(Fragmented) Spaces
Title: (Fragmented) Spaces
Fandom: Inception
Rating: PG-13. Nothing particularly dangerous, except potential mindscrew.
Characters: Arthur, Eames, Cobb
Summary: Done for an inception_kink prompt. Questions of missing dates, fragments of memory, and the spaces between that Arthur slips through, now and then. Implied A/E or A/C, depending on how you read.
Note: This is me experimenting with form, so be warned: things will get rough in there. Almost everything is deliberate, so odd sentence structures are to be expected.
-
1.
(In my beginning is my end, the poet says)
The die clatters, bounces, stops -
The world begins, the world ends.
2.
You’re late, he says.
Eames smirks; unperturbed, and reaches into his grey tweed jacket to pull out a bundle of dogeared papers, crinkled at the tips and says,
3.
“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
(He says that two years too soon.)
4.
Rather sorry to have kept you waiting, Arthur.
No, he wants to say, flipping through the crumpled papers that resist his attempts to arrange them, to impose some order on their Eamesian chaos, I’ve always been waiting (all my life.)
5.
He remembers being twenty-three, four times.
In three of them, he isn’t Arthur.
6.
I have sometimes been accused of being a bore. I beg to differ: people laugh at my jokes, and I’m handsome. I would like now to talk more about myself: I don’t like going to airports and hospitals. They make me uneasy. In both cases, somebody is always going to leave. I was born in 1983, and have never been to Berlin. But I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961. I have a memory of something that never happened.
I would like to elaborate on myself, but you will understand if I talk instead about the sky in Berlin in 1961: it was covered with dust. There were no birds. There was no sky.
7.
Say something, Eames says, because this is the kind of silence between acquaintances that is unsettling because you don’t really know what the other person is thinking.
Something, Arthur says.
Eames rolls his eyes, and they are grey, as grey as the rain.
8.
It is the small things, scattered about randomly with no discernable order.
It is the little things; the bits and pieces of memory (fragments) that defy any attempts to slot them neatly (like the hard plastic files he always buys at two for a dollar) into place; to superimpose a pattern over them
and the
(empty) spaces
between.
9.
This is a die.
You feel for the surface with the three pips, for the tiny uneven scratch that runs across the face of the die, and toss it;
it rolls, bouncing a little on the table, and you pocket it without looking, knowing what the number should be, and wondering why your mind remembers a series of other numbers, other memories.
10.
Dreams, you say, seem real while we’re in them.
She nods thoughtfully. Eames is draped over a chair, deliberately almost-slouching, not bothering to hide his amusement.
(What you do not say: after the dreams, all the memories melt and run together and bleed into each other, like rubber in the heat.)
11.
The most important word you never said:
Unreality.
12.
Arthur, he asked.
13.
Constancy.
(Is it too much to ask for, he wonders)
when reality and dreams start to interweave themselves, dripping puddles into each other like the Dali clock in The Persistence of Memory
in the faded hues of memory that his mind preserves, in their jangling, discordant layers that don’t always make sense.
14.
These are not constants:
the slow motion of the Earth beneath his feet,
the presence of Eames,
the way dream-jackets cling to his skin like plastic wrap,
(Cobb,)
the numbers he thinks the die is supposed to produce.
15.
These are constants:
a scarlet plastic die, a little battered, and scratched on the side with three pips,
the presence of Eames,
the way waking up is like falling, then slowly rising through water, sloughing sheets of it off his skin,
(Cobb,)
his need for constancy, something solid, and something unchanging; his need for something much like a totem.
16.
Yes, he says. He glances over at Eames.
Are you alright?
Pause.
Yes, he thinks he says. Or maybe, no.
Or maybe, he says nothing at all.
17.
Dream, he thinks.
The die is still, suspended;
The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, he remembers, and the physical impossibility of perfect stillness, even in the throbbing heart of this false-reality -
and then the dice hits the table, rolls (and then he can breathe.)
