warehouseâthat necessary condition of their meeting and connection.
Myka could dilate forever upon fate and purpose, but âignore itâ must be her mantra now, her grounding principle. For better or worse... for better and worse. The true moral of any Warehouse tale.
âI donât understand anybodyâs morality,â she says, âespecially not mine or yours. Iâm not trying to. Iâm ignoring that too.â
But what she canât ignoreânot now, not anymoreâis the way in which their bodies have, so gradually, continued to near, with Helena slowly mirroring Mykaâs movements, these little distance-closing developments. So small is the gap between them now, the displacement it would take to touch surely must be measured by time, not distance.
And yet she hesitates, for this raise of hand must speak correctly: not want, but offer.
Slow. Stretch that time, turn it back into space.
She does that, moving as slowly as she can. More slowly than she ever has.
Helena doesnât retreat.
Minimalist increments... yet their yield is immense: Mykaâs right hand meets Helenaâs left, and their fingers link and twist, palms not pressed but near.
It is their first genuinely mutual touch since Boone.
âI will be blunt,â Helena says, soft, burred by the contact. âI need you to... just say.â
Blunt. This knife of requestâindeed unsharpâmeets Mykaâs fears, at first bending against them, yet still bearing threat. The force of it makes her glance away, and again sheâs drawn to the clock. All she can find to articulate is, âI missed my flight.â
It could have been a way of saying, but Myka didnât mean it like that, and Helena knows it: she raises an eyebrow. The leavening takes away the knife, and it gives Myka leave to lighten too, to postulate, âMaybe weâre constitutionally incapable. Of the saying. Or maybe itâs just me? Okay, not maybeâprobably. Is that a dealbreaker?â
Now Helena cocks her head, completing the gesture with a lifting twist of chin. It calls of early, early: Helena handcuffed in a chair, Myka foolishly imagining she knew how all the ensuing moments would goâthen being flung up to meet the ceiling.
The book would have known that would happen, but Myka didnât. Hasnât. Flights, crashes. Over and over, each as unpredictable as every other. Which will Helena choose to inflict now?
âHave we agreed to a deal?â Helena asks. The question isnât coy. âIgnoring may be a way forward, but historically, you do seem to presuppose the existence of agreements that you fail to inform me Iâm a party to. That you then accuse me of violating.â
So: an objection, but one grounded in their shared history. A flight and a crash. âThat is an uncomfortably accurate description of what I do,â Myka admits. âLet me start again. I missed my flight. Did you?â
âMiss your flight? Yes.â More leavening: unfunny joking, words for the sake of them. To continue to speak together... of course this has been what Myka wished too. Of course she would listen to Helena saying words about anything.
Not anything, her Boone-and-Giselle-haunted memory reminds her...
âBut that was not the issue under discussion,â Helena continues. A providential interruption.
âRight. Dealbreaker. Saying. Inability.â Why are you vamping? What is the impediment? The answer is immediate: You are the impediment. âChange the vocabularyâ was a nice idea, but one word was never going to be enough. âLook,â she begins, determined now to do better, âIââ
Helena tightens her fingersâ grasp against Mykaâs. Itâs a very different way of getting things out in the physical open. âWanting you warps all I do,â she whispers. The words, the grasp: both are saying. Out in the open.
More even than the oh-so-welcome grasp, the words mean everything to Myka. And their meaning is itself everythingâeverything that mattersâso she steals them and says them back: âWanting you warps all I do.â Itâs mind-clearingly correct. The relief of at last having an accurate description of the past half-decade: it hits her like that slug sheâd perversely hoped Helena might deliver.
But having used Helenaâs words, however perfect, while coming up with none of her own pains her, so she feels she has to modify, âWarps. And warped, but not in any of the ways that might have helped. I canât apologize enough for how I got it all so wrong.â
Helenaâs tilt of head gentles. Her chin drops. âSomeone has recently recommended, rather eloquently, ignoring such things.â She smiles. âYou are terrible at following your own prescription.â
Helpless to object, Myka says, âThat canât come as a surprise.â
âA surprise? No. Perhaps an obstacle.â
âWould you... surmount it?â
Helena says, âFor you...â
Myka fears she hears a lift of question. âThatâs what I meant. Would you?â
âAs stated: for you.â
The certainty is... transporting. Nevertheless, âI donât know how this will work,â Myka admits. âIf this will work.â
âNor do I,â Helena says, yet her admission is a balm.
So much remains to be negotiated. So fragile this semi-resolution between their hands.
Then: âIâm so tired,â Helena says, actual rather than despondent, and Myka is ready to agree that yes, she is tired too, that everything thatâs taken place in this room has taxed her to her limits, but Helena follows that admission with, âWill you lie down with me?â
Myka tenses. Her immediate, insistent bodily approval of the idea jangles against her just-as-immediate worry over where such a requestâand such approvalâmight lead.
No doubt feeling that stiffening via their still-joined hands, Helena says, âFor rest. Rest, in privacy, and nothing more.â
Myka believes her. She doesnât trust herself, for her self is a serial liar with terrible impulse control, but she believes Helena.
Who is also a serial liar, one with similarly terrible impulse control, but saying ânoâ to this person who has so lately spoken of want and warp, this person whose hands continue to grip hers, is not an option.
Thus in a hotel room in an airport in Chicago, Myka lies down on a bed, and Helena lies beside her. They shift their bodies awkwardly, then less so, as they find a fit: Myka on her back, Helena on Mykaâs left side, curled like punctuation around everything theyâve suffered.
From a position moments ago unimaginable, Myka finds room to ask, âWhat are you doing?â
âWhat? Nothing,â Helena says, as if Myka has made an accusation. She stills the slight, slight stroke her fingers have begun to apply to Mykaâs hair.
More unfunny comedy. âI donât mean with your hand. I mean, every day. In your life.â
âOh,â Helena says. The stroke resumes. âWaiting.â
âYou said you hadnât stopped living.â
âThat is not what I said.â
âIf you could press pause on the semantics.â Itâs true that Myka couldâshouldâquote with greater accuracy, given that she knows exactly what Helena said. But Helena knows that Myka knows exactly what Helena said, and while continuing to speak together is the weirdly frustrating joy it is, they should really try to get somewhere.
Helena sighs; the sound contains a put-upon âfine.â She says, âI pretend to have expertise in several areas, including forensic analysis, for which pretensions Iâm paid absurd amounts of money.â
âEnds before means?â Myka asks, a tiny joke.
âMy own fabulism is unsurpassed.â
Thatâs probably a joke too, but thinking back on her own vast course of lies, Myka finds it important to counterclaim, âIâm not sure thatâs true.â
âDoes competition truly matter at this late date? A win in this category is dubiousâsinful, evenâbut today Iâm inclined to concede your victory in anything you like.â
So she understood Myka was talking about herself; is that pleasing or disturbing? In any case, Myka does know the concession as a surprise: âYou are?â
âToday. For here we are, at rest. Salvaged. By you.â
âBut only because you wrecked my shirt,â Myka reminds her.
Theyâve been wrecked, over and over, with stained shirts only the most recent, small detritus. Yet here they are, salvaged, washed up on some unfamiliar shore... this island of a hotel room: no Moreau; instead, uncharted.
Would that it were an island, one they could make their home.
âOnly because,â Helena echoes. âOnly because you were being recalcitrant... but we canât carry such recursion back ab ovo.â
âOr we can,â Myka says with a hiccupy laugh, momentarily captured by the possibility, seeing it as a burrowing-in, a we-got-here-and-this-is-how affirmation.
âThis from the woman whose mantra would be âignore itâ?â
âGame show,â Myka goes on, the laugh persisting; thereâs no escaping the beautiful factâshe might have imagined it would be true but now itâs a factâthat lying with Helena wrapped around her makes her giddy. âWhoever buzzes in with the preceding turning point the fastest gets...â
âWhat?â
âI was about to say âa point,â but that sounds weird. A point for a point?â
Helenaâs cheek flexes against Mykaâs, in what Myka suspects is her I-donât-quite-understand squint. âA point for a point... surely that should be the name of the program? But Iâm not conversant with game shows.â
âYou are a little. Whammies.â
Another flex of cheek. âThe current argot for being affected by an artifact?â
Sheâs right. But. âItâs from a game show. The coinage... itâs Peteâs.â Myka wishes she could have forever avoided introducing him into the conversation, the room, the problem. But in the end this hotel room isnât an island.
