D'Autrefois - Chapter 4 - Our consciousness
Title: D'Autrefois
Part I: Chapter 4: Our consciousness
Author: koushi
Rating: R
Word count: 4043
Disclaimer: I do not own nor am I in any way affiliated with Inception and/or its creators.
“The fuck is this shit? Yo, Johnny, come check this out,” a revolted voice called out, its cracking pitch ringing painfully in Cobb’s ears. “We gotta couple o’ fags on our hands!”
Coming to, Cobb blinked his eyes a few times before his vision cleared. He thought he could still hear the melody of the old French song playing in the background, but quickly it disappeared along with the hurtful memory. A sleeping Nash lay next to him, still on his stomach, his pants halfway pulled back up in an awkward sort of state. He mumbled something nonsensical akin to “not coming back for you,” but, of course, it meant nothing to Cobb.
As for himself, he looked down the length of his front: just as disheveled and leaving even less to the imagination. Sitting up in a scramble, he adjusted himself and zipped his trousers up as fast as his fingers would move. Nash also startled awake and began to stretch his muscles out, yawning as he returned from the dreamworld, the contents of which Cobb could only guess at.
As he heard the footsteps approaching, Cobb pulled the prison blanket, its texture not unlike that of sandpaper over Nash’s bottom half, to hide what evidence existed. He then took a hold of the bar above him, swinging himself over Nash and out of the bed, donning his usual nonchalant demeanor like a costume change as Johnny entered the cell.
“I want what you’re smokin’, dude,” Johnny said to the pink-complexioned guard as he crossed his arms and tapped his foot exasperatedly, “unless it’s cock or something gay like that. I mean seriously... you interrupted my exercise for this?”
The other man shook his head, “Naw, man. I swear they was like huggin’ in bed naked or somethin’. Fucked up shit.”
These were the attitudes he was used to, the derogatory remarks pelting Nash’s kind with irrational hatred. ...His kind?
“I think you might just be projecting, Red,” Johnny said, bopping him upside the head before turning to leave. “Oh yeah, and make sure you hose them down good this time. I’m tired of cleaning up after your messes.”
The disgruntled guard swore to himself, obviously pissed that his plan to impress his superior had backfired so inelegantly, as he pulled out the thick firefighter-style hose from a box on the wall of the hallway and unraveled it. “Y’all guys need ta strip down so I can uh... wash y’all off,” he said, balking at the inevitable homoerotic undertones of the situation.
Cobb did as he was told, folding his somewhat grimy clothes and placing them on the top bunk as he stood where Red beckoned. The hose felt like thousands of needles piercing his skin due to the pressure of the water, and there were patches of redness where it hit. But he welcomed the stinging pain of his baptism of sorts. He was, after all, supposed to be renewed, wasn’t he? Then why do I feel exactly the same?
“You too, Mickey the Talkin’ Mouse.” The spray then moved on to Nash, who’d disrobed, his wrinkled rags littering the cemented floor. He winced but held his ground, being, or at least he should have been, accustomed to pain by this point. Cobb couldn’t help but watch him, studying his face. I... I probably shouldn’t have done what I did.
Which part? Taking him by force or taking him at all? the voice, at least, was a strand of continuity in his mental breakdown, albeit an unpleasant one. He wasn’t sure he knew the answer.
“A’ight, that’s it. Now y’all kin get back to what y’all were doin’.” the fiery-haired guard gagged, dragging the dripping hose behind him as he exited their world.
Cobb watched as the small pond of water trickled in braided channels towards the tiny grate in the middle of the room, each droplet sifting through the slits in the metal circle and disappearing. The rest of the ground, especially that beneath the two of them, was darkened gray with damp concrete.
It was at that point that he realized Cobol hadn’t provided any towels, and the dripping prisoners, not having changes of clothing, couldn’t dress because they’d be wet for hours in the chilly swamp. He’d rather shiver for a few minutes now than for the rest of his time awake. Great, he lamented. Not only am I emotionally naked but physically as well? Someone up there must have a sick sense of humor.
He again laid his eyes on Nash, running them along his form like the drops coursing down his skin, conflicted emotions ebbing and flowing in the tide of his consciousness. This time the electricity was undeniable, that sudden pulse of blood through his veins causing him to wonder each time how he could have “mistaken” it for heart palpitations in the past. Fighting away his queasy repugnance, he found that... yeah, there was attraction alright, a fact that hadn’t changed since he’d first seen Nash in his Architecture course years ago.
And ah... Nothing felt better than the decision to stop lying to oneself. Cobb instantly felt lighter, more empowered and more stable in his sense of self. You finally ‘fessing up? A little slow, are we?
“H-Hey...” Cobb finally uttered, firmly shattering the pristine silence.
But Nash didn’t reply. He simply crossed his arms over his chest in a huff, turning his face away from view.