Arthur, Eames says.
Arthur looks at him, and waits.
18.
He says son can you play me a memory, I’m not really sure how it goes. But it’s sad and it’s sweet, and I knew it complete, when I wore a younger man’s clothes -
Empty spaces, what are we living for -
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Arthur flicks through the stations, through snippets of songs, and memories, and then shuts off the radio.
19.
Why, he says.
Cobb is silent, looks away.
Twenty-seven point four centimetres (is the distance between them), Arthur thinks. Maybe not strictly true, give or take a bit more. Twenty-seven point four centimetres, more than fifty years, and a projection intent on killing him in gruesome ways, this huge grey elephant in the room that unspoken rules say neither of them can acknowledge: this is the sum of the space that separates them.
Arthur walks away.
This is not a surrender, he says. This isn’t over (yet).
It doesn’t matter how close they will stand together, at each other’s shoulder, close enough to be keenly aware of the other’s body in the intimate way only dream-death and dreamsharing (and something more) can bring;
how he will measure the hard lines of Cobb’s shoulder-blades, how he has seen those sharp angles with much less fabric between his gaze and skin.
Yes, he can say, I know him, far more deeply than you will,
but the space between them is there, no matter how he will try to close it up, no matter how Cobb will walk away, and then come back.
(This is the secret of space; it is infinite. Within a single centimetre hides an expanse that drives a mathematician mad trying to ennumerate it.)
20.
Space is a paradox. Time is a paradox. Neither of them existed, before man needed some absolute measure of this ticking clock within his chest, some absolute measure of each mark his feet places on the earth.
I am small, they say. But I contain multitudes.
21.
I am twenty-four when I meet Eames. I am twenty-two when I meet Cobb. I stand in the isthmus between them, like a coin balanced perfectly on edge between heads and tails.
This is the space between them: two years, each of them reversed and reflecting the other. I worked with Cobb first, and then I took a job with Eames. Cobb is professional and brusque and reluctantly impressed (and in a charcoal suit-jacket). Eames is professional (on the job), brushes people off easily, and reluctantly impressed (and in a grey tweed jacket)
When I am twenty-four, Cobb and Eames have never, yet, worked together.
I wonder where, if there is space between them, can I fit.
22.
Do you still think this is a dream, Eames asks, slipping in softly behind him like a cat, with a cat’s disregard for the rules of personal space.
Arthur shrugs, and drops the die into his pocket; it is a comforting weight, and Eames’ eyes follow his movements.
No, he says. Just checking. Do you need to?
23.
My name is Arthur, I am twenty-eight, going twenty-nine.
Last night, my memory says, I was a cold, withdrawn man with nothing but suits, and twenty-five and my name (maybe) was Arthur. I looked at the calender, and saw nothing but a blur. There are entire dates missing from my memory, and a year or two that doesn’t belong.
You are not the same people who left that station, says a poet I have never heard of and I have never read.
24.
He is twenty-seven when Mal dies, and twenty-seven-going-twenty-eight when Mal shows up like an actor reciting lines from a half-remembered script in Cobb’s dreams.
He is twenty-seven-going-twenty-eight when he learns that no matter how close he and Cobb are, Cobb and Mal are closer, and even next to a shade, he is nothing.
Arthur is twenty-seven-going-twenty-eight when he learns that he will never fit in the space between them, but Cobb still wants him to try.
25.
Take a person, take a being, and enter his mind and peel it apart like the skin of an onion, and you will find:
layers
upon
layers
of memories, stacked on top of each other; this is what makes a person, this is what shapes the ideas that drive his personality (this is why inception can destroy a man, and make him, or change him forever).
This is a human being, infinitely complex, comprised of his nature shaped by memories, driven by and at the mercy of subconscious forces he can’t always comprehend. (As well ask the bands of rock slumbering in the earth’s womb why the ghost of the flowing river is forever cleaved into their brittle skin, unforgetting, eternal.)
