Inception Fic: Cut the Ties, Jump the Tracks
Title: Cut the Ties, Jump the Tracks
Author: chemfishee
Fandom: Inception
Pairings/Characters: Arthur/Mal [and fandom Cobb!squints and makes me sit at the kids’ table]
Rating: R
Word Count: ~3000
Summary: “I’ve always thought that if you looked left to right you could say see no evil,” Arthur points to the first panel, “hear no evil,” the second, “and speak no evil.”
Notes: Um, this certainly isn’t what I thought would be my first (proper) fic in this fandom. For kasiowy, who originally asked for an Arthur backstory where he met Mal before Cobb This is my original fill. It's since been significantly reworked and expanded because I couldn’t leave it alone. Title courtesy of The Avett Brothers’ “I And Love And You”.
Beta’d by the magnificent pjvilar, who absolutely refuses to let me get away with any authorial laziness and tolerates my neuroses. Any remaining mistakes are due to my tinkering.
The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.
-- The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
La poëte au cachot, débraillé, maladif,
Roulant un manuscrit sous son pied convulsif,
Mesure d’un regard que la terreur enflame
L’escalier de vertige où s’abîme son âme.
-- Charles Baudelaire
The story goes that they first met in Paris on a blustery April day.
-
But that’s just one version. The truth is that the City of Light was still an accident waiting to happen, spurred by youthful ennui and general wanderlust.
They do meet in Paris. After. She presses a kiss to his cheek outside de Gaulle. He twines their fingers together and lets himself be led wherever she wants to go.
“There’s someone I want you to meet.”
-
Arthur turns another page in his battered paperback. There is the normal detritus of the perpetually bored college student littered about him - coffee (black, no sugar) cooling slowly, plate of scattered cupcake remnants, unopened pack of Camel Lights under a cheap plastic lighter, Moleskine lying prone, fine-tipped pen within easy reach.
Arthur is not a student. Arthur is practicing adapting to his environment. Arthur is a man of action; he learns by doing.
“Are you reading Sartre en français?”
The girl - woman, he amends - sits across from him, uninvited. A ghost of disbelief hangs around her, smooth along the edges. No one Arthur knows is this self-assured.
“Oui.”
Amusement sparks in her eyes. Arthur’s arm itches, and he feels the back of his neck go hot under her cool regard. “Why ever would you do that?”
“Moi, j'aime un défi.” She laughs, and he thinks she’s lovely.
“May I?” She points at the cigarettes. He slides the pack to her and watches as she tamps down the tobacco inside. “Your accent could use some work.”
That surprises a laugh out of him. “And what are you, some kind of dialogue expert?”
She extracts one cigarette, lights it, inhales, watches the smoke curl around the edges of her vision before she answers. “Non. I’m Mal. And you can drop the pretension.”
Mal drags one leg over the other, the cuff of her trousers damp with city filth. “Tell me…”
“Arthur.”
“Tell me, Arthur, do you dream?”
-
The only thing we can say about personal histories is this: They are each subjected to the whimsical folly of memory, loosely stored in protein synthesis pathways and chemical signaling cascades.
Our identity is governed by chance random fluctuations and interactions. Bring two atoms together and form a molecule. Watch many molecules evolve into two people making a pair.
-
The woman rounds the corner, disappearing amongst the teetering stacks with the sharp click of high heels on hardwood floors.
Arthur focuses on the shelf in front of him, full to overflowing with copies of lovingly worn and heartlessly discarded Vonneguts. He pulls an edition of Mother Night swaddled in a yellow and black and blue cover.
His own original copy was cream and green, Howard Campbell, Jr.’s hands curled around the bars of G and T. Arthur’s father handed him the book on the occasion of his seventeenth birthday when Arthur announced he would be enlisting in his father’s Army post-graduation. Slaughterhouse-Five followed the year after.
And so it goes.
The next row over is international fiction, divided by geographic locality. Borges. Paz. García Marquez. Arthur inhales the scent of monochromatic sand and ancho chiles.
The woman stands at the opposite end. In her hands, a leather-bound and flaking, gilt-edged book. A resource. For research or general curiosity, Arthur can’t discern.
She cracks the cover, scattering a cloud of dust mites in the slanting late-afternoon sun. Arthur edges closer. The opened pages are columnated, photographs with bold names and italicized dates. The writing is French.