Helena nods. The movement is an acknowledgement of what Myka has doneâbut itâs also yet another blessed slide of her skin against Mykaâs. âWhat will you tell him?â Helena asks, and Myka can face the question only sideways, through the warmth of the slide.
Lying in bed is unquestionably better than sitting at a table. Myka nevertheless feels an incipient lie forming, a dodge to push off difficulty: I donât know, she could tell Helena, and maybe that lie of omission would suffice, here as they lie in a comfort Myka has already disturbed more than enough.
However. The truth is sheâll tell him whatever she has to, to get herself free. To make him let go. So thatâs what she says to Helena: âWhatever it takes.â
To her shock, the out-loud saying wallops her with a vision of a still different future, one stark and Warehouse-less. The view is empty: of purpose, of feeling. A disaster. âWhat happens if I burn it all down?â she asks. Her heartbeat speeds; her blood floods fearful.
âAs you should have in Boone?â Helena responds, with acid; then, âSorry. Momentarily failed to follow the âignoreâ prescription myself.â She raises herself on an elbow and looks down at Myka. Itâs a new, breathtaking view, one that Myka feels her prior lack of as acute deprivation.
Into that negative space, Helena says, âIf you burn it all down, then you and I will rise from the ashes.â
Every word is clear as still water.
Purpose: Myka and Helena, rising. Not empty of feeling; rather, replete. That reward would elevate.
âIs that what you want?â Helena asks. âTo burn it down?â
âYes.â Myka can say it; itâs true, if the rise is the result. And yet she canât uncommit her professional self so easily and entirely. âBut also no. And I have to tell him something.â
ââIgnoreâ is a powerful word,â Helena observes.
âI donât think that will work,â Myka says, for she can hear his escalating âbut whyâ iterations as clearly as if she were herself the Ladiesâ Oracle of the uncanny book. âIâll have to explain. That I was wrong?â she tries, but thatâs too small. âThat Iâm always wrong and he should have known that?â
âReally? Then you must be wrong about me as well.â
âDonât use my overgeneralizing words against me,â Myka says. She touches Helenaâs temple, intending it as a rebuke.
It lands instead as a caress, against which Helena leans and nestles. âArenât I using them against me?â she asks, low and amused.
Myka says, because she canât not, because the words are desperate to be said, âThis. I want this.â Joking, disputing, speaking, bodies together (and so much more of bodies together): all of this.
âMe using your words against myself? I see why you would.â Helena smiles against Mykaâs neck, then raises herself up again, her expression changing over. âBut thank you. For saying.â She follows this by reclining, nestling closer still.
The words, and the movement, are warming, but leaning all the way in would lead down a path too tantalizing. âYouâre welcome,â Myka says, but she follows it with, âWhen we leave this room. What will you do?â she asks, because this is something she doesnât know but might now learn, no book required. Just a Helena.
But thereâs no âjustâ about Helena, and particularly not when sheâs gazing up at Myka, sweet yet flinty, and that look tempers her answer. âWait,â she says, differently than she said âwaitingâ; now the task rings of burden and freedom both. Waiting for something, rather than waiting, without predicate.
However, that predicate: Myka is the one who must act. âIâm sorry,â she says.
âIâm accustomed.â
The little shrug of resignation that accompanies those words: Myka feels it small against her shoulder, but its implications make it seem a larger shudder. Helena has waited through so muchâdecades of punishments, and Myka should not make her suffer anything even vaguely similar. Sheâs about to say âIâll hurry,â even with no idea of what that would look like, but sheâs preempted by Helena saying, into her ear, âBut please hurry.â A breath of telepathic direction.
So. Now she must.
Yet that direction requires changing not the rules, nor even the vocabulary, but the speed with which the future is ushered near. Itâs a daunting prospect.
Daunting but necessary, if Myka is to blunder satisfactorily. âI will,â she says. But what is necessary isnât sufficient, not if the goal is to bring about the truly desired future. âOnce Iâve done... that. What comes next?â
Helena shifts her position again, un-nestling herself from Mykaâs neck, her head still on the bed but reared back a bit, looking up, and Myka tilts her head to look down. Sheâs often had to angle down, just that bit, to look into Helenaâs eyes, but this prone person is a dramatically differently enjoyable inflection of the standing version.
As she appreciates the view, she receives Helenaâs answer: âYou should text me.â
So strange to hear that voice say that sentence. But relief dizzies Myka, even as sheâs reclining and looking, for she realizes itâs just strange; Helena saying it doesnât make her seem a stranger.
âAnd then we should meet for coffee,â Helena addsâlightly, but not throwaway.
âOr save the world?â Myka says, trying for the besting echo. Trying to overwrite the words said in Boone.
âAnd save the world,â Helena says. âOur world.â
The modified callback is pointed and just right; it overrides both Boone and Mykaâs attempt. Myka shakes her head and says, âIâm no match for you.â
âCounterpoint: you are the match for me.â
How can it be true that Helena is saying these words? Ever, but more so here, on this day, the one Myka intended to end with the end, this day, that is instead ending with a beginning.
Not enough of a beginning, though, and Myka wants to make that clearâthat, and her regret at its clear, clear, clear, yet absolutely necessary insufficiency. She says, âI want to kiss you more than Iâve ever wanted anything in my life.â Helena doesnât move; she has to know whatâs coming next, and Myka delivers it: âBut I canât.â
Helena sighs. âI do not understand your morality.â
Third time the charmâthe Helena-knows-it charm.
She might as well know it, because who is Myka, really, to recognize and hold to some bright line? But to start now would entail a foundational lieââIâm freeââone that would infect all that came after.
You could ignore that too...
Animals, animals. Of course they would advocate for the body getting what it wants, regardless of consequences.
But the dismissal of obligation, though it might seem easy now, canât help but make realizing the future more strenuous. Myka should not increase the burden. Thus in the end, despite the pain of want, she has to get herself out from under the bodily lie she so desperately and foolishly toldâshe has to do that before she can give herself leave to know the bodily truth. It may be just as desperate and foolish, if differently so, but she wants, wants, wants to know it.
âLike I said, I donât either,â she says, to ward off, for what she hopes will this time not seem forever, Helenaâs charm. So as to think herself as far away as possible from the basic physical reality that a tiny turn of her head could âaccidentallyâ join their lips, she turns the opposite way and tells the ceiling, âI have to rebook my flights now.â
âTo set the future in motion,â Helena says. Agreement, but aggrieved.
Myka smiles at both of those, allowing herself a minimal turn back toward Helena. Sheâs a far better sight than the ceiling. âYou do know something about that.â
Helena breathes out, probably in more-aggrieved affirmation, and she makes no move to sit up. Is it possible to be aggressively still?
Helenaâs answer is an impressive yes.
Myka allows herself a dispensation, as she did when she watched Helena approach in the airport, so many hours ago: twenty more breaths before she takes the get-up initiative, as Helena very clearly intends to force her to do. So she breathes. Very. Very. Slowly. Inhale: beat... beat... for as many beats as she can manage. Hold, for the same: an the number is not small. Exhale again as many, then again, hold. Thatâs one. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Hold. Two.
Eighteen more of these with Helena warm against her; it isnât how she ever imagined heaven, or its earthly approximation, but here it is.
For now.
Right as she reaches inhale thirteen: âAre you asleep?â Helena whispers.
âSssh. Iâm counting.â
Helena doesnât ask âwhat.â She stays still, now solid and present only, until Myka reaches the pause after her twentieth exhale.
Disengagement is difficult.
After, they busy themselves with phones and booking. Myka situates herself at the desk, while Helena reclines on the bed: these stations they might have taken if they had done nothing but inhabit this room as travelers, travelers now bored before departing.
Helena finishes before Myka does, at which point her reclining becomes reclining, a grandiose occupying of space. A new Helena aspect, and Myka would never have seen it, never if not for salvage, wrecking, recalcitrance... back and back and back. How they got here.
âI donât want to leave,â she tells that new grandiosity.