“Look, I’m sorry about uh... last night. Really sorry this time,” he offered shakily but with the utmost sincerity. Then he managed a sheepish grin. Oh foolhardy pride. “But I’ve come to a realization.”
“Oh, here we go again,” Nash grimaced. “I told myself I wasn’t going to go through another round of this shit.”
“What?” Seriously, what?
“What do you think you did last time? When I approached you about the architect position, thinking in some ungodly misstep in logic that you might have changed?”
“Um... I hired you to design Saito’s apartment. And...” he nearly choked as the vaulted doors flew open in remembrance. “Did I really repeat my own actions?”
“Well let’s see. First you treated me like a bitch, check, then you got a hard-on and decided to fuck me, check, next you try to woo me with your apologies and supposed epiphanies, check, oh and you know what the next step is? Your selective repressive memory kicks in and you drop me like a sack of bricks. Fuck that noise,” Nash snarled angrily. “I’ll have no part in this, even though I was partly responsible for restarting the cycle. Knew I shouldn’t have tried to help you through after what you did to me last time. Knew I shouldn’t have started feeling sorry for your selfish ass.”
“I swear to you, I had no recollection of this. All I knew was that you, for some odd reason, betrayed us back there and that you were extremely bitter upon seeing me again,” Cobb pleaded. “I thought it was just you...”
“Right, it’s never you, never your fault, Dom. Because you’re perfect, remember?”
“I don’t believe that anymore, if I ever did.”
“You were so haughty, believing you could rise up above us other homos and overcome your ‘mental confusion.’ Ha. How many other disorders did you rack up perpetuating your denial and psychosis?”
“I... I was just trying to live a normal life. You’re supposed to go to school, get a job, get married, have kids. I mean, there was no visible option to the contrary.”
“Only because you chose to be blind to them. You and your blind spots,” Nash laughed derisively. “The fact still remains that you put your own interests above everyone else’s. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint the venerable Dominick Cobb once again, but I must excuse myself from his schizophrenic charade. You know, for my own sanity.”
He thought he’d broken it off with Guilt. That Guilt had sufficiently haunted him, whittling away at his faculties until he finally made amends to Mal’s memory at the end of the Fischer job. We had a beautiful relationship, Guilt, my dear, but I’m afraid we have nothing in common anymore, he’d thought joyously at the airport.
But no, it turned out Guilt wasn’t so easily spurned. Like a jilted lover refusing to part ways, Guilt believed erroneously that they were soul mates and consequently returned, more ferociously desperate than ever before. Guilt would appear in his morning coffee, around every corner, standing sullenly behind him in the mirror. If only you could put a restraining order on Guilt.
***
So they split up once again. The pitter-patter dripping of the ceiling leak all that rescued the chamber from complete silence as Cobb returned to his claimed bunk and Nash to his refuge of a corner. He pulled his ensemble back on, ostensibly to hide the gaping void in his chest. His short-lived sense of worth-derived from detaching himself from his escapist neuroses-had long since fizzled, a despairing emptiness where it had once rested.
Rest. Rest from what? The weariness of living as a pitiful waste of resources? When things were looking rough, Cobb could always count on that ever-present voice to kick him in the shins.
Yeah, yeah. I just regret having held out for this long.
He contemplated what he’d done. His whole life had apparently consisted of lying and stealing people’s valuable personal information and their livelihoods, of tearing people down to build himself up. And the brunt of it had apparently come down on Nash, who for some inexplicable reason besides-if one should choose to believe in it-Fate, would always return, ready for another round of self-destruction...
Then his mind vanished. Cobb reappeared, holding onto a bar on a subway car. Paris. He’d traveled this line thousands of times on the way to class and back. Another dreaded memory?
But he felt foreign within his own dream. The projections glared at him disdainfully, triggered to attention by his conspicuous presence. Something was different.
He seemed to have incurred the ire of the middle-aged bald man sitting closest to him especially. He was reading a copy of Le Monde while shooting the dirtiest of looks to Cobb between every other word. What could only have been the man’s son-his splitting image beneath a mop of wavy brown hair-had inherited his penchant for ego-eviscerating expressions did likewise, all the while perusing a Tintin comic book and clutching a worn teddy bear.
Not any more excited than they were about sharing an enclosed space, Cobb decided to get off the train at the first stop. Hôtel de Ville.
Instead of seeing the city hall as expected, he opened the door to another locale entirely. This definitely isn’t one of my dreams, although the tram is similar to my elevator, he milled over the organizational technique. Apparently I’m not the only one with a “prison” of memories.
The scene constructing itself before his eyes wasn’t entirely unknown to him, however. The interior of the hotel room had a very modern, minimalist appeal. Simple, elegant colors in a black, white, and green scheme painted the sparse furniture, which consisted of a low, black coffee table surrounded by white sofas in a half moon. There was a Rothko-style painting on the wall next to him, and the carpet was weaved of a lush green polyester.