He doesn’t recognize the names or faces.
She turns the page. Arthur chances a glance up, and his attention catches on a flock of birds balanced on the roof edge across the street, dots on the horizon. One twitters.
The woman’s eyelashes flutter and spread along the planes of her cheeks. She shuts her eyes for a long moment, as if she’s thinking. She inhales, shaky and wet.
A lone tear tracks a lazy path down.
-
Scientists say the hippocampus is where memories are stored in the brain.
Hippocampus. From the Latin. Seahorse.
Arthur sees a hippocampus, twice, in a crash neuroanatomy course the military thought necessary only after they started fucking around with people’s minds.
The first was human, outlined on a 50 µm thick sagittal section mounted on a glass slide. Dehydrated. Grayish-brown. Fragile.
For the second, a grad student in a white lab coat and purple nitrile gloves broke the white fiber tract of the corpus callosum in a fresh mouse brain and rolled a pale grayish-pink bulb away from the rest of the tissue.
Arthur supposes it did look like a seahorse, with a little imagination.
-
“de Botton posits that the buildings we call beautiful are those that create environments capable of satisfying needs we aren’t consciously aware of. It’s about anticipation. It’s about feeling.”
The projector clicks as the white-haired man with the lilting English accent advances to a slide of the Gmür and Vacchini house in Beinwil am See. Arthur honestly didn’t know people still resisted PowerPoint or even overhead projectors. He’s almost charmed by the iniquity of it all.
A woman two rows in front of him shifts and raises her hand. The man lecturing - Professor Miles, his mind helpfully supplies - pauses. “Yes?”
“If we adhere to this notion in the strictest sense, how can we be sure that we have anticipated adequately? If we design a house for a couple who claim to absolutely not want children and then find themselves a family of four a decade later, have we failed as architects?” Her hair is bobbed and her shoulders squared. Arthur knows without seeing her profile that she is gorgeous.
Professor Miles purses his lips. “Of course we aren’t omniscient. It’s impossible to anticipate every possible and alternative outcome. At some point, we as individuals need to shift the balance from information collection to creation while never losing sight of either.”
Arthur tilts his head, examining the house on the screen. An edifice of glass and concrete. No privacy and no illusion of such.
“And this is why we, as architects, are both engineers and artists. And why it takes us six years to get a piece of paper that says so.” The audience chuckles, polite and uncomfortable in the truth of that statement.
Arthur’s neck itches with day-old stubble. He drags angry red scratches to his shirt collar.
Professor Miles resumes his lecture. “To further address Mal’s question, this house is widely considered a marvel. It looks happy. But how happy would the mother be who has to clean children’s handprints off the windows daily?”
The woman - Mal - folds one leg over the other. The bottoms of her trousers are dirty.
Arthur wonders what she would be like in bed. He envisions her wrapped in the rumpled brown sheets of his fifth floor walk-up in Chinatown, smoking languidly and hair messy and loose. He pictures it in an idle, mindless sort of way.
-
There is more than one type of memory. Memory itself is a difficult enough concept to define, but it always involves endurance or retention over time at some level.
Declarative (explicit) memory: conscious recollection of facts and episodes. Mal’s eyes are the gray of storm clouds, moods changing the color like a weather front sweeping in.
Procedural (implicit) memory: unconscious recollection of how to do specific tasks. Always shoot on the exhale.
-
He slants a glance left. She smirks. Her lips and mouth are stained blackberry purple. She pulls a cigarette from a slim case. “All this wine is going to my head.” She drops her free hand on Arthur’s forearm. “Do you mind?”
He makes a show of patting his trouser pockets before shaking his head. “Sorry.”
She blows an errant curl out of her eyes. “You’ve lost your romance.” A glass of something clear appears by her elbow. The bartender shakes her head at the cigarette, pointing at the sign over her shoulder.
“Must’ve left it in my other pants.” She laughs. The sound makes him uneasy. “I think they would’ve made you put it out before you could properly enjoy it anyway.” She rolls a shrug but tucks the cigarette back in the case.
Arthur turns back to his wine. He has no taste for it, not yet.
She squeezes his arm, drawing his attention again. There’s a bit of a smile still curling lazily, something akin to amusement. “You’re far too interesting to be drinking alone.”
