Work Text:
They get stuck on the third level of a dream during the dry run of an extraction. It happens sometimes, Eames knows, though it hasn't to him before now. He supposes there must've been some kind of problem delivering the kick.
Arthur's both the dreamer and the subject, so they're in no danger from projections, so long as Eames doesn't build.
They wander about a dream-sculpture garden, and it dream-rains. Arthur dreams them up a couple of umbrellas, so Eames refrains from the obvious bladder jokes. He's made them all before, in any case. He's been in dreaming a long time.
"By the way," Arthur says, rain thrumming happily all around, "I've been meaning to ask you a favour."
"Ask away," says Eames.
"I need a hand with transporting something," Arthur says.
*
Arthur's something turns out to be a vast amalgam of wires and tubes and gears. They pick it up from a scrap heap, where Arthur's had it laid aside for him. It's quite old looking, some of the wires ending in bare, disconnected ends; the metal is scratched and tarnished, with large patches of mottled green and specks of rust. But Arthur seems confident that he can get it in working order, whatever the work is that it does.
"What does it do?" Eames asks.
"Nothing, on its own." Arthur runs his fingers over the blunt teeth of an outer cog. He looks into the depths of the thing, not assessing, it seems, but familiar and proprietary. "It's a component," he says.
It is also monstrously huge. Even between the two of them, they have a hard time getting it into the van Arthur has hired for the purpose. Eames bashes his elbows, his knees and his head, jams the same finger twice, and does something rather awful to his back.
"You owe me," says Eames on the drive back, pining for a more comfortable passenger seat, sweat sticky on his skin, another ordeal with the component still ahead.
"You owed me for the Aberdonian job," Arthur says.
"We're even," Eames says, but still very sternly, because his muscles ache a lot.
Arthur only smiles and drives, like he's got a lot on his mind but most of it's good.
*
This is probably egotism, or an overactive imagination, or insanity, but every so often, Eames thinks Arthur might be in love with him. It'll be there in a look -- something mute and still and too open, too vulnerable. Or it'll be a richness Eames catches in Arthur's voice. Or it'll be a small, precise detail in the way Arthur moves when Eames comes near. The particular way he holds his shoulders, or the tilt of his head. And then it will be gone, as if it never existed, and Eames won't catch anything like it again, sometimes for months. And then, once again -- the way Arthur smiles across at him, just for an instant, in the front of his hired white van.
They reach Arthur's house, a nice detached bit of Victorian splendour with huge windows and high ceilings, and Eames adds some bruises to his bruises. He jams the same finger three more times. He takes various deities' names in vain. Though in fairness, Arthur doesn't have a particularly easy time of it himself; and in fact, to be fairer still (not that Eames would say he has all that much fairness in his nature), this is a pretty soft way to pay back what Arthur did for him in Aberdeen.
Arthur's lounge is full of similar, smaller components. It's quite a mess. There are even some on the sofa.
"What on earth are you building?" Eames says.
"An escalator to the moon," says Arthur. He pats his new acquisition on one of its tubes. Outside, the sun is setting sweetly and the moon itself is already visible, large in the sky.
"All right," says Eames, "don't tell me if you don't want to."
*
There was a time two years ago in Mombasa -- the first time. Eames had agreed to let Arthur crash for the night at his place, en route to a job in Nairobi. Arthur turned up at Eames' front door at precisely the time agreed on, sweating through his linen shirt, with a huge, dark suitcase behind him. Eames can't remember now if it was the way Arthur looked back into his face, or only the way he said, "Hey," voice dry from ten hours on a plane, but the thought came into Eames' head, so new and so abruptly that it seemed as though it wasn't his at all, as if it had fallen from the sky like so much bird shit.
He thought, you love me.
And then Arthur went inside and proceeded to make arrangements over where he would sleep as if he were negotiating his share from a job, and to cast a critical eye over Eames' décor, and to be so generally normal and so Arthurian that, until it happened again, it seemed to Eames that whatever that was at his front door simply couldn't have happened.
*
He stays late at Arthur's house to talk about work. Not about the job in hand but a possibility for the next one. Arthur has found something in São Paulo that he thinks the two of them could take on together. They talk in Arthur's kitchen, heating up old take-away and drinking scotch. And so on this occasion, Eames ends up crashing for the night with Arthur.
There are three spare rooms, and he takes the one with the largest bed. On the wall is a picture of a nighttime seascape, dappled with silvery moonlight, and as Eames looks at it, he can almost hear the hushing shush of the waves.
Arthur doesn't bother with much of a goodnight. Eames hears him brushing his teeth in the bathroom, and then hears the clunk of him closing his bedroom door.
*
Eames wakes as if seconds later, sunlight filtering through his curtains and birds chirping with insensitive matinal cheerfulness. As he dresses, a banging and clanging starts up from downstairs.