A knocking at the door. Cobb found himself walking towards the front in some sort of impulse turned trance, his face curled into silent horror as his hands unlatched the lock and turned the doorknob, like some invisible puppeteer was tugging on just the right strings. He didn’t want to see what awaited him.
It was a dreadfully nervous Nash. He knew this, of course, his own version of the memory coming back to him. But this had a different flavor, being of someone else’s recollection after all. He now understood what it was like being a projection, a meaningless drone programmed by some watchmaker master’s subconscious.
Nash, on the other hand, was not bound by the laws set forth in the dreamscape. He stared at Cobb with bitter longing, as if he were looking upon the one thing he desired and the one thing he could never have. “Hey... long time no see,” he said, emotionless as if reading from a repetitive script.
“Yeah, it’s been awhile,” Cobb felt himself respond automatically. “Come in.”
He showed the tense new hire to the sitting area, offering a drink before taking a seat on the couch himself. Nash declined, overly polite in his diction, and sat down uneasily opposite.
“Now let’s not waste any more time. We have to catch a plane to Venezuela first thing in the morning. And you’ll need plenty of preparation for this job because I can’t afford to fail,” Cobb felt his lips move. Wow, am I really such a bossy son of a bitch? “Are you ready for the briefing?”
“No, actually. No, I’m not,” Nash replied, with a sorrowful stare in his brown eyes. Cobb stopped moving entirely: like a glitch in the system he became no more than a frame in time. Nash must have hit the pause button on his dream.
Nash stood and walked over to his statue, cupping Cobb’s face within his hands, looking down at him with lids at half-mast. He rubbed his cheek in small circles with his right thumb. “Oh, if you only knew what was coming...”
And you said I was mental... Here I am, might as well be a shade trapped in your vault of memories.
“I’m gonna change my mind and ask for a drink later on, to break the tension as we discuss the plan. I felt like it would help me relax, you know? But then one turned into several, and then it was like we’d never left each other, never parted ways since last we spoke,” Nash recounted to what he believed was only himself. Leaning forward, he planted a kiss on Cobb’s motionless lips, bittersweet and tender.
Cobb felt the strangest sensation of a simultaneous reflex to pull away and absolute lack of control of his muscles, a discordance of mind and body. This doesn’t make any sense, he thought. How are we even dreamsharing? And worst of all, why am I still a prisoner, even here?
“The way we ground our bodies together as if doing so could make us whole again, could make us one... But we don’t have the pause button in reality. Each moment is fleeting, ephemeral, no matter how much you want to hold on, it floats away like wisps of smoke from a dying fire.” Nash removed one of his warm hands from Cobb’s cheek as if he had an momentary desire to reach out and grab the tiny flecks of dust suspended in midair around the couple.
“You said, as we were huddled together afterwards, that you were sorry. That you’d come to. Should have been a lawyer, Dom, you could lie your way out of anything. Once upon a time you could even have convinced me you were a compassionate guy,” Nash chuckled darkly as he ran his fingers through Cobb’s neatly combed blond hair. “I like to forget all this when I relish in this memory. I like to bask in the shadow of delusion sometimes, just like you, because here I’m safe from doubts and insecurities. Here I can just be.... and screw everything else.”
Cobb felt like his own recurring thoughts were being read back to him through Nash’s narration. What they suffered from was the opposite of claustrophobia. Those four enclosed walls-lines drawn to close their worlds off to the concept of infinity-what they held was certainty.
And frankly, Cobb couldn’t imagine any sort of beginning without an eventual end.
“But sometimes, when I’m feeling lustful for that incomparable reality check that is pain, I wonder to myself... if you remembered tonight, would you regret it all over again?” Nash asked rhetorically. He knew the answer.
And then Time jarred itself back into movement just as suddenly as it had stopped. Clap on, clap off, Cobb recognized with an internal bout of amusement. Quite the magician you are, Nash.
It had to be internal considering he was still the marionette of a very focused Nash. It was as if he were on a mission to complete a sacred daily ritual, dragging Cobb behind him, like the powerless lackey that he was, back towards the subway train.
Once aboard, Cobb once again spotted the man and the young boy out of the corner of his eye. This time they were much less preoccupied with his presence, the father reading to his kid from the comic book, their faces enchanted by the world contained within.
As the brakes screeched to a halt at their next destination, Gare de Lyon, Nash hurriedly marched out of the railcar, Cobb trailing dutifully behind. It was the messy dorm room of an architecture student: drafting supplies, paper, pens, books, calculators strewn across the tiled floor. Another layer of mess overlaid the former: Nash wasn’t a neat person by any means, and his preferred method of organization was to toss things on the ground. That way he would know to finish what he’d started or be in danger of drowning in a pile of old socks. And yet another array obscured the rest, a third called heartbreak-which consisted of empty cartons of ice cream and used tissue boxes-decorating the rest like a colorful dash of sprinkles.