He sips, vinegar and raspberries and spice battling for dominance. “Is that so?”
“Yes.” He catchers her gaze, holds it steady. “We should leave.”
He says nothing, takes another sip, makes a decision. He grins, brushing his mouth over hers lightly.
-
Try this experiment: Stand in front of a mirror. Look yourself in the eye. Stick your fingers in your ears. Draw a mental line to connect your fingertips. Draw separate lines through each pupil. Where these lines intersect the line between your ears is approximately where each ventral hippocampus lies.
Pretty cool, right?
-
Arthur learns her name is Mal when she hitches her leg over his hip, back pressed against an anonymous hotel room door, dress caught over her hips and bunched at the waist.
“Like Baudelaire?” he asks, fumbling his zipper and pushing aside fabric between them.
“My mother’s sense of humor left something to be desired.” She bites at the juncture between shoulder and neck. Arthur pushes into her liminal spaces.
-
People who claim to have eidetic memory recall images, sounds, or objects.
They never mention smell or taste or touch.
There are no scientifically validated cases of long-term eidetic memory.
-
In the morning, his shirt is buttoned around her, fabric taut over her breasts, cuffs rolled into sleeves to her elbows. The tails hang between her legs, and her sex-mussed hair tumbles around the collar.
Arthur watches her perch on the faux-cherry desk. One foot drags up her calf absently. She bites at her thumb and ashes a cigarette into a cut-glass tumbler.
He props himself on an elbow. “You’re something else, Mal.”
She smiles, tiny and private, eyes veiled behind a curtain of hair. “I know.”
-
Henry Molaison (H.M.) is the most famous patient in psychological research. Nearly the entirety of his hippocampus (along with the parahippocampal gyrus and amygdala) was removed to cure him of debilitating tonic-clonic seizures.
After, his implicit memory functioning remained largely intact while his explicit memory systems were irreversibly damaged.
He could navigate a maze by hand. But he couldn’t tell you the name of the person who told him to complete the task.
-
Arthur waits until he completes his two-year active duty contract with the Army before he visits room 8 of the Tate Britain.
He sits on a low-slung wooden bench in the middle of the room and lets his eyes roam over the panels of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion. He notes the lines of movement caught in stasis, detail that could never be adequately captured in the prints his mother first showed him in a suburban New Jersey kitchen.
A woman joins him, all casual elegance as she stares at the painting before her. She holds a copy of Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté in her lap. Arthur notches his eyebrow before turning back to the Bacon.
“I’ve never understood the appeal of this painting.” He can tell from her voice alone that reading de Beauvoir isn’t merely an affectation for her. She looks at him, patient and considering.
“It’s about the balance between despair and vengeance.” Arthur takes a breath, holds it, allows the moment to stretch beyond the limits of comfort. She lets him. “Bacon was once quoted as saying, about a different painting, ‘I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.’”
She smiles then, crooked and brilliant. “Are you always so thorough?”
“Only when I want to impress lovely art appreciators.” He taps his knee, a nervous habit the Army failed to drill out of him. “My mother gifted me with a love of Bacon, although Figure with Meat is probably my favorite of his works.”
“So does that make you a serious man, a nihilist, a passionate man, or an adventurer?”
Arthur huffs a laugh. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I believe in all that.”
She inclines her head towards him. “But you do believe in the violence of action, do you not?”
He nods. “I do.”
She returns to contemplating the triptych, fingers curling around her book. Arthur follows her gaze.
“I’ve always thought that if you looked left to right you could say see no evil,” Arthur points to the first panel, “hear no evil,” the second, “and speak no evil.”
He notices her slide a glance to his face before following the line of his arm to where he points at the third panel.
“My name is Mal.”
-
Memory is a strange entity.
Sometimes we love it for enabling us to relive enjoyable experiences from our past.
Sometimes we hate it for reminding us of what we could’ve said, should’ve done.
-
An early morning rain dots the cobblestoned streets and dampens the buttery-rich smell of fresh-baked croissants. She sits on a bench under the Eiffel Tower, shoulders rolled in and loose curls catching and haloing in a slight breeze. A book sprawls across her lap, heavy with secrets, anchored with an open palm. The hem of her trousers ruined with city filth, she worries her bottom lip between manicured thumb and forefinger and turns the page.
