#and it's a silly one about whammies and Former Files and musical and hip-hop and the hideousness of LED lights

[apparitionism]

Streets 5

Again, mostly talking. Only a little bit of driving around. Maybe a spoonful of philosophy, thought out not at all well. But it’s a story, anyway. One that concludes here, after having variously raced and meandered through part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 on its way.

Streets 5

Helena remains disoriented, but she admonishes herself to ignore that sensation, to set herself to gathering data. Passersby will know the where and the when of the situation, so she steadies herself and turns to the person nearest her.

But in doing so, she encounters something she did not expect: a familiar face. Ramon is now standing in precisely the spot she had a moment ago occupied. “Where are we?” he asks, looking around just as Helena had. “I got lost. I think—I mean it musta been a—” and then he says a word that Helena does not know: teak-BALL-ang, he seems to have said, but for all her overeducation she cannot connect that to anything she knows.

“What must it have been?” she asks. She is relieved to be able to focus her attention on him.

“Tikbalang. Big guy with horse feet, horse head. Had to be one, had to. Thought it was just stories, like my mom told, how they like to mess with you, at night in the forest, get you lost. But he did it, he got me lost... is the rest of it true too?”

Focus. Continue to focus. “What is the rest of it?” she manages to ask him.

“Sometimes, when the moon’s bright... then, if you can ride them, they can take you between worlds.”

Nothing of what Ramon is saying resembles her own experience in any way, but she, too, can feel her mind straining to make sense of what has just occurred.... seeking an explanation. What it had to have been. Of course the human brain does want to understand what befalls the body, and of course that brain is perfectly happy to make up a story to account for any anomalous event. Helena tries to hold to the side that compulsion to rationalize—and she is having to concentrate mightily in order to do so—as she considers whether she might be able to reverse this, whatever this is... she shakes her head, hard, and that is enough to make her once again conscious of what she had done just as this happened: she had looked up, directly into the streetlight.

“When the moon is bright, you say... Ramon, will you trust me?”

“To what?” His look suggests that he is indeed quite lost, that he might wander away, telling himself over and over what this must have been. What had to have caused this anomalous state of affairs.

She says, “I want to repeat an experiment.” She takes hold of his hand. “Look up. Up into that bright, bright light.”

Once again a dazzle of disorientation, a paradoxic nothingness of strange, fast movement, no control, surrendering control, and she realizes—it all at once makes sense—this is the direct opposite of the Bronze, with its unrelenting dark and enforced lack of movement... if the Bronze was the unnatural preservation of life, then is this its natural end? Yes, that must be it: she has reached the end. It is over. Her acceptance of that as dispositive fact affords her an uncanny, yet not unwelcome, peace.

And then she is standing on another street corner—yet another street corner?—and she is alive. Alive, after having been dead. Again, dispositive fact. And yet...

From behind her, she hears Myka’s voice: “Helena!”

Pete’s: “See, she’s okay. She’s here and she’s okay.”

And Claudia’s: “Ohmygod H.G.! Ohmygod Ramon! Were you actually abducted by aliens?”

“Actually, no,” Helena says.

Ramon agrees, “Not unless they’re from Mindanao. But that was awesome!” Helena pulls him away from the streetlight to keep him from trying it again, regardless of awesomeness. Though he does seem perfectly happy, now, to marvel at what he believes he has experienced.

Claudia says, “So wait, does that mean there’s something else? Some totally different artifact?”

“I’ve no idea,” Helena says. “But I believe we may safely say there is more than one.”

“More than one,” Pete says. He is leaning is head a bit to the side, rubbing a thumb against his jaw: thinking.

“Working together,” Helena tells him.

“What,” Myka says, and she has got her voice under very tight control, “Happened. To. You.”

Claudia murmurs, “Hey, H.G., look at her eyes.”

Helena does so, and Myka blinks at her, then squints. “Indeed,” Helena says, “‘googly’ is not the word. But I suspect she is not playing it up.”

“Playing what up?” Myka demands. “You disappeared. Are you surprised that I found that a little worrying?”

“And annoying?” Helena asks. At this, Myka inhales in a way that conveys “not out of the question.”

“Like I said,” Claudia notes.

“I did not do it intentionally,” Helena tells Myka.

