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She creates things so that she can destroy them. Little girl in the pink and purple scarf, her good shoes buffed to diamond shine. Little girl at the birthday party all alone. Little girl with the taffeta dress and the box with the torn ribbon. Little girl with the rip in her fingernails as she walks home under the cool shade. She skips the lines in the sidewalk and then steps on the final crack, breaking her mother's back. I won't do that again, she thinks. I won't, I won't, I won't. And she never does.
In the first dream she can remember, her house is falling. Brick by brick, tumbling into bees.
She remembers holding her hands out and being surprised at her own soft skin, at the gentle curve of her life line down her palm.
The touch of a finger on her cheek.
She wants to make herself a monster so that she can crunch bone. It's a good trade, she thinks, and starts crawling into her backyard to collect the scrap wire.
Becoming an adult never really ends, and that's the unfortunate part because she was hoping she could get it over with quickly, like ripping off the proverbial band-aid, but adulthood just keeps on happening.
And afterwards, in the airport, Yusuf leans over and says "hi" sort of shyly, like it's the first time they've met and he hasn't just driven a car with her unconscious body through entire rows of enemies. Ariadne's eyebrows go up.
"Hi," she says back, fiddling with her luggage. She bends her elbows to carry the weight. Not far from her, Cobb's hands shake as he reaches for his bag on the conveyor belt. She doesn't mention it, though a part of her itches to. She doesn't really want to examine why so she looks at Yusuf instead. It's easier to look at Yusuf than at Cobb.
"You're really good," he says. "Not that I doubted it. But. You're really good."
She smiles.
"Can I talk to you privately?" he asks. "I have a proposition."
She's heard that one before.
"I have to return to school," she explains. "Got to graduate or my parents will kill me."
"Your parents," Yusuf says, a bit wonderingly. "Yes, of course. But if you ever have free time, come to Mombasa. I have work for you if Cobb doesn't."
She flicks her eyes towards Cobb. "I don't think he's going to need me anymore," she says softly, and her heart is a muscle, she reminds herself. Just a muscle.
Yusuf nods. "Think about it. My offer, I mean."
"I will," she replies, and maybe this is a part of adulthood too, the strange men with the strange offers. She wishes there was a manual for it, or something. An exam at the end that she could study for.
In Mombasa, he draws the curtains shut and plunges them into solitude. Ariadne presses her hip against the worn wall of his shop and thinks about the knife in her boot. Arthur gave it to her, that knife. She's never had one like it before, small and light and bare.
"I need to," Yusuf says. He clears his throat and tries again. "I need to see it again. The house that I grew up in."
"Why?" she asks. She always asks this.
"Cobb's share, I'll give it to you," he says.
There are times when she wishes she could be more romantic. She doubts that Mal ever had to count coins in Paris and worry about student debt. She imagines, when she lets herself think about these things, that Mal was born from a perfect white egg, coiled around a godhead like Helen. But she isn't Mal and she's sweating messily in the Kenyan heat, despite the drawn curtains and the water Yusuf has poured for her, so she says, "I'll need you to tell me what it was like."
"The truth is," Yusuf says, "I barely remember."
He describes what he can for her.
She begins with the garden. She likes gardens. She adds sassafras, sycamore, and green ash; she adds acacia, clover, and jasmine. She adds water. She adds sun. She folds them around an archway that leads up to a small red house, and then she waits for Yusuf to enter the dream and take a look.
His mouth. That's what she notices first, the slow drawing bow of his mouth. It's not a smile, not quite, and he says afterwards that it's all wrong. There were no sycamores, no acacias, and definitely no jasmine. But there's the spark of recognition all the same, and Yusuf's mouth. There's a certain architecture to be found there as well, and she says, without meaning to, "Nothing I did ever made Cobb happy. Nothing could."
Yusuf turns around slowly. His footsteps are heavy on the rocks; she could never mistake him for a projection. "Call him right now," he says. "Call him right now and see how happy he is."
"Right now? We're in a dream."
"The best place to do anything is within a dream," Yusuf says.
"That doesn't make any sense," she retorts. "And I'm not going to call. He doesn't want to hear from me." She grows quiet. Bites a ragged fingernail where the polish is turning speckled. "It's okay, I think. It's okay."
The house is red. There are plates inside the colour of clay.
Yusuf walks around. "It's fantastic work," he says. "Look at the detail and the way you've closed it all off. If I didn't know better, I would try to move in." He puts his hands on the banister. "But it's still not what I remember."
"You said red."
"Not this shade. Not like that."
She nods. "Let's wake up then."
As they leave, she catches a glimpse of the architecture tumbling, wiping itself clean.
Cobb said to her, once, that she should never try to recreate a real place.
She's breaking all the rules for Yusuf, and he won't tell her why. He writes down his memories for her. He fills entire notebooks with haphazard scribbles about this detail or that, going back to contradict himself every three sentences. There are doodles in the notebooks as well, little sketches of cats and chemical vials that made her laugh. He mails them to her, express post, and she copies down the information into a neat order that she pins on her corkboard. She looks at it before she goes to sleep at night, trying to decipher colour and texture and height.