He watches her across the crushed gravel walkway as she discreetly tips her face into the watery sunlight. Twenty minutes, forty-five, an hour.
And then he moves.
“Excusez-moi, madamemoiselle. Do you have a copy of Le Monde I might borrow?”
She slides her finger to mark her place, flashing a well-worn cover. Anna Karenina. “It took you an hour to decide you were going to ask me for the paper?”
Arthur ducks his head, rosy-pink blush staining his cheeks and highlighting a dusting of freckles there.
She smiles. “Join me.”
-
There is always truth in fiction.
This much is true: When he sees her for the first time, it rains earlier in the day. The bottoms of her trousers are dirty. He is itchy with discomfort. There is a book, title unimportant.
-
Arthur is sitting on Mal’s bench. She ropes a sweater cuff over her fingers. Her hand rests on top of a different novel, dust jacket depicting Moreau’s Jupiter and Semele.
“Bonjour.”
Their elbows knock. Arthur reaches up to tuck Mal’s hair behind one ear. She flinches.
“Did you ever think that reality was just this paper landscape? Like a giant scenery backdrop waiting to ignite under the stage lights? And when it catches aflame it will fall away in strips to reveal a smoking landscape and faceless names?”
He brushes his knuckles over the back of her sweater-clad hand. Arthur tugs the fraying end loose from her grip.
She looks away, eyes unfocused.
“I don’t recognize anything.”
Her fingers are warm as they curl around his, stealing a hold.
-
How they meet is not important. Just know that one day, they met, a long time ago.
-
Further notes:
Gmür and Vacchini house in Beinwil am See | Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion | Figure with Meat | Jupiter and Semele (dust jacket illustration for the American English translation of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666)
Everything I know about architecture I learned from The Architecture of Happiness.
H.M. was only known by his initials, as is customary for psychological patients, until his death in December 2008. The landmark studies Milner conducted with him are the foundation upon which the field of cognitive neuropsychology is built. They also comprise a large portion of the evidence for memory formation and storage in the hippocampus.
The Bacon quote is from The New Decade.
Oh. And I don’t speak French. If I’ve messed it up, please let me know.
Author: chemfishee
Fandom: Inception
Pairings/Characters: Arthur/Mal [and fandom Cobb!squints and makes me sit at the kids’ table]
Rating: R
Word Count: ~3000
Summary: “I’ve always thought that if you looked left to right you could say see no evil,” Arthur points to the first panel, “hear no evil,” the second, “and speak no evil.”
Notes: Um, this certainly isn’t what I thought would be my first (proper) fic in this fandom. For kasiowy, who originally asked for an Arthur backstory where he met Mal before Cobb This is my original fill. It's since been significantly reworked and expanded because I couldn’t leave it alone. Title courtesy of The Avett Brothers’ “I And Love And You”.
Beta’d by the magnificent pjvilar, who absolutely refuses to let me get away with any authorial laziness and tolerates my neuroses. Any remaining mistakes are due to my tinkering.
The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.
-- The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
La poëte au cachot, débraillé, maladif,
Roulant un manuscrit sous son pied convulsif,
Mesure d’un regard que la terreur enflame
L’escalier de vertige où s’abîme son âme.
-- Charles Baudelaire
The story goes that they first met in Paris on a blustery April day.
-
But that’s just one version. The truth is that the City of Light was still an accident waiting to happen, spurred by youthful ennui and general wanderlust.
They do meet in Paris. After. She presses a kiss to his cheek outside de Gaulle. He twines their fingers together and lets himself be led wherever she wants to go.
“There’s someone I want you to meet.”
-
Arthur turns another page in his battered paperback. There is the normal detritus of the perpetually bored college student littered about him - coffee (black, no sugar) cooling slowly, plate of scattered cupcake remnants, unopened pack of Camel Lights under a cheap plastic lighter, Moleskine lying prone, fine-tipped pen within easy reach.
Arthur is not a student. Arthur is practicing adapting to his environment. Arthur is a man of action; he learns by doing.
“Are you reading Sartre en français?”
The girl - woman, he amends - sits across from him, uninvited. A ghost of disbelief hangs around her, smooth along the edges. No one Arthur knows is this self-assured.
“Oui.”