Arthur, in the lounge, has his knee on a cog, a fistful of wires in his left hand, a spanner in his right and his head halfway inside his new component. He knocks his head when Eames says good morning. He deserves it for being so secretive.
Eames picks up a smaller piece of -- not-escalator -- and tries and fails to make head or tail of it, picks up another piece and tries and fails again.
"Careful with that," Arthur says.
Eames throws the piece into the air and catches it.
"Careful with that," Arthur says, perfectly evenly, "or I'll shoot you."
Eames makes a tactical decision and puts the piece gently back down where he found it.
*
Later, in a large department store, shopping for a watch for a con, Eames gets onto the escalator. It's packed full and noisy and it's not quite smooth, the way it carries him up, but it does have its kind of inexorability. Strange, but it seems suddenly imaginable -- an escalator to the moon. Not this one, but some more divine, perfected, more ancient relation. It has a kind of sense to it.
Eames steps off at the top, legs unsteady. He walks into ladies' underwear. He picks up a very lacy thong, in a pale, grey, delicate lace, and looks closely at it, his mind still on Arthur and cogs and moonlight. He twists the thong between his fingers like a cat's cradle, and then untwists it and gazes into the crotch, as if it could be hiding something from him.
Eames realises what he is holding and abruptly feels foolish. He untwists it and pretends, for the benefit of anyone watching, to inspect it once more, quite thoughtfully -- is this really the thong for me? -- and then shakes his head at the pattern of lace. He reattaches it, as if with regret, to its tiny plastic hanger.
He decides to go to the department store café for a nice mug of tea. And maybe a biscuit.
*
"How's it coming along?" he asks Arthur. "Your escalator."
"All right," says Arthur.
They're tailing the mark through a traffic jam. At present, she is four cars ahead and probably wishing she'd taken a different route. Someone on the inside lane honks their horn loudly, perhaps in existentialist protest against the hopeless absurdity of their traffic-bound existence. Or perhaps because they're a git.
Eames drums his fingers on the wheel and wishes the mark had taken a different route. He looks over at Arthur, in the passenger seat, and Arthur shrugs back, and, for an instant -- perhaps it is because of that moment in the truck, when he was briefly so certain; or perhaps it's because he's been looking for it for too long now, and thinking about it too much; or perhaps it's because he's started to want it to happen; perhaps he always has -- Eames expects that feeling to come, you love me. But it doesn't. It hasn't. And perhaps -- probably it has always been his imagination.
On a wild, weird kind of impulse, he says, "If I took you out for dinner, somewhere horrifically expensive, would you tell me what that thing you're building is actually supposed to be?"
And he waits and he breathes.
"No," Arthur says.
*
Eames gets out of the car. He leaves Arthur to take the wheel, and walks ahead through the traffic jam, to see how far it goes on. It seems endless. Eames walks and walks, making his way between unmoving vehicles, most with their engines off, their radios on, the blare of discordant music like a thick, grey smog of noise. It comes to seem to Eames that the road itself has stretched itself out, like a modern Dantean torture. Eventually, he gives up and heads back to the car.
Arthur has the driver's seat pushed back and his feet up on the wheel. One of the hems of his trousers has slipped down to around his knee, and Eames feels the strangest urge to touch Arthur's bare shin. He gets into the passenger seat. Arthur lowers his feet and straightens his back.
"Don't, on my account," Eames says.
Arthur shrugs. "What's it like up ahead?"
"Nightmarish."
"Oh," says Arthur. He adjusts the AC. "Good to know," he says, sounding unconvinced.
"I considered just leaving you here," Eames says. "Not sure why I didn't."
"I distribute the pay at the end of a job."
"Must be the goodness of my heart," Eames says.
*
Some while later, after an exhilarating five minutes in which they advance by at least a metre, Eames says, "It's not really an escalator, is it?"
Arthur frowns -- the way he often frowns at Eames, one part frustration to three parts unreadable insularity. He turns the key, and the hum of the car goes quiet.
"The thing is, if it really is-- Well, I thought it wasn't," Eames says, feeling awkward.
"Yeah, I know," Arthur says.
Eames rubs his forehead. "So is it?" He wants to add, And will it take you to the moon? but he doesn't know how you say something like that to a person.
Arthur takes his time over his answer. What he says, in the end, is, "Why don't you come round and see it? Like I said, it's coming along all right."
"Yeah, okay," Eames says, "I will. Thank you."
Arthur looks surprised. He mutters, "Sure," and turns the key again -- Eames realises that the traffic has begun to move.
*
There was a time, about eight months ago, at the start of a job, when Eames thought he saw the same thing twice in less than a week. First, when Eames bought the team coffee on the morning of their first day, as an easy show of goodwill and comradeship. When Eames brought Arthur his, Arthur touched the cup with the pads of two fingers, as if to test the way it felt, before slipping his hand around it. There was something in that, in the details of the movement, so that somehow -- he loves me, Eames thought.