Myka says, “That doesn’t help. Because what did I tell you? What did I explicitly tell you, using words?”

“Don’t get whammied.”

“And what did you do?”

“The obverse of that. However, I did keep my hands on my Tesla.”

“That doesn’t help either. Honestly, Helena, what happened?”

“I have two answers to that question.”

These words garner another communicative inhale from Myka; this one, Helena translates as “If you do not start providing said answers with a quickness, your ability to do so in any foreseeable future will be severely curtailed.”

With that quickness, Helena says, “One, I was transported to a street corner that was not this one, and then, attempting to replicate the effect, I was in similar fashion returned to this one.”

“And two?” Pete asks. He’s looking at her with appraisal. More so than usual.

She says, “I believe that I died and was then brought back to life.”

“What,” Myka says. Flat.

“I’m sorry. I hold it as a strangely fervent belief. I know it is untrue—that it must surely be untrue—and yet. But you should ask Ramon what happened to him.”

“Tell the tale, Ramon!” Claudia commands.

Ramon, for his part, is more than enthusiastic about complying: “It was incredible. I never thought my mom was talking about real stuff, you know? It was all just scary stories, keep the kids close to home, right? But it’s so for real! The first time, he just confused me, like they do, but the second time!”

“He who? The second time what?” Claudia asks.

“Riding a tikbalang! You don’t know, but—”

Claudia interrupts, “C’mon, I know what a tikbalang is. I watched Lost Girl.”

“Aw, you should check out the comics too, man. Some from when I was a kid, but there’s even more now. Like, now that I know, it’s amazing how right they get it!” Then he pauses, as if realizing how odd it is to be speaking about comics, and their rightness, under the circumstances. “But I guess I gotta ask, why’d a tikbalang confuse us over to 20th and then let us ride him back here?”

Pete says, “Hold it.” He asks Helena, “That’s where you blinked out of here to, during your little near-death experience?”

“Not near death. Death.”

“I don’t care.”

Claudia says, “That’s a little insensitive, big guy.”

“The street sign did say 20th,” Helena affirms.

“And here we are on Taylor,” Pete says. “Put those things together, and you know what you get?”

Helena sighs. “Something Roentgen Files­–related, no doubt.”

“You just get weirder. No: Bullitt.”

“Toldya,” Claudia says, with a little poke at Helena’s upper arm.

Pete goes on, “I bet they’re just moving you around. To where it happens.”

“To where what happens?” Claudia asks.

“The chase. All the streets, the pings. I shoulda put it together. One of those other streets, that’s where this one took you. And then another one brought you back. That’s what they did, right?”

Helena nods.

Claudia does not. “They? They who? The aliens? She said she wasn’t abducted!”

Pete shakes his head. “I pay a lot more attention to what she does than what she says. Makes her easier to understand. And I was watching her, right before she blinked out. Gimme that fantastico goo gun of yours.” Claudia excavates the implement from the depths of her satchel and hands it over; he points it up, and he shoots the streetlight. A spark or two ensues—but that of course might be the result only of mixing electricity and a conducting liquid. He says to Helena, “Okay, guinea pig. Try it again.”

After a moment of hesitation—one for which she berates herself as a coward—she does as he says. Nothing happens. She smiles at him. “Pete, you do surprise me.”

He says, “I get that a lot. Particularly from you.” But he smiles back.

Claudia is looking from Pete to Helena and back again. “Wait, are we done? What is happening?”

“I bet we gotta drive around some more,” Pete says. “Goo a buncha lights.”

Ramon says, “I’m with Claudia: what is happening? You guys, am I in some weird government experiment? Does the government have like a herd of tikbalang?”

“Does that make sense to you?” Claudia asks him. “As an explanation? Or have you ever done anything like, say, mushrooms?”

“I used to run around some.”

“We all did,” Pete assures him.

From Myka, there is an ill-tempered “I didn’t.” Her tone says that she is still not at all thrilled with Helena, or indeed with anything about the situation.

Helena ignores this for the moment and says, “Of course we did. I, for example, did indulge in opium.” She gives Claudia a pointed look.

“I knew it!” Claudia says.

Yet another, even more ill-tempered “I didn’t” from Myka.

“Didn’t what?” Claudia asks. “Indulge in opium, or know that H.G. did?”