Helena stretches, arms up then sweeping wide, as if making a snow angel. Then she props herself up on her elbows. She moves both her hands, a finger-flutter suggesting that whatever statement she about to issue is obvious. And it is: âThen weâll stay forever.â
For a brief counterfactual burst of cosmology, Myka believes they could. But this time Helena is the one to rise and dismiss the possibility, although she does it with still more ostentation: âAnd yet this room is entirely inappropriate as anyoneâs final resting place.â
Myka loves every muscled, meaningful emphasis. From inside that love, she pities her earlier-today self, the one who thought she could have lived without the continued possibility of this.
Well. She could have lived. But it wouldnât have been living.
For all their need to speak together, their final minutes in the room are silent, as if refraining from using that small duration of their privacy to the purpose they set, they might be able to bank it. Against some unprivate, nonspeaking future.
As they reenter the unprivate hallway and head toward the far greater unprivate spaces of transit, Myka says, âThat coffee was expensive.â
âWorth every penny.â The and you know it is inescapable.
Inescapable and true.
Helenaâs flight is scheduled to leave well before (the first of) Mykaâs isâNew York is so much easier to reach than anyplace named Dakota.
âNot The Dakota,â Helena says when Myka shares this gloomy observation with her, as they wait for the tram to the terminals.
Myka doesnât know whether to groan or congratulate her on the reference. She settles for a sincere âTouchĂ©,â then asks, âShould I come to your gate with you? To... sit?â Sheâs thinking on sitting together. Sitting together. What people see when they look.
âShould you?â Helena asks back, with an eyebrow.
âNo,â Myka has to concede. âIâd want to kiss you goodbye.â
âAnyone looking would expect you to kiss me, and/or me to kiss you. Goodbye or otherwise. But youâve made it clear that isnât in the offing until we can fulfill everyoneâs expectations.â
âEveryoneâs?â
âOurs and those of fortunate observers.â
âOf course youâd think theyâre fortunate,â Myka says; she hears and feels affectionâdistinct from wantâin her voice. Affection has been gone for so long between them... she welcomes its old-friend tenderness, gently yet insistently shouldering its way through all that must be ignored.
More eyebrow, differently inflected. âOf course they are fortunate. You underestimate our beauty but, more significantly, your own.â
Such a compliment is unassimilable right now, so Myka counters with, âBut not yours. I donât underestimate yours.â
Helena leans backward. âYour saying such things is why you should not come with me to my gate,â she says, and Myka reads the lean as speaking commensurately about what is unassimilable. âBecause I want you to come with me,â Helena goes on, to Mykaâs delight, âand then to board the flight with me.â
âBurning it all down,â Myka notes.
âWhich you donât want to do,â Helena notes back.
âBut I will if I have to.â
Helena now offers a wrinkle of brow. âThere is almost always a better way. You showed me that.â
The wrinkle doesnât belong, so Myka tries to smooth it by saying, with a lightness, âYou were going to freeze it all down. Totally different.â
âIn any event the way found then was better... and, I must say, better than shooting you in the head.â Helena says this dry, joking back, yet also a little stunned, probably at the idea that Myka would joke in the first place.
Myka answers that surprise with, âIâm pretty happy you thought so.â
Helena doesnât move, but she saysâtight, as if dampening some vibrationââYour understatement is rhetorically effective. In that I now want to kiss you more than I ever thought I could again be capable of wanting.â
This should be simple. Grab her right now and never let her go. But nothing is as simple as it should be, so Myka says, âIâll bear that understatement thing in mind.â
âI suspect Iâm weak for a wide array of rhetorical techniques. When deployed by you.â
The bubbling of possibility is... irresistible. âIâll make a study,â Myka says, exerting great effort to keep herself under control. âMaybe litotes next.â
âNot ineffective, you may find.â
They are tuned tight to each other now. In public, but speaking privately. If they can keep this alignment... theyâve had it before, lost it, got it back. Myka lets herself dissolve into one final dispensation: the blissful idea that they will always get it back.
Are there any words to describe what she is, other than âin loveâ? If so, she doesnât want to know them.
She also doesnât want to watch Helena walk away. Sheâs mourned such walks too often. So they clasp hands one more time, then let go; Helena turns away, and Myka, after enjoying the movement of Helenaâs hair the turn occasionsâthat swirl of fluid promiseâdoes too.
****
At the Sioux Falls airportâwhich Myka, hating its provincial familiarity, always greets with an internal but why do I have to know this place whineâshe wants nothing more than to roll off the plane and into the car sheâd parked in the absurdly small lot so many hours or days ago, thence rolling on to the B&B and into some state that might, if sheâs lucky, resemble sleep.
What she wants is not what she gets.
Mrs. Frederic is standing by the security exit.
 TBC

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Tabled
Hi @barbarawar , and happy Gift Exchange to you! Hereâs what you said to anonymous-me: âOkay, so we know up until Instinct HG wasnât in contact with Myka, but after it seems maybe they were from Mykaâs reference to HGâs girlfriend in the finale for example. Did they ever get that coffee? Do they talk regularly? If you could do something with that thatâd be awesome!â
First, I should say that from Instinct onward, the show seemed committed to forcing its characters into shapes that fit (or âfitâ) an apparently predetermined, clichĂ©d outcome, and I share the resentment that many feel about how awful that was. However! For the purposes of your gift, itâs that sense of âfit,â in quotes, that Iâve set out to push at in this piece. When people (well, characters) are forcedâor feel themselves forcedâto âfitâ into particular narratives, what damage is done? How much of that damage is irreparable? And what does it mean for damage to be irreparable, anyway? This story offers some maybe-answers.
(P.S. This is going to be two parts, both because Iâm incapable of being succinct and because I would like to get it right. Right-ish. Second part will appear in due time, with apologies for making you wait.) (P.P.S. The book referenced herein is real, which I hope comes as no surprise.) (P.P.P.S. Much gratitude, as always, to @kla1991 for the @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange management!)
Tabled
Myka sits at tables and tells lies.
She wouldnât have imagined sheâd take up these conjoined activitiesâan irrational hobby if ever there was oneâbut: here she is.
At times, this joint doing is an obstacle course, but today itâs simple. Artie, stationed across from her, asks, âAre you making unauthorized use of an artifact?â
Heâs asking everybody, one on one; Claudia had been the first interrogatee, and sheâd told Myka to brace herself, with a groan of âWhy does he have to turn into Torquemartie like this? âOh, the pingâs coming from inside the Warehouse!â Dude. Artifacts get weird. They make pingy noises. Doesnât mean weâre running around punching our downside cards.â
In the past, Myka wouldnât have needed the heads-up, for she would have been innocent and indignant. And in fact she doesnât need it now, for now sheâs a practiced liar, so: âNo,â she says (innocent), and âof course not,â she adds (indignant).
âIf you run across anything that... strikes you,â Artie says.
âIâll tell you.â Also a lie. Things that strike her, she keeps to herself.
Unlike her table-set lying, thatâs not new.
âI think I might be a writer,â sheâd said to her father, before she was old enough to have learned better. Eight. Sheâd been eight, and in school sheâd written a story about a girl who tamed a lion. Her teacher had asked her to read it aloud to the class.
âYou know nothing about that,â heâd snapped back, and the sting of it taught her: if you love something, if it sets you on fire, thatâs wrong. Kill it.
And if you canât? Then hide it.
Myka, having discovered after much effort that she had no talent for killing her love for anything, had become adept at hiding it, particularly from her family: sheâd hidden her love of writing, after that first young cut; later, sheâd hidden her affinity for law enforcement, every scrap of satisfaction she took in the accolades she received for valor, dedication, marksmanship, all of it; sheâd even hidden the perverse pride she took in her adept ability to hide.
She hid everything, from her family and then from everyone, and she was adept at the hiding. That didnât keep her clandestine investments from going southâwitness Samâbut she was adept.
Until Helena.
Helena short-circuited Mykaâs hiding mechanism. So much fire, so uncontainable, and it all spilled out, so loud, so open. So... unhidden.
So Myka has reasserted her old ability, augmented as it has had to be, here where she dwells in so many layered aftermaths. Sheâs hidingâwhich, fine, maybe thatâs passive lying, but at least itâs a sin of omission. And sheâs uttering (but not only uttering) untruths: this new, committed sin.
If she were paid by the lie, she could retire. Oh, and if she retired now, how about this: evil, crazy, dead; sheâs got the trifecta too. Evil because she tells lies, which is no good in any cosmos; crazy because thatâs what those lies render her in her head; and dead... well.