“The morning after our first and last time during college you were already gone when I awoke. I realized things had changed, but I thought they would be for the better... that maybe you would acknowledge what we’d been building up to for months as classmates, project partners, even friends. Instead of becoming ‘official’ for whatever that entails, you told me via a note under my door that you didn’t want to see me anymore. I wanted to shout at you, ‘Why?’ but you weren’t there when I needed to pummel you with my questions, my frustrations,” Nash began as they delicately trod the narrow path into the center of the room. He stopped without a warning and turned to face his expressionless companion.
“We’d wanted each other for so long, I could feel it in every sidelong glance you tossed in my direction, every time our fingers barely brushed against each other. But you told me there would never be anything more... and thus commenced the process of forgetting me.” The room started to shake, fragmenting like shards of glass, the walls breaking apart at the seams. In one final explosion, all the pieces flew in a whirlwind pattern around and past the two of them into the air. Cobb could point out individual notebooks, rulers, and empty photo frames among the debris of the past as it was cast into the blue beyond, like doves flapping their weary wings to freedom.
“I don’t know what you did with the times we had together. Maybe you projected all those memories of us onto her as if those months with me had never occurred, like photoshopping her face over my image.” With the annihilation of the room, the scene before them was now a street in Paris, much like the one he and Ariadne had dreamed up her first time going under. Cobb searched around, only to catch a glimpse of Mal sitting in a chair, shaded by the red umbrella atop the table, which was embossed with the logo Café Debussy. She was waiting for him patiently at the cafe where they’d gone for a first informal date. He headed towards her.
“I was alone to bear our secret, but, like a tree falling in the woods, a one-sided relationship might as well never have existed at all. So I lost myself in my work and became a top tier architect as I’d originally hoped. But it meant nothing, not being able to share my success with you. And no matter what I did little reminders of you would trickle into my designs as if my subconscious were reminding me that all these faded memories that kept me tousling in bed each night... were in fact real,” Nash said, his voice becoming slightly fainter with each step that Cobb took. So that’s what he’s always rolling around and mumbling about. He then reached the table, pulling out a chair and sitting down across from the gorgeous brunette who smiled coyly at his arrival.
Oh, Mal, he longed to say. Seeing her again now in some madman’s book of dreams, their years together flashed before his eyes. All those wasted years you could have spent with someone who truly loved you for who you were, not what you represented. He almost felt like his projected body was responding to his intense reactions, his throat seeming to twist into a knot. I can’t say this enough... but I’m sorry. “I’m sorry...”
“When I first saw you with her, chatting at this very cafe, I initially thought that you had become so desperate for your letter grade that you’d sleep with your professor’s daughter for a chance at gaining favor, perhaps a teaching assistant position. But then it became painfully clear to me that you’d convinced yourself somehow that she was the answer to all the uncertainties you had, that she could bring you closer to becoming the person you always wanted to be, someone you could be proud to call ‘self,’ someone you could stand to love. It was, pardon my French, like watching a fucking trainwreck,” Nash’s voice gradually rose from slow and detached to shrill and uncontrollable.
Boom! A blast of wind in Cobb’s face caused his eyes to close instinctively, his arm raising up to shield his face. But as he looked up again, Mal was gone, replaced by the passing of a freight train two feet in front of him. It smashed through the cafe and uprooted the asphalt from the road, plummeting on some one-way suicidal trek to the ends of the world.
I came to terms with the guilt of performing inception on her, yes, but I had never been able to face the other reason for her fall... the guilt over keeping her around despite who I really am. Until now...
“But it was one that I couldn’t peel my eyes from. Sure it was horrible to see happening before me in slow motion-the orange sparks flying from the rails, the ignition of nearby vegetation into a red sea of fire, the grinding of the metal as it crumpled like a sheet-but there’s nothing more terrifying than averting your eyes and not knowing. So I stood on the sidelines cheering for the other team, the only fan for ‘You and Me’ while the world spurred you on in your hopeless quest for self-fulfillment. I wish I could say I hoped you’d find happiness, but I didn’t. I’m just as selfish as you or any other person: I wanted you all for myself. I wanted you to have that rough awakening-dunked into a tub of cold water-to the abysmal fact that your world is not real.”
She was gone. Never had it felt more real to Cobb than now. The blasting of the locomotive as it burned those hideous towers of smoky coal, spewing an equally odious noise from its horn. Life was really that cut and dry, really that unbearably brisk. She was gone as suddenly as she had come into his life.
And what to make of his undeniably short life from this point on... was entirely up to him.
He noticed a movement in the distance. The little boy from the subway was hobbling towards them, covered in blood and bawling. His dad was no longer with him.
Nash greeted him with a brusque nod and coldly took the boy’s hand as they walked away together, along the fiery path of rubble left by the offending train, backs facing Cobb. From where he was, Cobb couldn’t tell that they weren’t one and the same.