Arthur wonders what that says about him, when there are parts and sections of his memories that aren’t his own, and who is Arthur anyway.
26.
There will be a girl, with brown eyes, who loves scarves, who pushes the limits with the same curiosity as Cobb, and the same genius, the same fierce intellect.
I will meet her, three years from now, and we will kiss in a hotel (in my dreams).
I will kiss her; she will taste like chaos, and I will kiss her to taste her chaos, because there is an order to this chaos, a method to her madness that I will never possess.
I will say it was worth a shot, because she is beautiful, and we will both stand at this crossroads and wonder where we go from here.
27.
Do you ever lose yourself, he asks Eames one day.
Eames looks up from his scrutiny of a set of notes on a mark he’s planning to forge. Sorry?
Do you ever lose yourself, he repeats.
No, Eames frowns, and puts the notes down, leaning forward just slightly in the scuffed armchair. What do you mean?
When you forge, he says, and is surprised to see his hands are shaking, just a little. (This is why he isn’t the forger, this is why Eames is the forger, and he is the point man who deals in certainties, not identities that blur and melt into each other like a Dali painting.)
Eames sees it too; rain-grey eyes narrow, like the closing of a camera aperture to bring the object into greater focus. Arthur, he says. Arthur.
28.
It might not have been Eames.
It might have been Cobb.
29.
These are your attempts to draw your line in the sand, to say, here, but no further.
The sharp angles at which you fold your sleeves, a declaration of identity, a deliberate concession to disorder, but on your terms, precisely so.
The die you keep, and roll every once in a while to remind yourself.
The way you only wear suits on the job, the way you painstakingly separate job professionalism with your personal identity - whatever you can really consider that to be.
Your need for specificity, for clarity, and for constancy, to set as a bulwark against the uncertainties of memory.
The sharp strokes in your black notebook where you neatly list the plans, proceedures, and requirements for each job.
Each line of black or blue ink is a stark contrast to white paper. Each slashing stroke is a declaration, a challenge that says, this is who I am, this is what I am. Each stroke is a barrier against uncertainty, your own way of resisting -
I am Arthur, you say, in the sum of all these. I am twenty-eight, going twenty-nine. I have never been to Berlin, I was born in 1983, but I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961.
30.
This is a totem:
A red plastic die, fragile, as it balances on your open palm.
This is reality:
Nothing tells you this is real. Not the die, not the fragments of memory, not the reassuring weight of the hand on your shoulder, not the textured feel of his fingers closing around your arm.
Not the way he breathes, Arthur, Arthur.
This is the fragile secret behind reality, like a breath, like a thin glass flute, like a note so high and pure you must hold yourself to keep from shattering:
It is only as real as you allow it to be.
31.
Reality, or dream?
Every morning, you wake up. You are not Cobb; you don’t find yourself clutching your totem and checking it in a desperate ritual for clarity.
Every morning, you breathe, you live, and you die, just a little more.
Every morning, you make your choice, look into the mirror and say (in your head), I am Arthur. I am twenty-eight-going-twenty-nine.
This is real, and I am sane.
32.
That’s the rub, Eames says, slowly. That’s the tricky bit, you see.
It’s a bit like playing chess against yourself; it’s a bit like being two people at once, two sides of the coin.
Each and every one of them are in here, he taps his head, but they’re not real.
I am real, and you have to keep remembering that you and only you are real.
How, you ask.
He slides the poker chip across the table. You reach for it, he doesn’t stop you. Your fingers pause, right before the smooth surface.
Your totem? You ask.
He doesn’t stop you. You hold it in your hand, measuring, considering. You flip it, once or twice, and snatch it out of the air. You can’t see anything about it, nothing unique, nothing particular, and it’s your job to notice such things.
It’s not so much a totem, as a general reminder, Eames says, smirking. I made a wager, you see. I made a wager with myself that this is reality.
33.
(In my end is my beginning, the poet says.)
The die clatters, bounces, stops -
The world ends, the world begins.