She flies to Mombasa during her breaks, and then when summer comes, she goes there to stay. She tells her parents that she has an internship in San Diego. Yusuf fakes a phone call for her, pretending to be her manager. "I don't like lying to your parents for you," he admits when he's hung up, but she shrugs. She's been lying to them for years. It doesn't hurt anyone.
She makes house after house for him, all red, all false.
Sometimes he smiles at them. When there's a hint of dried paint here, or a shadow of a young boy projection sitting on the step there, Yusuf will light up, as easy to read as the numbers on her watch. Other times, though, he's quiet, very quiet. He'll pick through the hallways, and she'll know that something happened in this house, long ago, that even though Yusuf is a successful chemist with many friends and an undeniable feeling of adulthood about him, he knows. He knows what it's like.
So she says to him, "This time, let's tear it down."
"Yes," he says, "oh god yes."
She builds houses, not monuments.
She's never wanted to build monuments.
This time the house is cold, and everything is painted blue and still like the hollows of a necropolis. "This is so far from right that I don't even have words," Yusuf says, and for the first time he sounds angry.
So she puts her hands over his. She looks up at his beautiful mouth.
"Do you love me?" she asks.
"I don't even know you," he says.
"That's no excuse," she replies. She's already seen all of his dreams. "I'm sorry," she finally says. "I do that a lot. I push. I push, and I push, and what I want, what I truly, truly want -- is for someone to push back. To expand the space. And then I want them to take my hand and say, Ariadne, you did good. That's what I want."
"This house," he says. "The original. It burned." His voice is hoarse but his hand grips her shoulder. He's forgiven her. "I don't even know if the house was red, just that the fire was."
She wraps her arms around him.
"Why does it matter to you so much?" she asks again when they're sitting in his apartment, and her legs are crossed on his plaid bedspread. "If it happened so long ago you barely remember."
He laughs a bit. The paunch of his belly shakes. He's much more relaxed now that they're in the waking world. "Are you seriously asking me that? You, of all people?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" she pouts, fingers worrying a loose thread on the sheets.
"If we had perfect control over our minds, we'd all be out of a job," Yusuf says. "I don't know why it matters. It just does. I want to see that house again. I need to know."
"I think," she says, "I think I should call Cobb."
"I agree," Yusuf replies. "The phone's over there, where it's always been."
This time the house is in the middle of a festival. It's on a floating island. It's nothing like how Yusuf remembers it, but it's better because it's beautiful. She slips into thin white sandals and pulls him into the crowd where she makes him shoot fish out of a barrel and gamble outrageous amounts on games that no one can win. Yusuf is strangely shy in crowds, even in a dream, but she teases a laugh out of him when she takes the plastic mallet and smashes it over a perfect plastic replica of Eames' head. The lights on the game burst into spasms.
"You are outrageous," he accuses, and then he kisses her. She isn't ready. She hasn't had much experience with kissing but it's still among the most awkward kisses of her life. He steps in too quickly and their knees bang together.
"Ow," she says.
He starts pulling away, a shocked expression on his face. Yusuf is such a gentleman that he belongs on the pages of a worn colouring book, something nostalgic and special to keep with her always. "I shouldn't have--"
"Don't you dare," she retorts, and lines them up properly.
She's never going to get the house right. Even if she does, it's never going to be the house that Yusuf lost, the carved space in his memory that he won't let go. The prototype is gone. All they can do is make copies from copies, and then try to hold it together with their delicacy of breath matched with the brute force of their shared genius. She wonders if what they're doing is more than what it seems, that if they're not trying to cheat death. Then Yusuf slides his knuckles down her spine and she curls towards him, in the house that was never a real house, in the home that was never a real home.
But she's an architect. She can make anything.
Wherever it was I was trying to go, she thinks. Have I arrived? Have I made my way there?
Yusuf looks at the red house on the red road. He hooks his thumbs into her pockets and puts his chin on top of her head. He likes to do that when he's thinking, and she likes it too. It makes her feel enveloped and warm, like this is the only thing that can harbour her. "Almost," he says, "almost."
And that's the best way to be, she thinks. Holding it in the palm of her hand, on top of her crooked life line, anticipatory.
"Hey Yusuf," she says, singing it. "Hey Yusuf."
"Shh, you're ruining the moment," he grouches, nuzzling her bare neck.
"Oh, sorry," she says.
"That word gets repeated so often, it's going to lose all meaning." He lifts his head and eyes her warily. "I'm almost afraid of what you're going to suggest. Please, I've already shamed myself with full frontal marketplace nudity."
"And I got new pictures for my scrapbook so that I can show all my friends," she says. "But stop wincing. It's not that bad. You have very nice thighs. No, listen to me. After this, I'm going to make you something new. I'm going to make you something amazing."
"Okay," he says, and she's already picturing it in her head, how good it's going to be.