And then, that Friday, late in the afternoon in one of those inevitable, start-of-a-job, developmental dreams gone badly wrong -- something flashed across Arthur's face as he dreamt a Glock into his hand, before he shot Eames awake with a neat, single shot. He does, Eames thought, he does. And then nothing more for the rest of the job.
Love is such a complicated mess of a feeling. Less a single emotion, more a tangle of hundreds upon hundreds of thoughts, ideas, urges, all pulling roughly the same way, but each in its own way and with its own particular object. Each with its own particular texture and force. Some that you would hardly want to follow.
What can you tell, Eames thinks, of all this from a single look?
Sometimes, he believes that the simplest things are the biggest and most complex of all -- he believes that only life's simplest, slightest, most insoluble, most missable items can say something as difficult as love. And at other times, he feels as though he has tried to see a whole painting in barely a fleck of paint.
*
He goes back to Arthur's house and looks at what Arthur is building.
There seems far more of it now. Many of the components have been fitted closely together about the larger one that Eames brought here with Arthur, but other large, new components are lined up along one wall. Some seem to involve pumps and pistons; in others, the parts are less easy to identify, rough-surfaced and twisting against one another in uneven curves, both organic and not, uncanny, alien and familiar.
There is a shape to the assembled section that seems to have a kind of potency of meaning. In fact, it is like a visible idea, half-formed. If Eames squints, perhaps it is something that could grow to have all the significance of an escalator. A means of ascent.
*
They reheat take-away again. They drink scotch. Eames watches for signs that Arthur might love him. He takes the same room as before, and looks at the same picture, in which the sea and the moonlight look different. It is as if he is looking at the same scene on a different night. The sound he imagines he hears -- that hush-shush of the sea -- is quieter and more insistent.
In the morning, the light filters only dimly through the curtains, the sky overcast. Eames goes to the window and looks out across the endless flat farmland Arthur's house backs onto -- the fields look jumbled and unformed beneath a confident, fat, ripe thickness of cloud. From the lounge, Eames hears a clunk and a clang.
Eames thinks of the sculpture garden and the rain, the two umbrellas Arthur made that existed suddenly in his hands, his own in his right, Eames' in his left, as if he had always had them. Eames thinks of the long, long wait for the dream to end.
*
Arthur has got further still with what might be an escalator -- its shape has more intelligence about it, more power. Irrationally, there seem to be even more components than yesterday. The lounge is a complication of metal and wires and rubber, and in the background is a stop-start tick-tock sound, around which there twines a semielectrical hiss.
Arthur is clambering to the top of some kind of secondary assemblage, limbs disappearing into dark spaces between tubes and cogs. One of the large, high windows stands entirely open, letting in the wind in damp gusts. Eames finds it impossible to focus on any one part of the scene. His attention is drawn about, never still.
"Want a hand?" he asks, though he doubts there's anything he could do. This seems so entirely Arthur's thing, he wonders if there's anyone else who could do much with it.
"S'fine," says Arthur.
"Right. Breakfast?"
"I've eaten. Help yourself."
"Right," says Eames. "Thanks."
Arthur nods. "Should be done by this evening," he adds, gesturing with something not quite a spanner, rather gracefully, at a close cluster of cogs. "Stick around."
"Thanks," Eames says. He looks about him once more over the mess. He thinks, escalator. It shouldn't, but the whole room shivers with the idea.
*
Eames gets himself breakfast. He wanders about Arthur's house, poking his nose where he probably shouldn't and leaving fingerprints in the dust. He flicks through several of Arthur's books -- first factual, then fiction, neither of which seems right for him.
The rain begins half-way into the morning and falls heavily, stubborn, fat drops beating themselves against the walls. Eames tries a book of prints of neoclassical sculpture -- fundamentally unsatisfying -- and a photobook, Paul Graham, A Shimmer of Possibility.
He goes out for his lunch. He asks Arthur along, but Arthur is absorbed in construction and says he'll shift for himself. So Eames ends up with a small table of his own at a pub full of wet umbrellas and the wash of numberless conversations -- mostly about the weather and the mud. He eats steak, medium rare, with a thick stripe of fat along one edge; grilled tomatoes; grilled mushrooms; chips, numerous; and lettuce, sad and shredded, in a little heap at the side of his immense, deep, elliptical plate.
Back at the house, Arthur is still in the lounge, but the kitchen contains evidence that he has eaten. There's a collection of unwashed things spread along the counter, plus crumbs on the floor and a yellow splodge of mustard by the hob. Eames leaves all this exactly as it is, and ignores the wet footprints he's added to the scene. He returns to Arthur's books. The rest of the day seems to blur away amidst Paul Graham's vision of modern America, Arthur's clunks and curses, and the persistence of the rain.