-
Commentary
Fandom: Inception
Rating: PG-13. Nothing particularly dangerous, except potential mindscrew.
Characters: Arthur, Eames, Cobb
Summary: Done for an inception_kink prompt. Questions of missing dates, fragments of memory, and the spaces between that Arthur slips through, now and then. Implied A/E or A/C, depending on how you read.
Note: This is me experimenting with form, so be warned: things will get rough in there. Almost everything is deliberate, so odd sentence structures are to be expected.
-
1.
(In my beginning is my end, the poet says)
The die clatters, bounces, stops -
The world begins, the world ends.
2.
You’re late, he says.
Eames smirks; unperturbed, and reaches into his grey tweed jacket to pull out a bundle of dogeared papers, crinkled at the tips and says,
3.
“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
(He says that two years too soon.)
4.
Rather sorry to have kept you waiting, Arthur.
No, he wants to say, flipping through the crumpled papers that resist his attempts to arrange them, to impose some order on their Eamesian chaos, I’ve always been waiting (all my life.)
5.
He remembers being twenty-three, four times.
In three of them, he isn’t Arthur.
6.
I have sometimes been accused of being a bore. I beg to differ: people laugh at my jokes, and I’m handsome. I would like now to talk more about myself: I don’t like going to airports and hospitals. They make me uneasy. In both cases, somebody is always going to leave. I was born in 1983, and have never been to Berlin. But I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961. I have a memory of something that never happened.
I would like to elaborate on myself, but you will understand if I talk instead about the sky in Berlin in 1961: it was covered with dust. There were no birds. There was no sky.
7.
Say something, Eames says, because this is the kind of silence between acquaintances that is unsettling because you don’t really know what the other person is thinking.
Something, Arthur says.
Eames rolls his eyes, and they are grey, as grey as the rain.
8.
It is the small things, scattered about randomly with no discernable order.
It is the little things; the bits and pieces of memory (fragments) that defy any attempts to slot them neatly (like the hard plastic files he always buys at two for a dollar) into place; to superimpose a pattern over them
and the
(empty) spaces
between.
9.
This is a die.
You feel for the surface with the three pips, for the tiny uneven scratch that runs across the face of the die, and toss it;
it rolls, bouncing a little on the table, and you pocket it without looking, knowing what the number should be, and wondering why your mind remembers a series of other numbers, other memories.
10.
Dreams, you say, seem real while we’re in them.
She nods thoughtfully. Eames is draped over a chair, deliberately almost-slouching, not bothering to hide his amusement.
(What you do not say: after the dreams, all the memories melt and run together and bleed into each other, like rubber in the heat.)
11.
The most important word you never said:
Unreality.
12.
Arthur, he asked.
13.
Constancy.
(Is it too much to ask for, he wonders)
when reality and dreams start to interweave themselves, dripping puddles into each other like the Dali clock in The Persistence of Memory
in the faded hues of memory that his mind preserves, in their jangling, discordant layers that don’t always make sense.
14.
These are not constants:
the slow motion of the Earth beneath his feet,
the presence of Eames,
the way dream-jackets cling to his skin like plastic wrap,
(Cobb,)
the numbers he thinks the die is supposed to produce.
15.
These are constants:
a scarlet plastic die, a little battered, and scratched on the side with three pips,
the presence of Eames,
the way waking up is like falling, then slowly rising through water, sloughing sheets of it off his skin,
(Cobb,)
his need for constancy, something solid, and something unchanging; his need for something much like a totem.
16.
Yes, he says. He glances over at Eames.
Are you alright?
Pause.
Yes, he thinks he says. Or maybe, no.
Or maybe, he says nothing at all.
17.
Dream, he thinks.
The die is still, suspended;
The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, he remembers, and the physical impossibility of perfect stillness, even in the throbbing heart of this false-reality -
and then the dice hits the table, rolls (and then he can breathe.)
Arthur, Eames says.