Next Chapter
D'Autrefois - Master Post
Part I: Chapter 4: Our consciousness
Author: koushi
Rating: R
Word count: 4043
Disclaimer: I do not own nor am I in any way affiliated with Inception and/or its creators.
“The fuck is this shit? Yo, Johnny, come check this out,” a revolted voice called out, its cracking pitch ringing painfully in Cobb’s ears. “We gotta couple o’ fags on our hands!”
Coming to, Cobb blinked his eyes a few times before his vision cleared. He thought he could still hear the melody of the old French song playing in the background, but quickly it disappeared along with the hurtful memory. A sleeping Nash lay next to him, still on his stomach, his pants halfway pulled back up in an awkward sort of state. He mumbled something nonsensical akin to “not coming back for you,” but, of course, it meant nothing to Cobb.
As for himself, he looked down the length of his front: just as disheveled and leaving even less to the imagination. Sitting up in a scramble, he adjusted himself and zipped his trousers up as fast as his fingers would move. Nash also startled awake and began to stretch his muscles out, yawning as he returned from the dreamworld, the contents of which Cobb could only guess at.
As he heard the footsteps approaching, Cobb pulled the prison blanket, its texture not unlike that of sandpaper over Nash’s bottom half, to hide what evidence existed. He then took a hold of the bar above him, swinging himself over Nash and out of the bed, donning his usual nonchalant demeanor like a costume change as Johnny entered the cell.
“I want what you’re smokin’, dude,” Johnny said to the pink-complexioned guard as he crossed his arms and tapped his foot exasperatedly, “unless it’s cock or something gay like that. I mean seriously... you interrupted my exercise for this?”
The other man shook his head, “Naw, man. I swear they was like huggin’ in bed naked or somethin’. Fucked up shit.”
These were the attitudes he was used to, the derogatory remarks pelting Nash’s kind with irrational hatred. ...His kind?
“I think you might just be projecting, Red,” Johnny said, bopping him upside the head before turning to leave. “Oh yeah, and make sure you hose them down good this time. I’m tired of cleaning up after your messes.”
The disgruntled guard swore to himself, obviously pissed that his plan to impress his superior had backfired so inelegantly, as he pulled out the thick firefighter-style hose from a box on the wall of the hallway and unraveled it. “Y’all guys need ta strip down so I can uh... wash y’all off,” he said, balking at the inevitable homoerotic undertones of the situation.
Cobb did as he was told, folding his somewhat grimy clothes and placing them on the top bunk as he stood where Red beckoned. The hose felt like thousands of needles piercing his skin due to the pressure of the water, and there were patches of redness where it hit. But he welcomed the stinging pain of his baptism of sorts. He was, after all, supposed to be renewed, wasn’t he? Then why do I feel exactly the same?
“You too, Mickey the Talkin’ Mouse.” The spray then moved on to Nash, who’d disrobed, his wrinkled rags littering the cemented floor. He winced but held his ground, being, or at least he should have been, accustomed to pain by this point. Cobb couldn’t help but watch him, studying his face. I... I probably shouldn’t have done what I did.
Which part? Taking him by force or taking him at all? the voice, at least, was a strand of continuity in his mental breakdown, albeit an unpleasant one. He wasn’t sure he knew the answer.
“A’ight, that’s it. Now y’all kin get back to what y’all were doin’.” the fiery-haired guard gagged, dragging the dripping hose behind him as he exited their world.
Cobb watched as the small pond of water trickled in braided channels towards the tiny grate in the middle of the room, each droplet sifting through the slits in the metal circle and disappearing. The rest of the ground, especially that beneath the two of them, was darkened gray with damp concrete.
It was at that point that he realized Cobol hadn’t provided any towels, and the dripping prisoners, not having changes of clothing, couldn’t dress because they’d be wet for hours in the chilly swamp. He’d rather shiver for a few minutes now than for the rest of his time awake. Great, he lamented. Not only am I emotionally naked but physically as well? Someone up there must have a sick sense of humor.
He again laid his eyes on Nash, running them along his form like the drops coursing down his skin, conflicted emotions ebbing and flowing in the tide of his consciousness. This time the electricity was undeniable, that sudden pulse of blood through his veins causing him to wonder each time how he could have “mistaken” it for heart palpitations in the past. Fighting away his queasy repugnance, he found that... yeah, there was attraction alright, a fact that hadn’t changed since he’d first seen Nash in his Architecture course years ago.
And ah... Nothing felt better than the decision to stop lying to oneself. Cobb instantly felt lighter, more empowered and more stable in his sense of self. You finally ‘fessing up? A little slow, are we?
“H-Hey...” Cobb finally uttered, firmly shattering the pristine silence.
But Nash didn’t reply. He simply crossed his arms over his chest in a huff, turning his face away from view.