*
"It's done," Arthur says in the evening, in the doorway of the guest room, looking in at Eames. Eames feels as though he is blinking awake out of fathoms of darkness. The rain has stopped. The curtain is open, and the outside world shines with dark.
"I've ordered food," Arthur says. "We should eat first, before we go up."
And so they eat freshly-ordered pizza and talk a little about the dreamscapes of an old job, and share salad from Arthur's fridge, while the kitchen light hmmms at them and the kitchen windows look on blankly.
Eames puts on the kettle, only to realise that Arthur doesn't have any tea, or even coffee. He pours himself a mug of plain hot water. The steam smells bland and comforting. He drinks half, and lets Arthur have the last piece of pizza. He goes into the dining room, where the light is switched off, and looks out at the sky. The clouds have dispersed, except for one or two sparse, dark patches, and the moon is three-quarters full.
*
The completed escalator leads out through the open lounge window. The carpet and parts of wall around the window are damp where rain must have got in earlier. There is a smell like wet leaves on the air.
The steps are already in motion: quiet, with a slight squeak. The external surfaces are all smooth, highly polished and perfect, but the way the light catches seems to reveal the truth that this is still the same assemblage of nameless components Eames saw before. This is, fundamentally, a thing of twisting metal and blunt-toothed cogs. Its appearance is its least real part.
It reaches out and up beyond visibility. Arthur hands Eames a torch. He keeps another for himself.
Arthur gets on first, Eames onto the second step below. He holds the handrail, and the feel of it makes his skin tingle.
Out in the open, the night air is cool and brisk, the wind fierce on Eames' skin. He should feel cold, but he doesn't. He feels cushioned, not invulnerable but protected. He watches Arthur's back, and the way he holds his shoulders still. He thinks Arthur must feel the same. He wants Arthur to look back, and eventually Arthur does, expression impenetrable in the torchlight and his own shadow. Then he returns to looking up.
A feeling seeps into Eames that begins with the particular grey of the escalator steps, and the dull gleam of its walls, parallel and seamless. And then there is the squeak, growing quieter. And the wind, now more seen than felt, rustling the leaves of the trees below. Arthur, two steps up, seeming calm and somehow complete. And Eames' own breathing and heart, and perhaps, very faintly, the sound of Arthur's breath. And then the immensity of everything ahead.
What Eames feels is not silence, but is hard to describe as anything else. It is a kind of ecstasy of empty sound. Or -- if euphoria could keep entirely still and cold and quiet, it might feel like this.
*
The moon is grey and very old, and they spend a long time there. The surface is dusty. Eames can only imagine the way it shines. Though in another sense, everything is light.
"You love me," Eames says. It's strangely easy to say it, up here. They simply come to a point, as they wander, where this is what is there for him to say. "Or -- I want you to."
Arthur nods, though what he is assenting to is unclear.
"I could've got it the wrong way round," Eames admits.
"I guess it depends on what you mean by love," Arthur says. "I'd have to know someone pretty well, to be certain. Though I've known you a while."
Eames looks into Arthur's face, and he thinks it again -- you love me. Or -- I love you. Or something somewhere in between.
He says, "Yeah. I've known you a while."
High above, the crescent Earth is mostly white, mottled with blue.
*
"Is this a dream?" he asks Arthur. "Are we still dreaming? Did we get the kick?"
"I don't know," Arthur says. "Does it matter?"
It probably should. But whatever this is, Eames thinks, it feels as real to him, as important, as any part of his life ever has.
*
Back on Earth.
Arthur kisses Eames slowly and plainly. It is not an overture or an expression of one single, simple thing; it is not a beginning, any more or less than it is an end. It is somehow entire, uncondensed.
Eames sinks into it.
Arthur's mouth is slightly dry, his skin addictive to the touch. There is a patch on his right elbow that is very rough, marked like a graze. His feet are very hard at the heels. The scent of him, beneath deodorant, pomade and mineral shower gel -- the scent of him is tannic, both deep and sharp.
His hair clumps when disarranged, and flicks out sideways at the back. His body heats up fast, despite the cold of his home. His bed creaks.
*
In the morning, they find the lounge window still open. In fact, its pane seems entirely gone. Leaves have blown in and piled up in heaps, and parts of the carpet are still damp.
There is no trace of the escalator, though there are dents in the sofa where components lay. Arthur walks a steady circuit around the room, and at times, he looks bereft -- at times, Eames feels bereft -- but eventually, he shrugs.
Eames makes them mugs of hot water which they drink together in the kitchen. He burns the toast, and then so does Arthur. They go back to bed.
Later, they find thick, grey dust on the soles of their shoes.