She could lie to herself and chalk that, too, up to those table-lies, but what would be the point? She wouldnât believe herself. She remembers too much about what being alive felt like. She canât fail to understand the contrast now.
****
âJust coffee next time,â Helena had said, and while Myka had counterproposed âsave the world,â she hadnât explicitly turned down the coffee proffer, and that had resulted, via a weird press of obligation in her head that hurt like hope, in her having to accept it when it was in fact proposed.
When Helena had contacted herâby text, and the Helena of before (before, oh, before) would never have begun âR u available,â so the texter seemed from the start a strangerâMyka had thought, Sure, I can do this, only to think, Tâminus five minutes, I canât do this.
Because sheâd compartmentalized, until that zero-nigh moment, the implications of what had brought Helena near: a forensics conference in Nebraska, which had to mean Helena was still working that... Myka tried to say âjobâ in her head. Instead it came out âcon.â
Thinking that word, doing the work of thinking it further into a sneer, helped paper over at least enough of her panic to allow her to walk into the designated coffee shop, a walk she tried to take with no expectations or intentions. I will see Helena. That was all. I will see Helena.
And see her Myka did, her face in profile against a window that offered, in stark contrast, a plain gray Nebraska sky. Its neutrality set Helenaâs beauty in high relief. She was striking enough, as always, to instantly take a heart and break it, and yet to Mykaâs gaze, this first sight after a length of time, she struck uncanny, like a painting of herself. Or not even that: instead some inartistic facsimile, an AI-generated irreality unworthy of her name.
Even so... even so, Myka could have regarded Helena foreverâshow me her, any version, and I will hungrily lookâbut looking, now, seemed an endpoint, not at enticement. Before (before, oh, before), Helena had been a magnet, aligning Mykaâs entire compass of being to her true-north pull.
Now, with Helena dead metal, Myka had no way to orient herself.
She stood in the coffee shopâs entryway, trying to decide, and I canât do this echoed in her head. Doing this, making it real, would put this fake-Helena in place of the ideal-Helena to whom Myka still, even after the Boone-crash, clung. I shouldnât do this.
Her body gathered itself to leave, so as to not do this, but Helenaâas if she sensed both Mykaâs presence and her ambivalenceâmoved her even-now-so-beautiful head, turned to catch Mykaâs gaze, and there was no escape.
So Myka sat at a table across from Helena. Having coffee. What wouldnât she have given for this chance, this quiet chance, at so many hinge points of their history?
âAre you well?â Helena asked. Her voice was as uncanny as her face, emanating from an elsewhere that admitted none of that history.
There Myka sat, at a table across from Helena, hating the chance, hating that she now hated the chance. And from the depth of that hate, she told a lie: âYes,â she said. She did not knowâcould not have knownâthat it was the first of many.
She had tried to logic herself out of culpability, there in that first lying moment, away from what exams and scans seemed to be revealing. What does âwellâ really mean, anyway? Sheâd driven a car to get here, and she hadnât committed any moving violations while doing so; she was drinking coffee (terrible coffee that tasted of slag) without spilling it on herself; words emerged from her mouth in a language she spoke with reasonable fluency. She was functioning, and any reasonable person might consider the ability to function a measure of wellness, so, âYes, Iâm well,â she reiterated. Re-lied.
As their conversation, if that was the word for it, continued, Mykaâs first impressions were borne out: Helenaâs aspect was wrong, as in the lab in Boone, when she and Pete had witnessed her strange matter-of-fact performance of something that didnât quite rise to the level of amnesia: rather than lacking her memory, as in the first Emily Lake disaster, in that lab sheâd had no depth. H.G. Wells with no depth! The first of so many Boone sacrileges...
And there in Nebraska, the sacrileges had continued. âHomeâ was a word Helena used, over and over, and Myka experienced each utterance as an accusatory taunt, as if Helena were saying, with emphasis: You told me to do this, so I did.
Had Helena made the accusation aloud, it would of course have been no lie. Myka had said the words; the responsibility was hers. She deserved this punishment. Because that, some snake agreed in a whisper, was when your lies truly began.
Once their conversation (that was not the word for it) had petered outâleaving Myka mourning their ability to talk for hours before (before, oh, before)âthe goodbye was awkward: in its too-formal words, for they clanged against the intimacies of the past, but also in its estranging absence of physicality. The latter was Mykaâs doing, as she made sure to keep the table between their bodies. Sheâd made the mistake of touching Helena in Boone, there at that bitter end. She was certainly not going to do that again. Those burns on her body had not healed.
Driving back to the Warehouse, she tried initially to keep her composure, but it was no use; she gave up and yelled at the Helena in her head: Why couldnât you be yourself! Make sense! Break through! (She aggressively refused to understand that she was yelling just as loudly at whatever lying version of âMyka Beringâ sheâd been performing, there during âcoffee.â) She told herself the car-yelling was perfectly normal, or at leastâin keeping with her justificatory themeâperfectly functional: she was getting Helena out of her system, so she could fit herself back into her nothing-is-the-matter Warehouse suit.
As if she were ever going to get Helena out of her system.
âHow was your... coffee?â Steve had asked her, back at the B&B.
Myka hadnât confided in him, not fully, but he had a tendency to ask discerning questions, and she had a corresponding tendency to answer. Sometimes, it was a relief.
This time it was not. âI donât want to talk about it,â she had said.
He whistled, a muted but sharp little inhale. âAinât that the truth,â was his verdict.
Myka laughed. It hurt.
****
Artieâs concern about unauthorized artifact use is surprising to Myka only in that he took as long as he did to realize it was occurring: for personal enlightenment (if not gain, but really, what was âgainâ?) Myka has twice consulted a book. Its title is The Fortune-Teller; or, Peeps into Futurity, and its publication date is 1861, but neither that title nor that date is its salient feature. No, its salience lies in the artifactual ability of one part of itâknown as âThe Ladiesâ Oracleââto predict the future.
These consultations had begun as a result of that initial âcoffee,â which had rendered Myka bereft, even more so than Boone had (as if her bereavements were rankable). In its wake sheâd needed something, anything, to grasp and hold. She knew she couldnât find comfort in the past, that treacherous country, and the present was merely something through which she was struggling to swim. That left the future.
So she had researched, furtive but diligent, until she found her little candidate.
Youâre doing this because turning back time didnât do what you wanted it to, did it, some truth-insistent fold of her cerebral cortex had jeered when sheâd first considered using the book. Youâre praying this direction will be different.
The accusation was fair. Reasonable. Thus, standing before the book, considering its perils, its unknown downside, sheâd tried to resist: Donât, she told herself. Sheâs alive and in the world. That has to be enough.
But it isnât, said the lizard at the bottom of her brain.
It sounded like Steve.
The bookâs divination process was elaborate and, in its way, entertaining, entertainment being what the book was initially intended to provide: Myka read that she was first to choose a numbered question from the list of sixty in the book, then close her eyes and touch a pencil to a chart on the following page. From that chart, her blindly directed point of lead would select a symbol, one of twelve, each comprising small circles in a distinct mantic-pebble pattern. Her next series of tasks: look up the page associated with her questionâs number that corresponded to that symbol, turn to that page, and discover her pebble-pattern-designated answer.
At first she thought to be clever, to game the outcome, working backward from desired answer to symbol to question, so as to contrive a prediction that would yield some light. The book resented this idea enormously. In the wake of her considered (not even attempted!) subversion, it refused to open to âThe Ladiesâ Oracle,â instead offering her pages related first to the reading of cards, then to the interpretation of dreams. She knew from her research that these pages had no artifactual significance. These seem more suited for a charlatan such as yourself, the book was conveying, with what Myka took to be great disdain. You donât deserve the access I afford.
âIâm sorry,â she told it, and that was entirely true. âI really want to know.â That was true tooâor true-ish. She wanted to know... but only if the knowledge would help.
Beggars canât be choosers, said another lizard. This one sounded like her father.
The book took its time deciding whether to believe her... no doubt sensing some residue of her dishonesty, adding that to her offense against its power. But rule in her favor it did, riffling to its oracular pages with a sigh of surrender. Or was it triumph?
She chose her question, that first question, based on her overall disquiet.
The question was numbered twenty-five. It read, âShall I long remain as I now am?â
Pencil in hand, Myka closed her eyes. She moved the lead until it encountered bookish resistance... the symbol on which it rested, when she opened her eyes, resembled a little pebble cairn, upright, proud. She consulted the page-map and learned her destination: page thirty-seven.