“Look, I’m sorry about uh... last night. Really sorry this time,” he offered shakily but with the utmost sincerity. Then he managed a sheepish grin. Oh foolhardy pride. “But I’ve come to a realization.”
“Oh, here we go again,” Nash grimaced. “I told myself I wasn’t going to go through another round of this shit.”
“What?” Seriously, what?
“What do you think you did last time? When I approached you about the architect position, thinking in some ungodly misstep in logic that you might have changed?”
“Um... I hired you to design Saito’s apartment. And...” he nearly choked as the vaulted doors flew open in remembrance. “Did I really repeat my own actions?”
“Well let’s see. First you treated me like a bitch, check, then you got a hard-on and decided to fuck me, check, next you try to woo me with your apologies and supposed epiphanies, check, oh and you know what the next step is? Your selective repressive memory kicks in and you drop me like a sack of bricks. Fuck that noise,” Nash snarled angrily. “I’ll have no part in this, even though I was partly responsible for restarting the cycle. Knew I shouldn’t have tried to help you through after what you did to me last time. Knew I shouldn’t have started feeling sorry for your selfish ass.”
“I swear to you, I had no recollection of this. All I knew was that you, for some odd reason, betrayed us back there and that you were extremely bitter upon seeing me again,” Cobb pleaded. “I thought it was just you...”
“Right, it’s never you, never your fault, Dom. Because you’re perfect, remember?”
“I don’t believe that anymore, if I ever did.”
“You were so haughty, believing you could rise up above us other homos and overcome your ‘mental confusion.’ Ha. How many other disorders did you rack up perpetuating your denial and psychosis?”
“I... I was just trying to live a normal life. You’re supposed to go to school, get a job, get married, have kids. I mean, there was no visible option to the contrary.”
“Only because you chose to be blind to them. You and your blind spots,” Nash laughed derisively. “The fact still remains that you put your own interests above everyone else’s. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint the venerable Dominick Cobb once again, but I must excuse myself from his schizophrenic charade. You know, for my own sanity.”
He thought he’d broken it off with Guilt. That Guilt had sufficiently haunted him, whittling away at his faculties until he finally made amends to Mal’s memory at the end of the Fischer job. We had a beautiful relationship, Guilt, my dear, but I’m afraid we have nothing in common anymore, he’d thought joyously at the airport.
But no, it turned out Guilt wasn’t so easily spurned. Like a jilted lover refusing to part ways, Guilt believed erroneously that they were soul mates and consequently returned, more ferociously desperate than ever before. Guilt would appear in his morning coffee, around every corner, standing sullenly behind him in the mirror. If only you could put a restraining order on Guilt.
***
So they split up once again. The pitter-patter dripping of the ceiling leak all that rescued the chamber from complete silence as Cobb returned to his claimed bunk and Nash to his refuge of a corner. He pulled his ensemble back on, ostensibly to hide the gaping void in his chest. His short-lived sense of worth-derived from detaching himself from his escapist neuroses-had long since fizzled, a despairing emptiness where it had once rested.
Rest. Rest from what? The weariness of living as a pitiful waste of resources? When things were looking rough, Cobb could always count on that ever-present voice to kick him in the shins.
Yeah, yeah. I just regret having held out for this long.
He contemplated what he’d done. His whole life had apparently consisted of lying and stealing people’s valuable personal information and their livelihoods, of tearing people down to build himself up. And the brunt of it had apparently come down on Nash, who for some inexplicable reason besides-if one should choose to believe in it-Fate, would always return, ready for another round of self-destruction...
Then his mind vanished. Cobb reappeared, holding onto a bar on a subway car. Paris. He’d traveled this line thousands of times on the way to class and back. Another dreaded memory?
But he felt foreign within his own dream. The projections glared at him disdainfully, triggered to attention by his conspicuous presence. Something was different.
He seemed to have incurred the ire of the middle-aged bald man sitting closest to him especially. He was reading a copy of Le Monde while shooting the dirtiest of looks to Cobb between every other word. What could only have been the man’s son-his splitting image beneath a mop of wavy brown hair-had inherited his penchant for ego-eviscerating expressions did likewise, all the while perusing a Tintin comic book and clutching a worn teddy bear.
Not any more excited than they were about sharing an enclosed space, Cobb decided to get off the train at the first stop. Hôtel de Ville.
Instead of seeing the city hall as expected, he opened the door to another locale entirely. This definitely isn’t one of my dreams, although the tram is similar to my elevator, he milled over the organizational technique. Apparently I’m not the only one with a “prison” of memories.
The scene constructing itself before his eyes wasn’t entirely unknown to him, however. The interior of the hotel room had a very modern, minimalist appeal. Simple, elegant colors in a black, white, and green scheme painted the sparse furniture, which consisted of a low, black coffee table surrounded by white sofas in a half moon. There was a Rothko-style painting on the wall next to him, and the carpet was weaved of a lush green polyester.