Arthur looks at him, and waits.
18.
He says son can you play me a memory, I’m not really sure how it goes. But it’s sad and it’s sweet, and I knew it complete, when I wore a younger man’s clothes -
Empty spaces, what are we living for -
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Arthur flicks through the stations, through snippets of songs, and memories, and then shuts off the radio.
19.
Why, he says.
Cobb is silent, looks away.
Twenty-seven point four centimetres (is the distance between them), Arthur thinks. Maybe not strictly true, give or take a bit more. Twenty-seven point four centimetres, more than fifty years, and a projection intent on killing him in gruesome ways, this huge grey elephant in the room that unspoken rules say neither of them can acknowledge: this is the sum of the space that separates them.
Arthur walks away.
This is not a surrender, he says. This isn’t over (yet).
It doesn’t matter how close they will stand together, at each other’s shoulder, close enough to be keenly aware of the other’s body in the intimate way only dream-death and dreamsharing (and something more) can bring;
how he will measure the hard lines of Cobb’s shoulder-blades, how he has seen those sharp angles with much less fabric between his gaze and skin.
Yes, he can say, I know him, far more deeply than you will,
but the space between them is there, no matter how he will try to close it up, no matter how Cobb will walk away, and then come back.
(This is the secret of space; it is infinite. Within a single centimetre hides an expanse that drives a mathematician mad trying to ennumerate it.)
20.
Space is a paradox. Time is a paradox. Neither of them existed, before man needed some absolute measure of this ticking clock within his chest, some absolute measure of each mark his feet places on the earth.
I am small, they say. But I contain multitudes.
21.
I am twenty-four when I meet Eames. I am twenty-two when I meet Cobb. I stand in the isthmus between them, like a coin balanced perfectly on edge between heads and tails.
This is the space between them: two years, each of them reversed and reflecting the other. I worked with Cobb first, and then I took a job with Eames. Cobb is professional and brusque and reluctantly impressed (and in a charcoal suit-jacket). Eames is professional (on the job), brushes people off easily, and reluctantly impressed (and in a grey tweed jacket)
When I am twenty-four, Cobb and Eames have never, yet, worked together.
I wonder where, if there is space between them, can I fit.
22.
Do you still think this is a dream, Eames asks, slipping in softly behind him like a cat, with a cat’s disregard for the rules of personal space.
Arthur shrugs, and drops the die into his pocket; it is a comforting weight, and Eames’ eyes follow his movements.
No, he says. Just checking. Do you need to?
23.
My name is Arthur, I am twenty-eight, going twenty-nine.
Last night, my memory says, I was a cold, withdrawn man with nothing but suits, and twenty-five and my name (maybe) was Arthur. I looked at the calender, and saw nothing but a blur. There are entire dates missing from my memory, and a year or two that doesn’t belong.
You are not the same people who left that station, says a poet I have never heard of and I have never read.
24.
He is twenty-seven when Mal dies, and twenty-seven-going-twenty-eight when Mal shows up like an actor reciting lines from a half-remembered script in Cobb’s dreams.
He is twenty-seven-going-twenty-eight when he learns that no matter how close he and Cobb are, Cobb and Mal are closer, and even next to a shade, he is nothing.
Arthur is twenty-seven-going-twenty-eight when he learns that he will never fit in the space between them, but Cobb still wants him to try.
25.
Take a person, take a being, and enter his mind and peel it apart like the skin of an onion, and you will find:
layers
upon
layers
of memories, stacked on top of each other; this is what makes a person, this is what shapes the ideas that drive his personality (this is why inception can destroy a man, and make him, or change him forever).
This is a human being, infinitely complex, comprised of his nature shaped by memories, driven by and at the mercy of subconscious forces he can’t always comprehend. (As well ask the bands of rock slumbering in the earth’s womb why the ghost of the flowing river is forever cleaved into their brittle skin, unforgetting, eternal.)
