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You heard a riddle, once. Or maybe it was a story. Aren’t riddles kind of like stories, except that the jackass telling the story won’t tell you the ending? Makes you guess the ending yourself, based on how it started?
Anyway. You heard a riddle once, and it goes like this:
*
You don’t know what Vicious is, you tell them, and then you show them. Vicious is a fist breaking across your face. Vicious is blood welling warm in your mouth. Vicious is lying on the pavement and aching, and aching, and aching, and thinking, somehow, again. I want that again.
Vicious is a ghost in the fragmented landscape of your vision. Vicious is the skin across your knuckles splitting open on the pavement. Vicious is, Vicious is, Vicious is, Vicious is--
Spike, Faye shouts, her palm banging against the shower door. You almost done in there? Some of us were hoping to use hot water.
You stand up, peel your forehead away from the wall and press your fingertips into the knots in the backs of your shoulders that never really go away. It’s cold; it’s always cold. You can always see your breath, even when the air is so thick it feels like you’re swimming.
You shut the water off and gather your clothes in one hand and a towel in the other. As you leave, towel around your waist, you pat Faye on the shoulder.
“Sorry, Miss Valentine,” you tell her. “Gotta be an earlier riser for that.”
She huffs, her fingers curled into tight fists. You like the way anger looks on her, you realize. It fits her face, like it used to fit Julia’s.
You fish a cigarette out of your pants pocket and chew on the end of it until it rinses the taste of her name out of your mouth.
*
The riddle goes like this.
There’s a man, and he has a ship. And the man falls apart, and the ship falls apart. And they rebuild the ship but they don’t rebuild the man, so it isn’t his ship anymore, and it isn’t itself, either; it’s a new thing, in the shape of the old. A reconstruction that wears the old ship’s ghost.
And the part that’s the riddle is--what, exactly? Is it the same?
Of course it isn’t. They tore it apart and put new pieces inside of it, until it reminded them of what it was before. Of course it’s not the same; what a stupid fucking riddle.
See? Jackasses with stories.
*
Spike is very far away sometimes, Ed says. She’s balanced on her hands, stretching her legs out to the ceiling and back down to the floor. She does it for fun, Faye says. Crazy kid.
“Yeah,” you tell her, sprawled on the couch. You throw an arm over both your eyes; you’d rather not see the moment she breaks her neck, or whatever. “Told you, it’s dangerous for you to come with us. You do plenty to help out from here on the ship, anyway.”
She hums; that high-pitched noise in the back of her throat when someone gets something wrong. Not like that kind, silly Spike, she says. Not space-far. Time-far.
You sit up on your elbows, glaring right at her. She smiles, upside down.
“You’re a piece of work,” you tell her. It’s something your dad used to say to you--you’re a piece of work, and then he’d laugh, and then you would, too.
Piece of work, Ed echoes, and kicks her feet all the way over, stands up wobbly when the blood rushes out of her head. Work and peace, piece of work.
“At least she’s having fun,” Julia laughs, from where she’s sitting cross-legged with a hand on your thigh, and you press your forearm into your eyes again.
*
Most days it’s fine. Most days. Most days it’s just Jet and Faye and Ed and that stupid little dog, and you, and not enough money in your pockets and too many bell peppers in the fridge and the next bounty, the next adventure, the next thing to cling to by the edges of your finger tips.
Some days--
Some days it’s Vicious with his hand tilting yours up when you aim your gun. Some days it’s Julia’s smile pasted over some poor store clerk, a double-vision image that you can only mumble thanks to and turn away. Some days it’s both of them, curled up in your bed, waiting for you to join.
Some days you hear her singing when you fall asleep.
*
When you wake up, your mouth is tacky. You stretch out, and bump something, and so you roll the other way and hit something there, too, and you think for a half a second not this one, I hate this one, and then Jet’s voice says you awake?
You blink your eyes open. Jet, to your right, his arm curled around you like he’s cradling something fragile. Faye, to your left, curled up just far enough away so as not to touch you.