A knocking at the door. Cobb found himself walking towards the front in some sort of impulse turned trance, his face curled into silent horror as his hands unlatched the lock and turned the doorknob, like some invisible puppeteer was tugging on just the right strings. He didn’t want to see what awaited him.
It was a dreadfully nervous Nash. He knew this, of course, his own version of the memory coming back to him. But this had a different flavor, being of someone else’s recollection after all. He now understood what it was like being a projection, a meaningless drone programmed by some watchmaker master’s subconscious.
Nash, on the other hand, was not bound by the laws set forth in the dreamscape. He stared at Cobb with bitter longing, as if he were looking upon the one thing he desired and the one thing he could never have. “Hey... long time no see,” he said, emotionless as if reading from a repetitive script.
“Yeah, it’s been awhile,” Cobb felt himself respond automatically. “Come in.”
He showed the tense new hire to the sitting area, offering a drink before taking a seat on the couch himself. Nash declined, overly polite in his diction, and sat down uneasily opposite.
“Now let’s not waste any more time. We have to catch a plane to Venezuela first thing in the morning. And you’ll need plenty of preparation for this job because I can’t afford to fail,” Cobb felt his lips move. Wow, am I really such a bossy son of a bitch? “Are you ready for the briefing?”
“No, actually. No, I’m not,” Nash replied, with a sorrowful stare in his brown eyes. Cobb stopped moving entirely: like a glitch in the system he became no more than a frame in time. Nash must have hit the pause button on his dream.
Nash stood and walked over to his statue, cupping Cobb’s face within his hands, looking down at him with lids at half-mast. He rubbed his cheek in small circles with his right thumb. “Oh, if you only knew what was coming...”
And you said I was mental... Here I am, might as well be a shade trapped in your vault of memories.
“I’m gonna change my mind and ask for a drink later on, to break the tension as we discuss the plan. I felt like it would help me relax, you know? But then one turned into several, and then it was like we’d never left each other, never parted ways since last we spoke,” Nash recounted to what he believed was only himself. Leaning forward, he planted a kiss on Cobb’s motionless lips, bittersweet and tender.
Cobb felt the strangest sensation of a simultaneous reflex to pull away and absolute lack of control of his muscles, a discordance of mind and body. This doesn’t make any sense, he thought. How are we even dreamsharing? And worst of all, why am I still a prisoner, even here?
“The way we ground our bodies together as if doing so could make us whole again, could make us one... But we don’t have the pause button in reality. Each moment is fleeting, ephemeral, no matter how much you want to hold on, it floats away like wisps of smoke from a dying fire.” Nash removed one of his warm hands from Cobb’s cheek as if he had an momentary desire to reach out and grab the tiny flecks of dust suspended in midair around the couple.
“You said, as we were huddled together afterwards, that you were sorry. That you’d come to. Should have been a lawyer, Dom, you could lie your way out of anything. Once upon a time you could even have convinced me you were a compassionate guy,” Nash chuckled darkly as he ran his fingers through Cobb’s neatly combed blond hair. “I like to forget all this when I relish in this memory. I like to bask in the shadow of delusion sometimes, just like you, because here I’m safe from doubts and insecurities. Here I can just be.... and screw everything else.”
Cobb felt like his own recurring thoughts were being read back to him through Nash’s narration. What they suffered from was the opposite of claustrophobia. Those four enclosed walls-lines drawn to close their worlds off to the concept of infinity-what they held was certainty.
And frankly, Cobb couldn’t imagine any sort of beginning without an eventual end.
“But sometimes, when I’m feeling lustful for that incomparable reality check that is pain, I wonder to myself... if you remembered tonight, would you regret it all over again?” Nash asked rhetorically. He knew the answer.
And then Time jarred itself back into movement just as suddenly as it had stopped. Clap on, clap off, Cobb recognized with an internal bout of amusement. Quite the magician you are, Nash.
It had to be internal considering he was still the marionette of a very focused Nash. It was as if he were on a mission to complete a sacred daily ritual, dragging Cobb behind him, like the powerless lackey that he was, back towards the subway train.
Once aboard, Cobb once again spotted the man and the young boy out of the corner of his eye. This time they were much less preoccupied with his presence, the father reading to his kid from the comic book, their faces enchanted by the world contained within.
As the brakes screeched to a halt at their next destination, Gare de Lyon, Nash hurriedly marched out of the railcar, Cobb trailing dutifully behind. It was the messy dorm room of an architecture student: drafting supplies, paper, pens, books, calculators strewn across the tiled floor. Another layer of mess overlaid the former: Nash wasn’t a neat person by any means, and his preferred method of organization was to toss things on the ground. That way he would know to finish what he’d started or be in danger of drowning in a pile of old socks. And yet another array obscured the rest, a third called heartbreak-which consisted of empty cartons of ice cream and used tissue boxes-decorating the rest like a colorful dash of sprinkles.