Amusement sparks in her eyes. Arthur’s arm itches, and he feels the back of his neck go hot under her cool regard. “Why ever would you do that?”
“Moi, j'aime un défi.” She laughs, and he thinks she’s lovely.
“May I?” She points at the cigarettes. He slides the pack to her and watches as she tamps down the tobacco inside. “Your accent could use some work.”
That surprises a laugh out of him. “And what are you, some kind of dialogue expert?”
She extracts one cigarette, lights it, inhales, watches the smoke curl around the edges of her vision before she answers. “Non. I’m Mal. And you can drop the pretension.”
Mal drags one leg over the other, the cuff of her trousers damp with city filth. “Tell me…”
“Arthur.”
“Tell me, Arthur, do you dream?”
-
The only thing we can say about personal histories is this: They are each subjected to the whimsical folly of memory, loosely stored in protein synthesis pathways and chemical signaling cascades.
Our identity is governed by chance random fluctuations and interactions. Bring two atoms together and form a molecule. Watch many molecules evolve into two people making a pair.
-
The woman rounds the corner, disappearing amongst the teetering stacks with the sharp click of high heels on hardwood floors.
Arthur focuses on the shelf in front of him, full to overflowing with copies of lovingly worn and heartlessly discarded Vonneguts. He pulls an edition of Mother Night swaddled in a yellow and black and blue cover.
His own original copy was cream and green, Howard Campbell, Jr.’s hands curled around the bars of G and T. Arthur’s father handed him the book on the occasion of his seventeenth birthday when Arthur announced he would be enlisting in his father’s Army post-graduation. Slaughterhouse-Five followed the year after.
And so it goes.
The next row over is international fiction, divided by geographic locality. Borges. Paz. García Marquez. Arthur inhales the scent of monochromatic sand and ancho chiles.
The woman stands at the opposite end. In her hands, a leather-bound and flaking, gilt-edged book. A resource. For research or general curiosity, Arthur can’t discern.
She cracks the cover, scattering a cloud of dust mites in the slanting late-afternoon sun. Arthur edges closer. The opened pages are columnated, photographs with bold names and italicized dates. The writing is French.
He doesn’t recognize the names or faces.
She turns the page. Arthur chances a glance up, and his attention catches on a flock of birds balanced on the roof edge across the street, dots on the horizon. One twitters.
The woman’s eyelashes flutter and spread along the planes of her cheeks. She shuts her eyes for a long moment, as if she’s thinking. She inhales, shaky and wet.
A lone tear tracks a lazy path down.
-
Scientists say the hippocampus is where memories are stored in the brain.
Hippocampus. From the Latin. Seahorse.
Arthur sees a hippocampus, twice, in a crash neuroanatomy course the military thought necessary only after they started fucking around with people’s minds.
The first was human, outlined on a 50 µm thick sagittal section mounted on a glass slide. Dehydrated. Grayish-brown. Fragile.
For the second, a grad student in a white lab coat and purple nitrile gloves broke the white fiber tract of the corpus callosum in a fresh mouse brain and rolled a pale grayish-pink bulb away from the rest of the tissue.
Arthur supposes it did look like a seahorse, with a little imagination.
-
“de Botton posits that the buildings we call beautiful are those that create environments capable of satisfying needs we aren’t consciously aware of. It’s about anticipation. It’s about feeling.”
The projector clicks as the white-haired man with the lilting English accent advances to a slide of the Gmür and Vacchini house in Beinwil am See. Arthur honestly didn’t know people still resisted PowerPoint or even overhead projectors. He’s almost charmed by the iniquity of it all.
A woman two rows in front of him shifts and raises her hand. The man lecturing - Professor Miles, his mind helpfully supplies - pauses. “Yes?”
“If we adhere to this notion in the strictest sense, how can we be sure that we have anticipated adequately? If we design a house for a couple who claim to absolutely not want children and then find themselves a family of four a decade later, have we failed as architects?” Her hair is bobbed and her shoulders squared. Arthur knows without seeing her profile that she is gorgeous.
Professor Miles purses his lips. “Of course we aren’t omniscient. It’s impossible to anticipate every possible and alternative outcome. At some point, we as individuals need to shift the balance from information collection to creation while never losing sight of either.”