Arthur wonders what that says about him, when there are parts and sections of his memories that aren’t his own, and who is Arthur anyway.
26.
There will be a girl, with brown eyes, who loves scarves, who pushes the limits with the same curiosity as Cobb, and the same genius, the same fierce intellect.
I will meet her, three years from now, and we will kiss in a hotel (in my dreams).
I will kiss her; she will taste like chaos, and I will kiss her to taste her chaos, because there is an order to this chaos, a method to her madness that I will never possess.
I will say it was worth a shot, because she is beautiful, and we will both stand at this crossroads and wonder where we go from here.
27.
Do you ever lose yourself, he asks Eames one day.
Eames looks up from his scrutiny of a set of notes on a mark he’s planning to forge. Sorry?
Do you ever lose yourself, he repeats.
No, Eames frowns, and puts the notes down, leaning forward just slightly in the scuffed armchair. What do you mean?
When you forge, he says, and is surprised to see his hands are shaking, just a little. (This is why he isn’t the forger, this is why Eames is the forger, and he is the point man who deals in certainties, not identities that blur and melt into each other like a Dali painting.)
Eames sees it too; rain-grey eyes narrow, like the closing of a camera aperture to bring the object into greater focus. Arthur, he says. Arthur.
28.
It might not have been Eames.
It might have been Cobb.
29.
These are your attempts to draw your line in the sand, to say, here, but no further.
The sharp angles at which you fold your sleeves, a declaration of identity, a deliberate concession to disorder, but on your terms, precisely so.
The die you keep, and roll every once in a while to remind yourself.
The way you only wear suits on the job, the way you painstakingly separate job professionalism with your personal identity - whatever you can really consider that to be.
Your need for specificity, for clarity, and for constancy, to set as a bulwark against the uncertainties of memory.
The sharp strokes in your black notebook where you neatly list the plans, proceedures, and requirements for each job.
Each line of black or blue ink is a stark contrast to white paper. Each slashing stroke is a declaration, a challenge that says, this is who I am, this is what I am. Each stroke is a barrier against uncertainty, your own way of resisting -
I am Arthur, you say, in the sum of all these. I am twenty-eight, going twenty-nine. I have never been to Berlin, I was born in 1983, but I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961.
30.
This is a totem:
A red plastic die, fragile, as it balances on your open palm.
This is reality:
Nothing tells you this is real. Not the die, not the fragments of memory, not the reassuring weight of the hand on your shoulder, not the textured feel of his fingers closing around your arm.
Not the way he breathes, Arthur, Arthur.
This is the fragile secret behind reality, like a breath, like a thin glass flute, like a note so high and pure you must hold yourself to keep from shattering:
It is only as real as you allow it to be.
31.
Reality, or dream?
Every morning, you wake up. You are not Cobb; you don’t find yourself clutching your totem and checking it in a desperate ritual for clarity.
Every morning, you breathe, you live, and you die, just a little more.
Every morning, you make your choice, look into the mirror and say (in your head), I am Arthur. I am twenty-eight-going-twenty-nine.
This is real, and I am sane.
32.
That’s the rub, Eames says, slowly. That’s the tricky bit, you see.
It’s a bit like playing chess against yourself; it’s a bit like being two people at once, two sides of the coin.
Each and every one of them are in here, he taps his head, but they’re not real.
I am real, and you have to keep remembering that you and only you are real.
How, you ask.
He slides the poker chip across the table. You reach for it, he doesn’t stop you. Your fingers pause, right before the smooth surface.
Your totem? You ask.
He doesn’t stop you. You hold it in your hand, measuring, considering. You flip it, once or twice, and snatch it out of the air. You can’t see anything about it, nothing unique, nothing particular, and it’s your job to notice such things.
It’s not so much a totem, as a general reminder, Eames says, smirking. I made a wager, you see. I made a wager with myself that this is reality.
33.
(In my end is my beginning, the poet says.)
The die clatters, bounces, stops -
The world ends, the world begins.
-
Commentary