“Both.” And as Myka says this word, Helena receives a familiar “why can’t you tell me these things” glance. The eyes delivering that glance continue to be not at all googly.

Claudia says, “You know, Ramon, I think maybe what we’ll go with is, having done whatever running around you did? That might make you susceptible when some tikbalang guy comes a-calling.” Ramon looks as if he does want to believe her, and she takes that as encouragement. “I mean, who’d put it past the government to have herds of unicorns and whatever else, right? But they probably wouldn’t’ve been able to guess that today their employees would catch a ride with a guy who’d know a Filipino beastie if he saw it. And they couldn’t’ve reached into your head and figured out that’s the herd they’d need to rustle up this afternoon.”

“But can we get back to the comics at some point?” Pete asks. “Because pretty cool that whoever wrote those got it right. I’d love it if I found out that the Sandman was really exactly like what Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean and everybody came up with.”

“Sandman isn’t real,” Claudia scoffs.

“Ramon thought this tikbalang guy wasn’t real.”

“I was so wrong,” Ramon rhapsodizes.

But this exchange has Myka’s attention. “Wait,” she says, and her ill temper is gone; this is her agent-voice. “The government wouldn’t be able to reach into anyone’s head and find anything. But something did, and it found something different for Helena than it found for Ramon. Why did it? If this is only about movement from place to place, I mean. And for that matter, why is that movement happening via streetlight?”

Claudia says, “Trust you to come up with the work-related questions. Let’s see if Artie and Steve have anything to contribute.” She Farnsworths and inquires about San Francisco’s streetlights: if there is anything strange, anything new about them. Steve eventually comes up with... a nonanswer. “They’re replacing their old lights with LEDs. But the project’s been going on for a while now, so I don’t see—”

In the background, Artie exclaims, “Oh! LEDs.”

“Oh LEDs what?” Steve asks him.

“I had a feeling this might start happening at some point.”

Myka leans over to the Farnsworth. “You had a feeling what might start happening?”

Artie’s face appears. He looks displeased... but of course he usually looks displeased. “They’re—how to put this?—absorbent. Energy-wise. Fortunately it takes them a while to... take it all in.”

Claudia says, “LED lights are cheap paper towels?”

Pete muses, “So if those cheap paper towels were shining on a bunch of streets, and something major had happened on those streets...”

“But what do lights shining on streets have to do with aliens?” Artie asks.

“Yeah, that part I still don’t get,” Claudia says. “Also why Ramon went into a comic book, and H.G. thought she left her wallet in the afterlife.”

Helena says, “The mind is happy to make up a story...” Myka looks a question at her, and she shrugs. “I remember thinking that, as it was happening.”

“But why do you believe the story?” Myka pushes.

Pete’s eyebrows rise. Then he grins a very wide grin. “You know what?” he says. “I think I got this one! With the assist from H.G.! It’s continuity. Because there’s really none of it in that chase in the movie. You cut from street to street—well, technically Frank Keller cuts from street to street, and you gotta give it to the guy, because he had to work with the shots they gave him—but anyway it doesn’t make any geographic sense. Like none at all. You go around a corner, and it’s totally a different street. Different part of the city. In the movie, all you need to know about what’s happening is that it’s a totally awesome car chase, so who cares? But if it happens to you, here in the world, you gotta make sense of it somehow. Give it some continuity!”

Myka says, with a distinct lack of belief, “And to do that, most people went with alien abduction?”

“But not Miss ‘I Never Heard of the Roentgen Files’ over here!” Claudia crows.

“My aliens did not waste time on abduction,” Helena points out. “Perhaps only the people who did find explanatory solace in alien abduction felt compelled to tell their stories to others? Or at the very least, to tell those stories in a way that would, when coupled with curiosities, come to the Warehouse’s attention. And alien abduction might be quite a convincing explanation, to those whose minds turn to it. I, on the other hand, understand perfectly well that I did not in fact die and come back to life. And yet.”

“And yet what?” Pete asks.

“And yet I did in fact die and come back to life.” How ludicrous she must sound.

Claudia, for one, does not seem to care. “Whatever you say, resident-alien Jesus. So Pete, I guess we gotta go goo whichever streetlights, then try to talk the hippies out of energy efficiency? Even if we do, though, I really don’t see how we’re gonna keep this from happening over and over.”