Arthur tilts his head, examining the house on the screen. An edifice of glass and concrete. No privacy and no illusion of such.
“And this is why we, as architects, are both engineers and artists. And why it takes us six years to get a piece of paper that says so.” The audience chuckles, polite and uncomfortable in the truth of that statement.
Arthur’s neck itches with day-old stubble. He drags angry red scratches to his shirt collar.
Professor Miles resumes his lecture. “To further address Mal’s question, this house is widely considered a marvel. It looks happy. But how happy would the mother be who has to clean children’s handprints off the windows daily?”
The woman - Mal - folds one leg over the other. The bottoms of her trousers are dirty.
Arthur wonders what she would be like in bed. He envisions her wrapped in the rumpled brown sheets of his fifth floor walk-up in Chinatown, smoking languidly and hair messy and loose. He pictures it in an idle, mindless sort of way.
-
There is more than one type of memory. Memory itself is a difficult enough concept to define, but it always involves endurance or retention over time at some level.
Declarative (explicit) memory: conscious recollection of facts and episodes. Mal’s eyes are the gray of storm clouds, moods changing the color like a weather front sweeping in.
Procedural (implicit) memory: unconscious recollection of how to do specific tasks. Always shoot on the exhale.
-
He slants a glance left. She smirks. Her lips and mouth are stained blackberry purple. She pulls a cigarette from a slim case. “All this wine is going to my head.” She drops her free hand on Arthur’s forearm. “Do you mind?”
He makes a show of patting his trouser pockets before shaking his head. “Sorry.”
She blows an errant curl out of her eyes. “You’ve lost your romance.” A glass of something clear appears by her elbow. The bartender shakes her head at the cigarette, pointing at the sign over her shoulder.
“Must’ve left it in my other pants.” She laughs. The sound makes him uneasy. “I think they would’ve made you put it out before you could properly enjoy it anyway.” She rolls a shrug but tucks the cigarette back in the case.
Arthur turns back to his wine. He has no taste for it, not yet.
She squeezes his arm, drawing his attention again. There’s a bit of a smile still curling lazily, something akin to amusement. “You’re far too interesting to be drinking alone.”
He sips, vinegar and raspberries and spice battling for dominance. “Is that so?”
“Yes.” He catchers her gaze, holds it steady. “We should leave.”
He says nothing, takes another sip, makes a decision. He grins, brushing his mouth over hers lightly.
-
Try this experiment: Stand in front of a mirror. Look yourself in the eye. Stick your fingers in your ears. Draw a mental line to connect your fingertips. Draw separate lines through each pupil. Where these lines intersect the line between your ears is approximately where each ventral hippocampus lies.
Pretty cool, right?
-
Arthur learns her name is Mal when she hitches her leg over his hip, back pressed against an anonymous hotel room door, dress caught over her hips and bunched at the waist.
“Like Baudelaire?” he asks, fumbling his zipper and pushing aside fabric between them.
“My mother’s sense of humor left something to be desired.” She bites at the juncture between shoulder and neck. Arthur pushes into her liminal spaces.
-
People who claim to have eidetic memory recall images, sounds, or objects.
They never mention smell or taste or touch.
There are no scientifically validated cases of long-term eidetic memory.
-
In the morning, his shirt is buttoned around her, fabric taut over her breasts, cuffs rolled into sleeves to her elbows. The tails hang between her legs, and her sex-mussed hair tumbles around the collar.
Arthur watches her perch on the faux-cherry desk. One foot drags up her calf absently. She bites at her thumb and ashes a cigarette into a cut-glass tumbler.
He props himself on an elbow. “You’re something else, Mal.”
She smiles, tiny and private, eyes veiled behind a curtain of hair. “I know.”
-
Henry Molaison (H.M.) is the most famous patient in psychological research. Nearly the entirety of his hippocampus (along with the parahippocampal gyrus and amygdala) was removed to cure him of debilitating tonic-clonic seizures.
After, his implicit memory functioning remained largely intact while his explicit memory systems were irreversibly damaged.
He could navigate a maze by hand. But he couldn’t tell you the name of the person who told him to complete the task.
-
Arthur waits until he completes his two-year active duty contract with the Army before he visits room 8 of the Tate Britain.