The book, unmoved by her anxiety about what she would discover, allowed her to turn only a single leaf at a time.
Show-off.
On page thirty-seven, the pebble cairn nestled at its very bottom.
Its predictionâMykaâs futureâher fate.
âThat is impossible; so much the worse.â
****
For some time, Myka had thought the book must have been wrongâmaybe it had decided in the end to withhold true knowledge of her future out of spite?âfor her status remained quo. Artifacts. Retrievals. Warehouse business, world-shaking in the strangely run-of-the-mill ways it tended to be.
The looming presence of cancer as a possibility had kept her tensed for âthe worseâ to emerge from that quarter... and she did on some level find it hilarious that the likelihood of having some youâll-probably-die-soon disease hadnât been enough to push her to seek an oracle, but an emptied-out Helena had.
But then, abruptly, cancer had been removed from the table.
Myka had tried not to dwell on how wrong that removal could have gone, given what Pete had done. She had tried to be content that the most significant upshot of that entire series of episodes seemed to be the adding of a benign category to her catalog of untruths: she sat not at but rather on a table and told a lie. âI guess Iâm just lucky,â she had said when her oncologistâs PA expressed the teamâs surprise at having found no malignancy.
But then Helena had texted again. âIâll be in South Dakota soon, relatively near Univille. Can you believe it?â
As if belief had any right to be any part of anything anymore... but Myka should have believed the book. The second coffee (âcoffeeâ) had not allowed her to remain as she was. It was, truly, so much the worse.
This one happened to happen on Valentineâs Day, a fact on which neither Myka nor Helena remarked, despite what Myka couldnât help but read as its bracing irony.
And speaking of bracing. Myka had braced herself for more extollings of âhome,â its charms, its warm certainties...
...but: âOh, that ended,â Helena said. Dismissive. Breezy.
Myka had put so much anguish into making Helenaâs âhomeâ in Boone make whatever tortured sense it could... justifying it as Helena needing to make her own choices about what she could face and what she couldnât, what she could wake up to every day and what she couldnât, what she could bring herself to need every day and what she couldnât... and Myka had further worked very hard to keep all of that torturesome rationalization from spiraling into âwhy not face me, why not wake up to me, why not need me.â Her hard work there had failed to hold, so: Because you are not Nate, she told herself, again and again, in cut after cut. And because you donât have a daughter. Cut. Cut. You. Donât. Have.
Yet here, now, Helena had simply waved her hand at the entire chapter. It unmoored Mykaâwas this a weight lifted? or was it yet another burdening betrayal?âsuch that she for a moment couldnât speak, and for that moment, she didnât understand that Helena was waiting for her to speak. Eventually: âEnded,â she managed to echo, and she did not recognize the sharp breath she then took.
âYes. Because thereâs someone else.â As Helena said that, she was not performing the uncanny copy of herselfâinstead, she sparked.
The spark smashed Myka with the realization that her breath had signaled hope. Stupid, naĂŻve hope. And she was defeated, bitterly, both by that hopeâs instant dashing and by the knowledge that it still could spring. Would spring. Would, apparently, always spring.
âIs there,â Myka said, as blankly as she could.
âA woman,â Helena said.
She might as well have pulled out an actual knife, but Myka was ferally not going to let that show. âThatâs great,â she said, reaching for something beyond blank, something even more resistantly telling, trying to channel Steve at his most calm, like water unsubject to weather.
To that, Helenaâs reaction was to sit back and say, as if she resented the idea, âYes, it is.â Then she said, âShall I tell you about her?â Still sparking. A challenge.
I donât need any more challenges. But: âSure. Why not,â she said. At this point, Myka was certain she could sit through anything. âWhatâs her name.â
âHer name...â and Helena tightened her jaw, making Myka think she was trying not to unleash an incongruously outsize grin, âis Giselle.â
And Myka said Sure; why not again, but under her breath.
Helena had then begun to relate seemingly endless anecdotes conveying the attributes of this apparent wonder of the world namedâsure, why notâGiselle.
You should be enjoying this, Myka told herself as the accolades unfurled. The one and only H.G. Wells is deigning to tell you stories, but here you sit, getting picky about content, all surly andâ
âYou know what? Iâm happy for you,â she interrupted, because she could not, in fact, sit through anything. She could not suffer more, from herself or from Helena. Steve would have clutched his head and screamed at what sheâd said, but at this point, what did lies matter?
Driving home this time, she did not yell. Instead, she practiced. âHelena is with a woman named Giselle.â Over and over she said it, to make sure she understood it, and to make sure her mouth knew how to repeat it, because someone, Steve or Claudia or even Pete, would ask, and she would need to say. Out loud, she would need to say these words that told the harshest of truths (though she wished she could sit, at or on a table, and lie that truth away): Helena wants a woman, and that woman is not Myka Bering.
So much the worse.
****
âWell, book,â Myka had said late that night, facing it, facing up to it, âyou were right.â
Did the acknowledgement prompt it to offer a self-satisfied ruffle?
She had then asked, âWhere do we go from here?â She wished she could have asked it of Helena...
This occasioned something legible as a sort of shoulder-shrug: the book opened to the first of its question-pages.
âYou think I want to know more?â
Provocatively, the page turned, as if catching the waft of some future-breeze.
Scanning that next of the list, Mykaâs eyesâand her mindâwere drawn to, were powerless but to settle on, question 37: âIs a certain person thinking of me?â
That was about the present, not the future. The book wouldnât really know. Would it?
But Myka was powerless to resist divining the answer. This one corresponded to a pebble nabla (Myka could not help but think of slopes and slipping): âSome one is thinking, dreaming, and talking unceasingly about you.â
Upon receiving that statement, she had suffered another of those stupid hope-leaps... âsome oneâ! Never mind the future; if it could be true in the now: âsome one!â
She had soon been forced to realize, however, which âsome oneâ the book must have meant. That was made painfully clear by the events of the most improbable, yet to date consequential, table: that voracious, hateful Round Table. It had brought Mykaâs lies home. Literally.
Sitting at that table, Myka had prepped for more lies, these to sell a supposedly âdefiningâ story, for she of course could not allow her definitional truth to be seen. Worse, extracted. She had tried to maintain confidence about being able to exert her will: My brain might not be as big as some brains but itâs big enough to beat you, table, she sneered. But then she admonished, Donât sneer. No attitude. Because who does attitude make you think of?
She felt herself almost almost almost picture, almost almost almost name, her attitude-ideal...
And so Myka had redoubled her thought-efforts, thrusting every shred of attitude, every shard of emotion, every bit of real definition, from her mind, forcing it to produce for consumption the most anodyne memory possible: something sheâd come as close to forgetting as she ever could, some ridiculous ninja-something that wasnât worth the neurons firing to deliver it to the tableâs dumb demands.
But then... everything had gone wrong. Not in the way sheâd feared, but in a way that, given the bookâs answer, she should have thought to fear. Her imagination had failed her, for the taking of cancer off the table had been the salient change after all: not what Pete had done, but instead, why heâd done it.
Sitting at that selfish table, Myka had at last come to understand the expectations surrounding her response to that why. With Mrs. Frederic and Steve both looking like examiners at the worst imaginable viva voce, she knew what sheâshe who had never failed a test in her lifeâhad to say in order to pass.
So sheâd said it.
The roiling in her gut had come as a surprise, for shouldnât her soul have been resigned by now to endless perjury? She resented this unwelcome vagus-nerve stimulation of her earlier, righteous self.
In the immediate aftermath sheâd stumbled away, trying to find a space to breathe, to assess, to plan how she would act a convincing version of the play she had stupidlyâor, no, functionally; she needed to know it that wayâlet begin. The aisle in which she stopped was dim, its shelves full of metal, pieces of things, things she wished she could herself wright into a bunker of such artifactual strength that no one would dare approach her. Ever. No one.
She hadnât realized Steve had followed her until she heard his voice. âAre you okay?â he asked, quiet behind her.
So much for her wish: his question, and his solicitude, were absurd. Heâd seen her state; heâd encouraged her state. âObviously not,â she snapped. He had the grace to wince. But because it had all gone so wrong, because she was still so angry that he had helped all that wrong along, she said, harsh, âWhat was with that âhelloâ? Why did you start that business about my face?â
His face spoke of pain. âI had to. I had to. Because today, honestly: today Mrs. Frederic had to hear what she wanted to hear. From all of us.â His desperate sincerity rang very true.