Helena suggests, “We can look into their manufacture, these LEDs. Surely we can intervene in some relevant way.”

“Sabotage!” Claudia enthuses.

Ramon says, “Oh my god, it’s a mirage.”

“Is it?” Helena asks. She notes that Ramon has put on sunglasses, and—

Pete exclaims, or rather sing-songs, “I’m tellin’ y’all, it’s sabotage!” Then he says, “Good one, Ramon. You are a man with excellent taste. Seriously, we gotta talk comics.”

So there is most likely no actual mirage... Helena envies Ramon the shaded view, however. “It is quite bright,” she says aloud.

“Aw, but poor H.G., you don’t have any sunglasses,” Claudia says, and Helena hears nothing even vaguely resembling sympathy in her voice, “because you’d have to carry them.”

“You would have anticipated my need for them, were you a decent butler. But alas.”

“Did you just call me an indecent butler?”

“If the sunglasses fit, darling...”

“You won’t sound so smug about it when my ‘Never Had an Indecent Butler Like Me’ number brings down the house, Pops.”

Myka tells them both, “I really do not understand your relationship.”

Artie squawks from the Farnsworth, to which everyone has stopped paying attention, “I do not understand a single thing you lunatics say and I am hanging up on all of you people!”

“Hanging up on people,” Ramon says. “That reminds me, I gotta call my mom, let her in on what happened. Blow her mind.”

“Hanging up on people reminds you to call your mom?” Claudia queries.

“Reminds me of my mom. Cell phone drives her crazy; she says it hangs up by itself. Pretty sure she really does it with her face.”

He moves near his car and makes his call... Helena eavesdrops, just a bit. She presumes he is speaking Tagalog, in that his syllables, rhythms, and stresses are melodious yet on the whole meaningless to her. A word or two of Spanish, perhaps, as he had suggested, and also the occasional English: she hears “awesome” said with particular intensity. Then he winces. She suspects his mother might be inquiring as to whether he has taken up again the habits that occupied him when he “ran around some.”

Myka draws Helena’s attention away when she says, “I honestly can’t believe you got yourself not just whammied, but double-whammied. You know, I expect this kind of thing from Pete.”

“Reasonable,” Helena says. She is continuing to find it a bit difficult to focus; a part of her wants to concentrate all her resources on the truth of her death and resurrection. To embrace it fully, not merely philosophically...

“Hey!” Pete objects, and the familiarity of his protest is a comfort.

“Shut up,” Myka tells him. “This whole thing is actually your fault.”

Helena says, “Technically I believe it is Claudia’s fault—”

“Now it’s my turn: hey! Whose team are you on?” Claudia says.

“Yours. But you did not allow me to finish: your fault, but also Myka’s, because she is softhearted and believes in backup.”

“It isn’t softhearted to believe in backup,” Myka says.

“I did not say I attribute softheartedness to you because you believe in backup. I said you are softhearted and you believe in backup.”

“I’m not softhearted,” is Myka’s response.

Claudia snorts. “I wish Steve could’ve heard you say that. He’d be making his weird little ‘does she know she’s lying, and if she doesn’t know, how do I tell her’ face.”

Pete says, as if it is a revelation, “He does make a weird little face like that. He makes it around Myka a lot.”

“So,” Helena says, “comprehensively, she is softhearted, believes in backup, and may make a habit of lying to herself with regard to herself.”

“Is there some reason you’re all picking on me?” Myka asks, resignation edged with resentment.

“Fills the emptiness in our souls,” Claudia says cheerily.

Pete says, “I was gonna go with ‘makes you make a weird little face of your own, Mykes,’ but the empty souls thing works too.”

“And what about you,” Myka says to Helena.

“Perhaps I’m hoping you’ll exact revenge. Later. For my having raised the specter of your softheartedness and prompted such agreement on the point.”

“Perhaps that revenge won’t take the fun form you’re imagining.”

“Perhaps you don’t fully grasp my definition of fun.”

It’s a bit perfunctory, this back-and-forth, but it prompts Claudia to say to Pete, “I really do not understand their relationship.”

“I really do not want to understand their relationship,” he tells her.

