part of a letter;; Judith Sherwin
Here’s the thing about working in the dreamshare business. It’s not always with a team.
There are people who work with a team, and then there are team players. Eames is the former, though she would have you believe she is the latter. Eames will work with a group but she’s never without her means. The team could walk out on her and she would, for the most part, be able to hold a job together because she is a person who works with a team. Team players are the reason she has a job- she can do something they can’t.
It probably explains why she’s able to get away with so much.
Seeing the same old secrets, bank codes, adulterers, an endless string of meaningless numbers; it gets old after a while.
Eames doesn’t always act with a team. The reckless, defiant part of her that yearns for independence leads her off the beaten path. Away from dream mazes and liability reports, to more neglected venues.
She finds interesting jobs that others deem ‘too close to home.’ Jobs with tears and jobs with no tears left to shed. Eames seeks them out and smiles the smile she knows they want to see, just the right shade of competent and reassuring.
Eames is always surprised by how much people are willing to assume; the right words and a metal suitcase will get a person very far.
Money could be an issue, and she makes it seem like it is when the job calls for it, but mostly Eames takes these jobs because no one else wants them. Too personal, not high profile enough, frivolous, too experimental. What she walks away from with these jobs is much more than they could ever pay her.
Experience is the best teacher and Eames knows that she could live a thousand years and barely scrape the surface of all the things she’d like to learn. So she finds her answers in other people’s experiences, working through jobs that might be ‘too personal’ but are all the more alluring for it.
She fixes things, finds others, and sometimes she just bears witness. When no one else will, when no one else can, she is the one willing to slip into their subconscious with the right words. Catharsis, she has found, comes in many a varied shade and hue.
Sometimes, she finds things that she keeps.
Beautiful things, so many gems to her eyes, and she yearns to hold them in her hands, to keep them all for herself. She is a thief after all.
The difference in what she takes and what she wants, lies in the sentimentality.
Eames sifts through the memories of her clients, and for a moment (a day, a week, a small lifetime) lives a life she would never get to otherwise. Goes to places and doesn’t feel the heat the way she would feel it, hot and sticky under her arms and between her toes, but evenly across her skin, a warm press on all sides, womb-like in its familiarity. Memories of lavender like a first kiss, the sunrise like the swell of heartbreak within her chest. Eames keeps these moments, needs to remember them as if they were her own because they are beautiful and she is weak.
People are capable of magnificent things, fantasies and perceptions that they hide away, keep out of sight and out of mind because some feelings are too substantial to be borne.
So Eames takes them.
Not literally; no, she would make much more money if she ever perfected that skill-- though something tells her she wouldn’t erase them even if she could. Pain is the body’s way of learning, and suffering is all in the mind. When we suffer, we learn to cope with pain, and Eames would never cripple someone by taking that away.
No, Eames takes these memories with her in her own mind. Stores them deep within her so that every once in a while, she’ll smell lavender and feel the heady rush of triumph, the greedy satisfaction of a kiss she’s waited her whole life for. A gun will fit just right in her palm and the guilt, the sickening, dizzying guilt of first blood on her hands will make her sway.
More often than not, these people have secrets tucked away not in safes, but in boxes from old computer parts, drawers filled with buttons and foam letters and indescribable little scraps of paper that even Eames can’t decipher.
That she can’t puzzle them out makes them unspeakably precious.
In the mind, away from the judgment of coherency, people are beautiful, hurt creatures. Poetic in their incoherency, hungry for the positive feedback loop of their own misery because the human existence can be such a lonely one.
Eames sifts through these paper memories, transcribed in gory detail, so much anger and lust, brimming with passion in its most basic sense, and she takes them to heart.
Sometimes she keeps them as they are, stealing the memories she isn’t sure she will ever make; the thoughts she isn't sure she even understands,
wet and soft, your tiny
head fits in my hands. i made you, a
sinner,
i could take you away without nine months and
so much blood.
But then there are the others. The bits and pieces that she molds together- a flash of feeling here, a glimpse of herself there. Until there is something jagged and obscene, heavy and true in her palms. Real enough to make her doubt.
Doubt herself. Doubt the dream. Doubt that these words, that fit so perfectly, don’t belong to her to begin with.
Eames fashions them together and keeps them tucked out of sight, hoarding these secrets of theirs that slowly become her own.
When she leaves, no one is the wiser. The client gets their wish, as best as she can grant it, and Eames comes away with a bit of a world she’s never seen. A symbiosis cleverly disguised as a business transaction.
She keeps these things and wanders her way back into her own life. To those philandering multi-million dollar conglomerate businessmen and the shady underbelly that television dramas can only dream of. Her dreams are never so unfulfilling.
She waits for the call that is always interesting enough. Waits for the text, just this side of biting but always worth her time.
-A
On long days, or simply when the fancy strikes, Eames revisits these stolen words.
She slips into sleep only to find these thoughts, her vicarious memories, have changed. Sometimes it is only a word, a fit that resonates and she isn’t sure if its been changed at all. But other times, without her permission or even her knowledge, these moments that were not her own to rearrange become something entirely more substantial.
With cautious fingers, gentle because these permutations are so new (or, at least, that is what she tells herself) Eames learns her new memories.
i hope you’re well, not hungry, not more lonely
than you can bear. i hope you’re not angry with me.
i think of you constantly.
time goes out, our time
goes out for a good time
and we’re left behind
just the same
forgive me for fucking around
forgive me for getting abstract again
argument
is my meat
i wasn’t ever cut out
for an earth mother. gut talk,
yes, but i like games too,
make this world as i go along,
enjoy the foreplay.
i enjoy you.
i don’t want to change you.
if i could be like you
i’d hurt more than i do
i have
more
to tell you
but not the same things.
please enjoy me too.
i hope you find yourself some gentle, gone chessplayer
hard-headed, soft spoken,
knows how to bug you, how to leave you alone,
how to answer you, dig in and not budge,
what to do with his head, what to do with his cock,
when to make you shut up
with so much love,
These are the words she tucks away.
In a forgotten time and place, Eames is sure she must have stolen these as well. Forgotten gems at the bottom of a box of treasures that do not belong.
This is what she tells herself when she slips the cannula from her wrist, only as substantial as her smiles and endearments. Because in the end…
It is much easier to keep someone else’s secret, than it is to confront your own.