Myka breathed. Metal coated her throat; further hard words would snag and twist on it, wounding her more than Steve ever could. âIâm pretty sure sheâs been wanting me to say that for a while,â she conceded.
Steve winced again. âYou looked like you might throw up, and I felt like I would, hearing you... saying what you said. I wish I couldâve given you an out.â
Myka didnât, now, doubt him. âMe too. And I wish I couldâve taken it.â She meant it, but that was all it was: a wish. For a different world. A different timeline? She said, with a wince of her own, âBut I think I have to play along.â
âI see that, from the Mrs. Frederic angle. But you sound like... like there might be something in it for you. Not what I said there wasâand Iâm sorry I had to say it, or felt like I had to, or couldnât figure out how not toâbut something.â
âBackup,â Myka said immediately. It was the only answer.
âBackup,â Steve echoed, and âbackup?â he said again, as if it were a word from a language in which he was not fully fluent.
âI need somethingâI need somethingâreliable.â Another hurt: that that was what she needed. So short a time ago, she would have claimed a different need. Such a crashingly different need.
âNeed,â Steve said. âNot âwantâ?â
âNo.â And Myka admitted: âThatâs too dangerous.â
âI have to ask you about it though. Want.â
Myka braced herself. She braced herself, even as she thought on how tired she was of having to brace herself.
âDo you want me to keep protecting you? Primarily from Mrs. Frederic, but...â
It was a less dangerous ask, about a less dangerous want, than sheâd feared. Or maybe it was the same want, the same danger, but more gently expressed. âYes?â she said.
âMrs. Frederic aside, the problem is that if you do play along, I donât know what âprotectâ means. Should I keep covering your lie or tell Pete the truth?â
âI donât know either.â Another admission. She wasnât proud of it. âFor now, just let it... lie. Sorry.â
At that, he didnât wince. âTell me when things change. In whatever way they do.â
âIf they do.â
âThey always do,â he said.
âSo I guess Iâll be telling you.â But she believed neither him nor herself.
Steve said, âIf you could be happy.â Helpless.
Sweet Steve. Helpful, helpless. Myka gestured into the air. Conjuring speech took her a minute, and even then, all she managed was, âIf I could.â Steve just kept looking like he looked, with his base of sympathy (and she had never so appreciated, or so responded to, sympathy), so she asked, because she didnât know, âWhy donât you want to protect him?â
He offered her an exhausted smile. âDonât take this the wrong way, but: you said âneed.â Who needs protecting? I like Pete, but if it comes down to it, itâs you.â
Leave me alone! she wanted to yell. But she also wanted to curl up in Steveâs protection. Backup. Backup.
****
Even as Myka found Artieâs interrogation easy to lie through, she knows that her lying footing as a whole is becoming unsteady, even vertiginous. If she could have restricted her lies to those sitting utterances... but the expansions are depleting her, and she is trying to resign herself to what she sees as her only realistic option for narrowing her scope. As for any objections her heart might be raising? She is shutting those lights out, one by one.
****
âI think I have to play along,â Myka had told Steve, and she had continued to convince herself of that necessity. So she had taken the initiative and done it, in at least the first of the ways she knew she would have to, in order to act her role.
To act your role? Really? No. To sell your con. Was that a lizard or a snake?
No matter. She sold it. She was not sitting at a table, but a kiss was a lie that was worse.
So much the worse.
After thatâthat demonstration, that acted untruthâshe could not reach her lifeline fast enough. After that, she ran.
âBook,â she said, facing it. âBook.â
Her third try was not the charm; rather, it was the compulsion: Tell me something, anything, that I canât already see about whatâs next. Because an oracle must know more than I do, must know different. If not... Myka had not been ready, not then, not yet, to think on any consequences.
Some daysâcertainly that day, but not only that dayâwhat she wanted more than life (literally, more than life) was to go back to protecting the president. If a bullet, then I take it. Simple. Clean.
She hated how resentfully, brokenly beholden she had become to people for saving her life. They set her up with the saving, but they didnât bother with the consequences: with the fact that she had to keep on living. And nobody seemed to be interested in saving her from that.
So: âBook,â she said again, and if that word had never before meant âsave me clean,â it did that day.
But struggle as she might, with increasingly desperate fingers into which she tried to wish and pray prying strength, the book refused to open.
Was this the downside? No response in oneâs hour of true need?
âWhat am I doing wrong?â she begged.
But if that was her question, then of course the book was right: it could reveal nothing to her. She knew the answer.
Everything.
TBC
Tabled 5
This slow-motion @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange gift for @barbarawar , a tale that concerns Myka and Helenaâs post-Boone coffee(s) and the fallout therefrom, continues to be quite difficult to get right. Itâs still got the shape I envisioned, with Myka sitting at tables and lying and consulting a book to find out her future, but I have to say I didnât expect the Bering and the Wells to need to hit so very many beats in the course of enacting, or embodying, that shape: witness my optimism in each of part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 that that part would (might) be penultimate. Then again these two were never going to be able to âget coffeeâ with any degree of ease, much less find their way back toâor is it simply to, for the first time?âgood. Slow and steady may not in the end win the race, but it does finish the race (eventually, though not today); however, please know, @barbarawarâ , Iâll always be apologizing to you for letting this race, such as it is, continue to run. Anyway, the prior leg ended with Myka and Helena behind the locked door of a hotel room. Mykaâs hand had just touched, then trailed away from, Helenaâs shoulder.
Tabled 5
Blunders. So the book had said. Satisfactory, so it had also said.
Myka raises her right hand again; it wants to meet Helenaâs waist, meet and seek, seek and sway... this hand, so empty as it rises, could be, at long last, full, full, full as it blunders...
But Helena backs away, raising her own right hand, warding Myka off. âOh no,â she says. âYouâre not getting out of anything that easily.â
Rendered purposeless by the refusal, Myka looks down at her reaching (empty) hand, her wanting (empty) body. âEasily?â she asks, because what could that mean? Such blundering could never be easy, no matter how satisfactory.
And yet satisfactory would mean satisfaction. At long last, satisfaction.
Keeping her own hand up, Helena says, âPrivacy and nothing more. I said it to you and I meant it. Youâll blame me if in the end it proves untrue, and as for any intemperance of your own? I donât doubt youâll indict me for that as well, particularly in the event youâre forced to confess it. Does Pete even know youâre here?â
Myka wants to say yes. As if that lie would make what she wants defensible. As if it would be reasonable of her to say âyes, he trusts me, and isnât that foolishâ: as if by saying that, by getting agreement on that, she could in fact implicate Helena in all of it too. She glances at the table, bolted down, solid. It could give her cover to put that lie in motion.
As if she could do any of that... all right, yes, she could do it to herself. But she should not do it to Helena.
But you can, unison the snake and the lizard and all the other animal manifestations of... well. Animals.
And as she fights to maintain that âshould notâ: Arenât you an animal? is their next enticing chorus.
Obviously...
âObviously not,â Helena says, which brings Myka up short until she walks herself back to Helena having asked about Pete. About what he knows. Myka wishes, for a bloodless, anti-animal moment, that he could know, that she could have told him, told him cold, such that he could understand her as, because he himself also was, then and now and going forward, purely pragmatic.
But Pete is not pragmatic.
âI refuse to serve as your release valve,â Helena goes on, the last two words harsh.
âHow could you say that?â Myka demands, trying to make her taking of offense believable, trying to dismiss from her head the evidence that was her raised, reaching hand. Her raised, reaching knowledge of the blunders she would volunteer to make.
âHow could you say you have romantic feelings for Pete?â Helena counters. âNever mind what youâre willing to do when his back is turned.â
This is not just about what Myka has said, or even what sheâs willing to do. It is not. And apparently now is the time to crash full speed into these walls: âHow could you say you had romantic feelings for Nate? For nonexistent Giselle?â
âI did not say that. I invite you to search your prodigious memory, in which you will fail to find me saying that.â
âReally? Semantics? You implied!â This is not the hill to die on; Myka knows that. But she will be dying, and here is a hill. Why not plant her flag?