Helena tells Myka, “Speaking of fun, or the lack thereof: you won. Your team neutralized the artifact. One of the artifacts, at any rate.” She kisses Myka—this time on the mouth, not the cheek—to indicate that her earlier words had indeed been token, that they had no real purpose. That certainly she intended no real annoyance. That she needs comfort from this, too.

Myka’s eyes do soften as she says, “You think I find that rewarding, do you?” And those words are no challenge. Instead, they are, Helena feels, the soft beginning of their move back to the hotel room.

So for Myka’s ears only, Helena says, “I certainly hope so. If not, there has been a significant dropoff in your appreciation for my performance, this morning to now.”

“Hey, as the team member who actually did the gooing, I won too,” Pete says. “Maybe even more.”

Myka moves only slightly away from Helena as she says, “If she kisses you, I will kill you.”

“Might be worth it,” Pete says. He is jaunty now, Helena thinks, just as he was after the “chase”: happy to have won in whatever way he feels he has.

“How true,” she agrees.

Myka says to Helena, “If you kiss him—in fact if you kiss either of them—I will kill you.”

To Pete, Helena says, “I’ve kissed you before. Not worth it.” He pouts a bit, but Helena turns and assesses Claudia. “You, I don’t know.” But she shoots a sidelong glance at Myka, and she gets the desired response: Myka says, with a bit more fervor than is called for, “Don’t find out.”

“Don’t,” Claudia seconds. “I like my life. So what if I’m a loser at transportation roulette?”

Pete shrugs. “Nah, I give. You can totally have a car chase in your little not-quite-taxis. If Ramon’s driving, anyway, ’cause he’s a boss.”

“I’m switching to Lyft anyway. Better corporate culture. I wonder if Ramon would too.”

Pete, moping, says, “Won’t matter eventually. All the cars’ll be driving themselves.”

“All that means,” Myka tells him, “is you can spend your time watching Bullitt on your phone or whatever entertainment system a self-driving car would have.”

“I guess you’ll just do paperwork,” Pete sighs.

“Not if she’s in a self-driving car with me,” Helena tells him.

“Keep your self-driving sex-taxi fantasies to yourself,” he says.

Helena raises an eyebrow. “I might have been about to say that we would engage in Platonic dialogues.”

“Wouldn’t be much platonic about any dialogues you two engaged in,” Claudia says.

Myka sighs. “Some days I miss being single.”

“I bet you do,” Pete says. “So sad that you’ll never reach that dream of sitting in the back seat of a self-driving car all by yourself, doing paperwork.”

“I might read,” Myka says.

Helena offers, “You might in fact read a Platonic dialogue. The Apology, perhaps.”

“That seems more up your alley,” Myka says, with a smile, “given that it’s the one where Socrates defends himself for corrupting the young.”

“I have corrupted no one!”

“To hear Pete tell it, you’re taking me for rides in self-driving sex taxis. I was a fine, upstanding Secret Service agent before I met you. A pillar of law enforcement.”

Claudia says, “I’m ruling from the bench: you’re guilty, H.G. She really was a pillar before you showed up. Her posture was amazing.”

“There is nothing wrong with my posture now!” Myka objects.

Pete says, “It’s really too easy. Too easy and too dirty... just like Myka, these days.”

“Please go away,” Myka says. “Forever.” She might mean all of them, Helena included.

“You’re not really mad, are you? We’re still partners, right?” Pete asks, in that cajoling way he does.

“Of course we’re still partners, in the sense that we are. But if you steal any more time from my vacation with my different-sense partner, I will be rethinking.” And Myka says this in the way that she does, when responding to Pete’s wheedling; it is a long-suffering, yet oddly tender tone, and she reserves it solely for him. Helena consistently must work not to envy it. Sometimes she succeeds.

“Fair,” Pete says.

“Be happy,” Myka tells him. “You got your car chase.”

Cajoling again, Pete says, “You have to admit, it was amazingly cool.”

“I don’t have to admit any such thing.” Long-suffering. Tender. Then she smiles at Helena and says, in a loud whisper, “Don’t tell him, but I had my eyes closed the whole time.”

Pete sighs. “Where’s your sense of adventure? H.G., I wouldn’t bother taking her for a ride in a sex taxi, if I were you.”