He sits on a low-slung wooden bench in the middle of the room and lets his eyes roam over the panels of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion. He notes the lines of movement caught in stasis, detail that could never be adequately captured in the prints his mother first showed him in a suburban New Jersey kitchen.
A woman joins him, all casual elegance as she stares at the painting before her. She holds a copy of Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté in her lap. Arthur notches his eyebrow before turning back to the Bacon.
“I’ve never understood the appeal of this painting.” He can tell from her voice alone that reading de Beauvoir isn’t merely an affectation for her. She looks at him, patient and considering.
“It’s about the balance between despair and vengeance.” Arthur takes a breath, holds it, allows the moment to stretch beyond the limits of comfort. She lets him. “Bacon was once quoted as saying, about a different painting, ‘I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.’”
She smiles then, crooked and brilliant. “Are you always so thorough?”
“Only when I want to impress lovely art appreciators.” He taps his knee, a nervous habit the Army failed to drill out of him. “My mother gifted me with a love of Bacon, although Figure with Meat is probably my favorite of his works.”
“So does that make you a serious man, a nihilist, a passionate man, or an adventurer?”
Arthur huffs a laugh. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I believe in all that.”
She inclines her head towards him. “But you do believe in the violence of action, do you not?”
He nods. “I do.”
She returns to contemplating the triptych, fingers curling around her book. Arthur follows her gaze.
“I’ve always thought that if you looked left to right you could say see no evil,” Arthur points to the first panel, “hear no evil,” the second, “and speak no evil.”
He notices her slide a glance to his face before following the line of his arm to where he points at the third panel.
“My name is Mal.”
-
Memory is a strange entity.
Sometimes we love it for enabling us to relive enjoyable experiences from our past.
Sometimes we hate it for reminding us of what we could’ve said, should’ve done.
-
An early morning rain dots the cobblestoned streets and dampens the buttery-rich smell of fresh-baked croissants. She sits on a bench under the Eiffel Tower, shoulders rolled in and loose curls catching and haloing in a slight breeze. A book sprawls across her lap, heavy with secrets, anchored with an open palm. The hem of her trousers ruined with city filth, she worries her bottom lip between manicured thumb and forefinger and turns the page.
He watches her across the crushed gravel walkway as she discreetly tips her face into the watery sunlight. Twenty minutes, forty-five, an hour.
And then he moves.
“Excusez-moi, madamemoiselle. Do you have a copy of Le Monde I might borrow?”
She slides her finger to mark her place, flashing a well-worn cover. Anna Karenina. “It took you an hour to decide you were going to ask me for the paper?”
Arthur ducks his head, rosy-pink blush staining his cheeks and highlighting a dusting of freckles there.
She smiles. “Join me.”
-
There is always truth in fiction.
This much is true: When he sees her for the first time, it rains earlier in the day. The bottoms of her trousers are dirty. He is itchy with discomfort. There is a book, title unimportant.
-
Arthur is sitting on Mal’s bench. She ropes a sweater cuff over her fingers. Her hand rests on top of a different novel, dust jacket depicting Moreau’s Jupiter and Semele.
“Bonjour.”
Their elbows knock. Arthur reaches up to tuck Mal’s hair behind one ear. She flinches.
“Did you ever think that reality was just this paper landscape? Like a giant scenery backdrop waiting to ignite under the stage lights? And when it catches aflame it will fall away in strips to reveal a smoking landscape and faceless names?”
He brushes his knuckles over the back of her sweater-clad hand. Arthur tugs the fraying end loose from her grip.
She looks away, eyes unfocused.
“I don’t recognize anything.”
Her fingers are warm as they curl around his, stealing a hold.
-
How they meet is not important. Just know that one day, they met, a long time ago.
-
Further notes:
Gmür and Vacchini house in Beinwil am See | Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion | Figure with Meat | Jupiter and Semele (dust jacket illustration for the American English translation of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666)
Everything I know about architecture I learned from The Architecture of Happiness.
H.M. was only known by his initials, as is customary for psychological patients, until his death in December 2008. The landmark studies Milner conducted with him are the foundation upon which the field of cognitive neuropsychology is built. They also comprise a large portion of the evidence for memory formation and storage in the hippocampus.
The Bacon quote is from The New Decade.
Oh. And I don’t speak French. If I’ve messed it up, please let me know.