âPerhaps. But you inferred. And you seem to be doing it again. About my... what shall we call it? Use-value?â
Myka, mortified by intention and error and invalid inference, accuses, âYou are the one who brought us to this room.â
âYes. I do seem to be the one who acts. Leaving aside the recent poorly considered raise of hand.â
Myka doesnât understand the fuller itch of meaning in Helenaâs words. Maybe on purpose. âWhat are you talking about?â she demands, but sheâs pretty sure she doesnât want to hear the answer. Hearing it will surely require yet more bracing.
âWhy did you come to Boone?â Helena asks.
The question confounds. Is she trying to punish Myka by making her put herself back in that place? âBecause you called me about the artifact.â
âYes. I contacted you.â
âI know. Like I said.â Are they negotiating something? Myka canât reach to it, whatever it is. Maybe thatâs on purpose too. Sheâd rather just raise her hand again, regardless of what tainted meaning Helena might assign it. She wouldnât say no twice, would she?
Helenaâs exhaleâexasperated, closing in on angryâsuggests she would indeed say no twice, in fact infinitely, based on how obtuse she finds Mykaâs response. âDo you not see why I might have had reason to question your... interest?â
âWhat?â Myka does hate how often she uses, how often she seems to have to use, that word as a mark of utter bafflement.
âIt isnât as if you were looking for me.â
Mykaâs entire being sinks. âHow do you know?â she asks. A question isnât a lie, but she feels the further fall of where this must go if the truth comes out, and itâs awful and unpardonable and she will never live it down in front of herself, never mind in front of Helena.
âYou didnât find me,â Helena says, and the backhand of that compliment slaps Myka hard across her pride, because Helenaâs right. On every accusatory level, sheâs right.
All Myka can muster, in pathetic defense, is, âI didnât know where to start.â
âSo you didnât. Start.â
Myka doesnât affirm it. She doesnât have to.
âWere we not just speaking of who acts,â Helena says. Thatâs no blunt slap; rather, itâs the lightness of a perfect blade.
âI should have,â Myka says. Her wince is contemptibly inadequate. âStarted.â
âYou didnât.â
Myka wishes that had been an angry accusation rather than a dispassionate statement of fact. She begins in response, âWell, you should have...â But she can find no similarly dispassionate retroscription.
âHeld myself in limbo?â Helena finishes for her, brutal and true in what she knows Myka wishedâwhat she and Myka both know was unreasonable for Myka to have wished. âI had had enough of limbo. Bronze. Incorporeality. And furthermore, I didnât betray you.â
Here at this late date, Myka should say it out loud, this unjustifiable position that has irrationally sustained her: âIt feels like you did.â
Helena takes a moment, her breathing again exasperated, then says, âYour feelings were notâare notâthe primary determinant of my actions. Do you know why?â
âYes.â Myka wishes she didnât have to hear the elaboration. But she deserves it.
âBecause I did not know your feelings.â
âI said yes,â Myka stubborns. âAnd itâs not my fault you didnât know them; thatâs Mrs. Fredericâs fault.â Myka would have spoken; she knows it. If Helena hadnât disappeared, she would have spoken.
But you could have spoken if youâd looked for her and found her! Those animals again. Sing-song. Laughing at all her inabilities.
Helena sniffs. âHer fault perhaps at first. Subsequently, however, your fault.â
The animals and Helena, singing together. Their accord makes Myka dig deeper into her resentment. âI didnât know yours either.â
âI did keep them close, first from necessity,â Helena says. Sheâs very serious now, intensity legible in her brow, and Myka feels herself pierced by a familiarly impossible love for that concentrationâso lanced that she might fall to her knees, stricken. âBut later,â Helena continues, even more severely, as if in rebuke (of the love, of any drama of possible expression), âbecause I saw quite clearly that my choices in Boone altered your opinion of me. Fundamentally. Not my other sins, grievous as they were, but my choices in Boone. As evidenced by your pulling further and further away... even unto Pete.â She hardens. âI donât understand your morality. I donât believe I care to.â
âThen weâre even,â Myka says, trying for similarly hard but faltering, failing, because the soft, vulnerable fact is that she has desperately tried to but doesnât understand Helenaâs morality, particularly (but not solely) how she could have, even for a second, entangled herself withâwanted to be withâthat... person, whose daughter could not possibly have offset enough of anything. She doesnât understand how Helena could ever have taken any comfort in that mediocrity, that fakery, never mind any effect those choices were always going to have had on Mykaâs heart. Never mind that.
Never mind it, and Helena can deny that it was a betrayal, but itâs sharp like that, there in Mykaâs heart... the condemnation of betrayal is part of her morality, thatâs always been a bedrock, and she recognizes a sick mortification at the acute, astute contrast Helena has drawn between her ability to justify Helenaâs other sins but not her choices in Boone.
In further contradiction, Myka isnât condemning herself for betrayalâwell, not yetâand of course Helena would call out that flagrant inconsistency. Call it out and condemn it. âYouâre changing your opinion of me. Here, now,â Myka accuses, and Helenaâs set face is confirmation enough. âWe said we knew each other so well,â Myka says, an illogical lament for that tragic, though clearer, time.
Helena shakes her head. âSentimental claims in an extreme circumstance.â
Nothing but sentimental claims, those words theyâd said... and here Myka had thought she already had sufficient fault from that incident to scourge herself forever: Oh, Pete, Iâll refuse to watch you kill Helena, but Iâll let you kill her. As if âI canât watch thisâ were a moral stance.
Sins, sins, but omissions not commissions, for what Helena has laid out before her seems now entirely right: Myka doesnât act. She lets others do the acting. She lets others do the acting; worse, she lets them do the unholy, if thwarted, killing; but most of all she lets them do the saving, which Steve and Pete and above all Helena have done for her. Again and again. Damningly, because whenever she should have thought of ways to save Helena, sheâs failed. Perhaps the greatest reason they both must walk away is that the scales between them will never be even.
Myka isnât crying, because she doesnât cry; instead, she steels. But in this moment, her tempering goes awry. She feels heat in her throat, threatening to overfill, for she is here, now, realizing that she hasnât truly believed in this as the end, even though sheâs the one who determined so deliberately to bring it about. There have been so many supposed endsâends-that-were-notâthat sheâs harbored (yes, tied tight to a dock in her heart) a lifeboat of hope that Helena would save her this time too.
But just as the book declined to save her, Helena is declining as well. Myka canât see a way out, canât see any way for them to stop reminding each other of everything that begrimes what once promised blinding beauty, everything that makes the possibility of that beauty harder and harder to discern, even for Myka who can replay all its promise in detail, every brilliant episode, over and over at will... but never fresh. Never without everything else replaying too.
She isnât crying, but she is grieving. âWe canât fix this,â she says.
âNo,â Helena agrees.
Itâs a final verdict.
The coffeemaker exhales loudly, inserting itself back into the conversation, and Myka turns to it, numb. Two small filled cups await her, determinedly present. Her hand shakes as she takes one and sets it next to the machine on the bureau; it shakes again as she takes the other and hands to Helena, saying âhere,â to which Helena says âthank youââa domestic little exchange, as if a glimpse of that other reality, the one with the couples therapy. A quiet scene from a pleasant time before they needed the therapy. Itâs an achingly calming view.
But the picture fades, going and going, away away, as Helena says, âI donât know what to do now.â Bleak. Newly so.
Myka stands inarticulate, because she doesnât know either. Into the gap, she places her best guess: âDrink our coffee?â
So they do that, in this quiet, private space. The lack of distraction brings home to Myka that she has never really attended to how Helena drinks coffee. Their âcoffeesâ have not allowed for that sort of observation, but now she attends, and she readily discerns a pattern: Helena takes a sip, then follows it with a near-gulp; another sip, another gulp. Hesitant, sure; hesitant, sure. Over and over, but then too soon sheâs through, through and walking to the table, setting her cup there.
Helena retreats back to the bedside, and Myka understands that she, too, must finish. This is now become a ceremony.
She raises her cup to her mouth and drinks. In a final irony, itâs strong and good.
When her cup is empty, she places it next to Helenaâs on the tableâthis final table that might have supported disastrous, yet satisfactory, blundering.
But even as Myka for one escaping instant lets her imagination soar to the potential transcendence of that blunder, she is visited by a question that crashes it into dirt: could âsatisfactoryâ ever have been enough?
Of course not, say some animals, writhing and reveling in contradiction.