“Oh, Pete,” Helena says. “How you underestimate me. Not to mention, the extent to which Myka is... adventurous.”

Pete blinks at Helena. He looks at Myka, and he blinks again.

Myka thumps her fist against his upper arm, and he winces. Helena would be more inclined to let him imagine what he likes—he certainly could never even approximate the reality—but Myka tells him, “Wash your brain out with soap. And since nobody’s going away like I asked, in spite of the fact that I did it really politely and said please, I will go away. Helena, you can come with me, but only if you promise you will never utter the word ‘adventurous’ again.”

“In public, correct?” Helena asks. “Versus private.”

Myka makes a sound very like a growl. “Since you don’t know the difference, it’s a blanket ban.” Pete opens his mouth to speak, and Myka says, “I swear to god, Lattimer, if you tell me it’s a bad idea to ban blankets, that’s it.”

Pete closes his mouth.

****

Ramon drives Helena and Myka back to their hotel. Helena herself feels, and she believes Myka and Ramon also feel, it as a welcome exhale.

Ramon says, “This kind of wins the crazy-trip prize. Like, trip like trip, and like trip. Don’t give me less stars, but—”

“No need to apologize,” Helena tells him. “We frequently win prizes for which the primary judging criterion is ‘crazy.’”

“Speak for yourself,” Myka says, but without much force.

“My dear,” Helena responds, equally mildly.

Myka closes her eyes. “Fine.”

Ramon says, “Wins the awesome-trip prize too. But that’s really more like trip.”

“Understood,” Helena assures him.

Ramon consults his telephone as he pulls to the curb in front of the hotel. “Huh,” he says. “Here’s a funny. About the trip, and it’s kind of more like trip too. You know how you’re supposed to pay for your Uber through the app?”

“No,” Helena says.

“Okay. Anyway, that’s what you do. What Claudia was supposed to do.”

“All right. I’m failing to appreciate the comedy thus far.”

“So here’s the thing: she set it up so the payment’s cash.”

Myka, who is almost, awkwardly, out of the car—she really did not fit into it properly to begin with—pauses and says, “You can’t pay for an Uber with cash.”

“Right. Not here in old USA. But you know where you can?”

“You are about to say ‘the Philippines,’” Helena guesses.

“Other places too, but yeah. This trip? Got sent through the Filipino app, then back to me. Claudia a genius or something?”

“Yes, a genius,” Helena says.

“But also something,” Myka adds.

“Anyway she stiffed you,” Ramon concludes.

As Helena exits the vehicle, she says to Myka, “I hope you are, as I am, appreciating the irony of this entire situation being the result of your having maintained that ‘stiffing’ Pete and Claudia on the relatively minor bill for our lunches would have been inappropriate.”

Ramon is out of the car as well, and he is saying, with apology, “It’s not cheap. We drove a lot.”

“This is in some way related to limbo, or possibly the limbo. Would you like to estimate the cost of your shock absorbers as well and allow me to reimburse you now?”

“You sure? I can try to bill Claudia or her boss or whoever once I get a estimate.”

“I would not put you through that. Sometimes it is the better part of valor to surrender.”

“The money?” he asks.

“The money, the point, the flag, the fort, the entire cause. I am learning that pragmatism can be the wiser approach.” Myka snorts out half a chortle. “Striving to learn it,” Helena amends.

“My mom, she’d like you. Because you know what she’d say about you? She’d say you’d make a good Catholic.”

“That is...” Helena pauses. “It is an unexpectedly lovely compliment. Thank you. And please give your mother my regards—insofar as I am any judge of such things, she raised a fine son.”

He hugs her. It is strange but also quite sweet.

“This has been a most bizarre afternoon and evening,” she says as they let go of each other, at the same time, in the awkward-yet-appropriate way that embraces can end. “But you’ve dealt admirably with every bit. Thank you.”

Myka smiles at them both. “And thanks from me, Ramon. Mostly for complimenting this one. She deserves it.”

“You’re all right too, lady in question,” he says.

Once they have settled up—Helena hands over every bit of cash she possesses, plus some of Myka’s, and Myka expresses reluctance on the point of this latter participation until Helena reminds her that she could in fact have kept Pete from leading them in his “chase” if she had really tried, thus obviating the need for repairs—Ramon inserts himself into the small maroon car and drives away. Helena is made nostalgic by the furious horn-blares that attend his nonchalant movement into the stream of traffic.