“The morning after our first and last time during college you were already gone when I awoke. I realized things had changed, but I thought they would be for the better... that maybe you would acknowledge what we’d been building up to for months as classmates, project partners, even friends. Instead of becoming ‘official’ for whatever that entails, you told me via a note under my door that you didn’t want to see me anymore. I wanted to shout at you, ‘Why?’ but you weren’t there when I needed to pummel you with my questions, my frustrations,” Nash began as they delicately trod the narrow path into the center of the room. He stopped without a warning and turned to face his expressionless companion.
“We’d wanted each other for so long, I could feel it in every sidelong glance you tossed in my direction, every time our fingers barely brushed against each other. But you told me there would never be anything more... and thus commenced the process of forgetting me.” The room started to shake, fragmenting like shards of glass, the walls breaking apart at the seams. In one final explosion, all the pieces flew in a whirlwind pattern around and past the two of them into the air. Cobb could point out individual notebooks, rulers, and empty photo frames among the debris of the past as it was cast into the blue beyond, like doves flapping their weary wings to freedom.
“I don’t know what you did with the times we had together. Maybe you projected all those memories of us onto her as if those months with me had never occurred, like photoshopping her face over my image.” With the annihilation of the room, the scene before them was now a street in Paris, much like the one he and Ariadne had dreamed up her first time going under. Cobb searched around, only to catch a glimpse of Mal sitting in a chair, shaded by the red umbrella atop the table, which was embossed with the logo Café Debussy. She was waiting for him patiently at the cafe where they’d gone for a first informal date. He headed towards her.
“I was alone to bear our secret, but, like a tree falling in the woods, a one-sided relationship might as well never have existed at all. So I lost myself in my work and became a top tier architect as I’d originally hoped. But it meant nothing, not being able to share my success with you. And no matter what I did little reminders of you would trickle into my designs as if my subconscious were reminding me that all these faded memories that kept me tousling in bed each night... were in fact real,” Nash said, his voice becoming slightly fainter with each step that Cobb took. So that’s what he’s always rolling around and mumbling about. He then reached the table, pulling out a chair and sitting down across from the gorgeous brunette who smiled coyly at his arrival.
Oh, Mal, he longed to say. Seeing her again now in some madman’s book of dreams, their years together flashed before his eyes. All those wasted years you could have spent with someone who truly loved you for who you were, not what you represented. He almost felt like his projected body was responding to his intense reactions, his throat seeming to twist into a knot. I can’t say this enough... but I’m sorry. “I’m sorry...”
“When I first saw you with her, chatting at this very cafe, I initially thought that you had become so desperate for your letter grade that you’d sleep with your professor’s daughter for a chance at gaining favor, perhaps a teaching assistant position. But then it became painfully clear to me that you’d convinced yourself somehow that she was the answer to all the uncertainties you had, that she could bring you closer to becoming the person you always wanted to be, someone you could be proud to call ‘self,’ someone you could stand to love. It was, pardon my French, like watching a fucking trainwreck,” Nash’s voice gradually rose from slow and detached to shrill and uncontrollable.
Boom! A blast of wind in Cobb’s face caused his eyes to close instinctively, his arm raising up to shield his face. But as he looked up again, Mal was gone, replaced by the passing of a freight train two feet in front of him. It smashed through the cafe and uprooted the asphalt from the road, plummeting on some one-way suicidal trek to the ends of the world.
I came to terms with the guilt of performing inception on her, yes, but I had never been able to face the other reason for her fall... the guilt over keeping her around despite who I really am. Until now...
“But it was one that I couldn’t peel my eyes from. Sure it was horrible to see happening before me in slow motion-the orange sparks flying from the rails, the ignition of nearby vegetation into a red sea of fire, the grinding of the metal as it crumpled like a sheet-but there’s nothing more terrifying than averting your eyes and not knowing. So I stood on the sidelines cheering for the other team, the only fan for ‘You and Me’ while the world spurred you on in your hopeless quest for self-fulfillment. I wish I could say I hoped you’d find happiness, but I didn’t. I’m just as selfish as you or any other person: I wanted you all for myself. I wanted you to have that rough awakening-dunked into a tub of cold water-to the abysmal fact that your world is not real.”
She was gone. Never had it felt more real to Cobb than now. The blasting of the locomotive as it burned those hideous towers of smoky coal, spewing an equally odious noise from its horn. Life was really that cut and dry, really that unbearably brisk. She was gone as suddenly as she had come into his life.
And what to make of his undeniably short life from this point on... was entirely up to him.
He noticed a movement in the distance. The little boy from the subway was hobbling towards them, covered in blood and bawling. His dad was no longer with him.
Nash greeted him with a brusque nod and coldly took the boy’s hand as they walked away together, along the fiery path of rubble left by the offending train, backs facing Cobb. From where he was, Cobb couldn’t tell that they weren’t one and the same.
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D'Autrefois - Master Post