So has Helena in the end saved her one last time?
Sorry, book.
Involuntarily, Myka glances at the clock on the nightstand. It informs her that she can catch her plane if she hurries. Plane, flight, flying...
Oh, Iâm flying...
The wisp from that early, beautiful part of their story, when everything was possibility, forces her to try to steel again, this time into cynicism and distance. All it really does is lead her to an incongruous near-regret that she has no gun.
Things should end as they began.
But then they very nearly do, in an even more literal sense: both Myka and Helena move toward the door, then veer away, saying âsorryâ as their paths threaten to intersect. Myka takes a step back, yielding.
Helenaâs hand is reaching for the doorâs handle, to push it down, then to pull, thus breaking the seal that has kept them here.
However: a certainty rises in Myka, a conviction that this part of their story shouldnât end as it began. They canât fix everything, canât fix enough of anything, but maybe Myka can fix this one thing. âWait,â she says, and sheâs gratified to see Helena still her handâs rise. âI lied to you,â she says.
Helena turns minimally, as if Mykaâs request that she stop her motion is an unreasonable burden. âAbout you and Pete. Your supposed feelings. Yes, I know.â
âNot that lie,â Myka says without thought, then realizes what sheâs said, then realizes it doesnât matter at all that sheâs said it. âIâm talking about Nebraska.â
Helena twists her face. âMy proving ground.â
âWhat?â Bafflement again. More mortification.
âSpeaking of lies,â Helena clarifies.
Itâs not a relief, that acknowledgmentâthat the âhomeâ talk was fabricatedâbut itâs something. âMine too,â Myka begins.
Helena cuts in with, âYou were not well.â
So she knows. Knows the lie. Which means she knows the truth. âIs this Claudia again?â Myka asks, defeated.
Helena breathes.
âIt isnât fair that you had a spy the whole time,â Myka says. If only she had had a spy.
Helena says, âNoâand I mean no, it isnât fair, but also no, not âthe whole time.â In fact that was how she and I came into contact again: because you didnât seem well. Egotistically, I thought it might have had to do with me. So I inquired.â
âWhich means you know everything.â
âIâd like to think so,â Helena says, with a momentary sparkle of full charm, âbut in fact, I donât. Why did you lie?â
Myka, helpless against the charm, gives the most real answer she can: âI didnât see a way to be honest with that version of you.â
âAh,â is all Helena says, and Myka doesnât know what that means. Implies. Carries. Before she can ask, Helena continues, âAnd are you well now?â
âIâm sure your spy told you the answer to that.â
âShe may have believed she had. But I would like to hear it from you. Honestly.â
âIâm fine,â Myka says. It isnât honest. Sheâs about to walk away from Helena for the last time. She is not fine.
âYouâre lying. Yet again,â Helena says, with obvious disappointment.
Myka has never wanted to disappoint Helena. Helena has disappointed her, more than once, but for the reverse to be trueâitâs pain Myka will suffer in perpetuity.
Helena sighs. âOf course itâs what we do.â
âYou and I?â Myka asks, desolate.
Helena curls her lip. âHumans. Weâre feral little fabulists who put ends before means.â
If thereâs a better formulation of what Mykaâs been performing, lately but never when it would do her any real good, she doesnât know it. âI didnât look for you,â she says, condemning herself. âAnd I didnât burn Boone down to get you free.â
Now Helena smiles fully. Condescendingly. âTo what would you have touched your match?â
Myka doesnât bother answering, because there is no answer. Instead she says, because she should say it aloud, âYouâre very good at saving me. Iâm terrible at saving you.â
âThatâs not true,â Helena says, gentling.
She sounds sincere, and she might mean it, but Myka knows better. âI never hoisted you into the sky.â
âBut you did serve as my eventual impetus to leave Boone: essential, once it was allowed. I admit that in the circumstance, faced with your disapproval, I became more obstinate.â Helena ratchets her face down to a half-smile, one that self-deprecates rather than condescends. âWould that you could have hoisted me into the sky.â
âI think the car had already hit you,â Myka says. âI think you stepped in front of the car and begged it to hit you.â
With a bow of head, Helena says, âApt.â
âWas that because of me? All that I didnât do?â
âIn part? But that canât be the entire answer.â
âI guess I did the same,â Myka says. She isnât guessing.
âBecause of me?â
Myka wants to put everything on Helena, but she canât. Well. She can, but she shouldnât. âIn part,â she echoes. Then, âIf we had both just said.â Itâs a lament.
âWe donât just say.â
âHumans?â Feral little not-sayers, Helena might clarify, which would make their own not-saying at least in some way justified, if not fully excusable, andâ
âNo,â Helena says. âIn this case, you and I.â
Mykaâs desolation is complete. âMaybe in another life we would.â She looks at the clock again. Time, time. She knows she should hurry now, but instead sheâs fixated on that other life. Itâs different, that life. Itâs justâdifferent. She wishes she could see her way back and through to how it might have come about, but there are too many branching points, an exploding tree of âwhy didnât Iâ choices; they mingle and blur into a chaos that she has to push down, push down and hide, to prevent that back-tracery from taking her over.
Helena is again moving to the door. Again raising her hand to it. The actionâgraceful, as always so graceful, a movement flowing as if through water, not airâunfolds in slow motion, stretching time, and is this why Helena always moves with such grace? To prove, over and over, her mastery of time itself?
Tellingly, Mykaâs first impulse is to turn away: I canât watch this. The consequence for Helena here today is not so dire; for Myka, though, it might as well be.
But turning her back on what is most difficult is notâshould never have beenâpart of her morality.
Face it. Face it.
She orients herself toward the door, readying to watch that graceful hand open it. Readying to watch that beloved body recrossâuncross?âthe threshold. Facing it, just as she should have faced Helenaâs imminent actual destruction.
She wishes, hard, that she could have been the one to deliver the reprieve then, wishes she could have parried all of Peteâs and Helenaâs arguments about usefulness and nobility, parried them and found a better way, found it and brought it about. That would have been more moral, surely, than a simple turning of her face toward what she never wanted to see...
At that, her brain clicks. More moral? The moral. The lesson hadnât beenâisnâtââWatch, even when you want to look away.â Because: âThings you donât want to watch are things that shouldnât happen.â And so the real moral, of all these stories: âFind a better way and bring it about.â
But this insight, valid as it may be, offers her no vision here of how to find, of how to bring about, that better way.
She tries to think, tries to find, but laughably, in spite of everything, her hand wants to rise again, to catch somewhere, anywhere, on Helenaâs body; she feels her wrist, palm, fingers pulling against all the gravity, as if trying to get everyoneâs attention, as if that could be the way, as if the argument of a wanting hand could ever be stronger than that of history. As if it could fix any of what had gone wrong.
It couldnât.
Of course it couldnât.
But. But. But.
In raising her hand, before, in that inarticulate closed-door wish, sheâd been prepared to... what?
Fix nothing. Certainly, sheâd been prepared to fix nothing. So: what, then, had her intention been?
To ignore everything that stood between that reaching hand and what she wanted it to achieve.
And if for a blundering moment in a hotel in an airport in Chicago...
What if the book, in its prediction, hadnât been referring only to what might happen in a blundering moment in a hotel in an airport in Chicago?
What if Myka is meant to blunderâsatisfactorilyâwell beyond this moment in a hotel in an airport in Chicago?
What if the book had told of more than her immediate future? What if it had understood what she had been âabout to undertakeâ as... the rest of her life?
And one final what ifâone final move of mind, like the anticipatory shudder of the second hand the instant before it calls a clockâs alarm to lifeâwhat if learning to let language slip hasnât been about dirty work at all? What if itâs the key?
Try it try it try it try it...
âWait!â Myka yellsâitâs no yawp; sheâs got purpose now. âWe canât fix this,â she fevers out.
Helena slews her head around, and yes, yes, now sheâs caught again; and this, yes, yes, this is what Myka needs. She isnât surprised, however, when Helena says, âI know. If I hadnât before, I know it now.â
âNo. Listen.â Language, the slip, the work. ââFix.â Thatâs the word I said.â
âI did listen,â Helena says, and the set stone in her voice rhymes with the adamant of her face. âThat is the word you said, and I agreed. And thus we are finished.â
âNo!â Myka throws the exclamation up against that tall wall. âWe need a different word! Change the vocabulary!â
TBC