****

“Alone at last,” Helena says, once they are, in fact, alone, at long last, in their room.

“Feels a little weird. Any aftereffects for you? From the whammy? Whammies.”

“I’ll echo you: feels a little weird. Or perhaps I mean, on my part, a little sad.” She does not want to make more of this than it is, but it is. “I find myself unaccountably despondent at the mismatch between my fervent belief in having been resurrected after perishing and the apparently contradictory reality.”

“You want to believe?” Myka asks.

Helena grimaces. “I suppose that, like everyone else, you are intimately familiar with the Roentgen Files television program. And film. And imaginary musical.”

“I thought I got that joke, before, but maybe I didn’t get it in its fullness.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t have. ‘I Want to Believe’ would be, according to Claudia, the closing number of the first act of the Broadway-musical version, which does not exist but which Claudia would pay Hamilton money to see. I gather that is a large sum. She would also pay similar monies to see a Warehouse musical, in which you and I would sing a love duet entitled ‘The Price Is Too High.’”

“If it’s Hamilton money, then yeah, the price probably is too high. Anyway, you can’t sing. I can’t either.”

“Our parts would be played by professionals.”

“That’s good. I’m sure the audience would appreciate it. Although weirdly now the idea that I’ll never sing a love duet on Broadway with you makes me a little sad.”

“Take comfort in my embrace,” Helena suggests, and Myka moves to do exactly that as Helena goes on, “in which you may stand while I refrain from serenading you.”

“Now it feels like I really did win something.” She leans down to kiss Helena, but then her telephone makes its noise that signifies a call from Pete. Myka says, “Don’t worry; I’m not answering. He’s just being a pain.”

That is true: if it mattered, Pete would use the Farnsworth. But this does put Helena in mind of another point, one that she most likely should have considered before now: “Perhaps he is calling to inform you that Claudia still has my Farnsworth and my telephone.” Myka exhales meaningfully, but Helena reminds her, “I did, as instructed, keep my hands on my Tesla.”

“Still a little less than impressive, given the whammying, but at least you’re armed. Can you live without a phone for four days?”

“I lived without one for well over a hundred years.”

“That in no way answers my question.”

Helena says, “I can certainly try. Perhaps it will mean fewer interruptions at the very least.”

“Even fewer if I turn mine off.” A musing tone. A tease, too.

“Would you?” Because if Pete is in a mood to torment them...

Myka says nothing. But she does move away from Helena, and she does take up her telephone. Seconds later, Helena hears a brief, tell-tale buzz. Then Myka says, “Now. I think we have more than twenty minutes.”

But when Myka puts her hands on Helena, she moves as if they have far less time than that. In the past, of course, such desperation could not help but characterize their intimacy; back in the beginning, nothing could be fast enough, intense enough, due to desire’s bright necessity of course, but also to the demands of secrecy, the pressures of stolen time...

This extremity has a different quality, however; Myka’s hands are working fast, yet not with abandon, so that she seems hurried, but to some purpose other than physical satisfaction, the particular haste of which Helena knows quite well. This seems more like... making a point? Solving a problem?

Whatever it is, it is uncharacteristic. “Your pace seems a bit... breakneck,” Helena says, as her shirt is, with alacrity, being unbuttoned, pushed from her shoulders, and let fall to the floor.

Myka pauses, then laughs a little. “Just call me Steve McQueen.”

“If that is yet another unpalatable cocktail that might be but is not, I will... well, do nothing, probably, other than sigh.”

“No. Not a cocktail.”

“A movie? And a guy in the movie?”

“Your speech patterns always get weird when you spend time with Claudia. It’s not a movie, anyway, but it is a guy in a movie. I mean, an actor in a movie.”

“Which, I now deduce, must be Bullitt. Due to my superior deductive powers.” It’s a halfhearted vaunt; she is trying to overcome whatever is keeping her from responding as she should, as she wants to, as she under any other circumstances would if Myka were so bodily insistent.

“Superior,” Myka echoes. “Pete would be making you watch it right now if he were here. Fortunately he’s not,” and she returns to her tasks: lips on neck, hands hard at work, hips pushing Helena backwards to the bed.

Helena is trying to participate fully—trying to ignore whatever is wrong, wrong with both of them—when an abrupt sense of something being no longer the matter overtakes her. She stops moving entirely, the relief is so strong. “I did not die,” she says.

“I know that,” Myka says, but her voice is restless. “I know it, but I can’t help—”

“No, I mean I no longer hold my death and resurrection as a conviction. I suspect Ramon no longer feels so certain that he traveled in his mythologically inspired way.”

“They got the other streetlight,” Myka says, and Helena nods, for that is what must have occurred. And that that is now what must have happened, not her own death, seems a liberation of the most palpable sort. Myka goes on, “How do you feel? Still... despondent?”

“Not nearly so. Although I do I feel a bit sorry for Ramon.” She feels a bit sorry, in fact, for all the previous believers. How are they responding to having their fully embraced beliefs in their abductions, or whatever they chose to give continuity to their experiences, taken away? “Not that I cannot feel despondent on my own recognizance, but I do feel much more myself.”

Myka says, “You’ve been trying really hard, since it happened, to be yourself. Say what you’d say. Banter.” Helena acknowledges this insight with a nod, and Myka goes on, “Ramon gave himself over to it—and I bet he wasn’t despondent at all. But yours was really a balancing act. A kind of ‘I know very well, but nevertheless.’”

“I did want to give myself over to it., but perhaps I’m genuinely incapable of belief. Perhaps that’s the real reason for the despondency. I would make a terrible Catholic after all.” It is brooding and self-pitying, but also most likely true.

“Or maybe it’s just that some cheap-paper-towel artifacts didn’t have nearly enough mojo to convince you. To make you let go of what you know very well.”

“You are playing to my vanity,” Helena accuses. Myka just smiles a little, then kisses her without urgency. Helena further accuses, “You think I am an egotist.”

“No, I know you’re an egotist.” And Helena can’t muster a true smile or laugh, because Myka is of course right. She is stuck between being pleased with and resentful of Myka’s acceptance of this fact for what it is.

“Your face just now,” Myka says, with a shake of her head. “Am I ever going to love anything in my life as much as I love you?”

"As an egotist, I’ll say ‘Of course not.’ As a pragmatist, I’ll say ‘I don’t know.’”

“I like how, just like that, you’ve maneuvered me into rooting for egotist-you over pragmatist-you.”

“As an egotist, I’m quite practiced at such maneuvering. As a pragmatist, less so. However, both the egotist and the pragmatist are ready to declare that they are unlikely to love anything in their respective lives as much as they love you.”

“I bet that’s not really true about the egotist.”

“I think it’s to the egotist’s credit.”

“Oh I see. She can preen about it.”

“She is an egotist.”

“She’s pretty good at making me feel pretty good. Maybe it’s warranted.”

“She is transported to learn that both of those things are the case.”

“Just so you aren’t transported out of this room, that’s fine. Just so you stay here with me.”

“I certainly intend to,” Helena says, striving for lightness, because while she can feel Myka trying for the same thing, there is a shadow in Myka’s voice that should not be there, a shadow in her voice as there had been in her hurried hands. It should not be there; why is it there?

And then she has her answer. “Don’t die,” Myka says. Her voice now is low and her brow is knit: she is serious.

So. Of course Myka knows very well that Helena did not die, just as Helena knows it. Yet while Helena’s now-nullified “but nevertheless” had been “I believe that I did die,” Myka’s was—is—“I am reminded that Helena someday will die.” And that cannot be so conveniently neutralized away.

Helena is inclined to offer, in response, something that would itself fall under some heading of “I know very well these words are preposterously untrue, but nevertheless I will say them in order to offer false comfort”—something such as “I won’t.” Or “I’ll try not to.” Even “Not for a while yet, I hope.”

But Myka deserves better than that. So instead Helena offers a counterproposal: “Deathlets?”

At that, Myka shakes her head, her forehead still unsmooth. But her mouth begins to turn, slowly, and at last the smile breaks over her beautiful face. Finally, now, she laughs, and the shadow is gone.

Tomorrow morning, the first kiss will taste of toothpaste and coffee.

END