“Um,” you say.
Jet laughs; you feel it in your vertebrae. You got to wandering the ship again, he says. Seemed you needed company to fall asleep.
You exhale through your teeth. Wandering the ship. It’s a nice phrase. Neutral. Toothless.
Says nothing about the things he says, while he’s wandering. Says nothing about what he thinks he sees. Says nothing about how little he remembers, afterwards; how if Jet doesn’t find him, if he doesn’t make a fuss, if he manages to keep himself together enough, he’s never sure whether it was a dream or not.
“Well,” you say. “I slept.”
Jet hums again. There’s no harm, maybe, in closing your eyes for just a little longer.
*
Here’s the riddle.
What the fuck are you? No, really--are you a bounty hunter? A syndicate boss? A half-dead man who doesn’t know what he is, only what he isn’t?
What are you, if the only pieces of yourself you ever liked lived inside other people? What are you, if they took those pieces with them when they left? What are you, if you want to kill them now, not to get the pieces back but because you’ve been dead since they took them and you want them to know how it feels?
What are you, if you live half your life in a daydream? If you see the two of them always at the edges of your vision? If you can only piece yourself together by knowing that they can’t be here because they live in the left side of your field of view and scatter like water droplets whenever you blink?
What are you, if sometimes you close your hand over your right eye, just so you can see them for a moment?
*
That wasn’t me, Faye tells you desperately, her fingers digging into your wrists, her hair spilling over her forehead over yours. Do you understand me? You have to understand me. That girl in the video, it was me but it wasn’t me.
“I know,” you tell her, your hand on the back of her neck. “Listen, I know.”
She’s dead, Faye hisses. She died in that accident.
*
“I miss you,” Vicious says, with a crooked smile, and it doesn’t matter because he isn’t real. Even when he reaches his hands out to brush against the edges of your hair, the way he always did; even when he whispers, “Spike, don’t be like that,” the way he always did; even when he puts one hand around your throat with the thumb pressed into the hollow of your neck. The way he always did.
He was always saying shit like that, too. Spike, don’t be like that. Spike, I miss you. Spike, what do you think you’re doing, anyway. Towards the end of it all, even when you were right there he said he missed you, and when you asked what he meant he’d just smile., like it was a joke. Like it was a riddle.
“I get it,” you tell him, and turn your head over, bury it underneath the pillow. As if that’ll help jarr the left side of your vision out of an old hotel room filled with shards of broken glass. “I get it, I’m crazy. Haunted. Ghosts of my past, blah, blah. Could you shut the fuck up? I need to sleep.”
He wraps his arm around your waist, curls himself into the space behind your knees. “I can’t wait,” he murmurs into your ear, “for you to kill me.”
*
What you’ve got here is not a space ship, a repair mechanic told Jet once. What you’ve got is a hunk of junk so hodge-podged together that the whole might actually be worth less than the sum of its parts.
You’d stuck around, hands in your pockets, just to see if the guy got decked.
Be that as it may, Jet had sighed, you able to fix the rear heat compressor on my hunk of junk, or not?
The mechanic had shrugged. Sure, he’d said. If you’re sure you’d rather do that than scrap the whole rig and buy something respectable.
Jet had smiled. You hated it when Jet smiled.
See you in an hour, he’d said, and that was the end of it.
Well, not quite. Jet had cussed the guy out on the way home afterwards--never speak ill of your mechanic before the repairs, he’d said--in roaring technicolor.
I can’t stand assholes like that, he’d snapped. Hunk of junk. This is the fucking Bebop. And besides, ain’t a ship out there worth less than the sum of its parts. It’s a damn ship, that’s what it’s worth. Scrap the whole thing. Fucking bull-shit.
Anyway. You think about that sometimes, is all.
*
There’s a scar on the back of your neck. When you look at it in the mirror, there’s a bump in the center, rough and jagged. Like a glass shard stuck inside.
You’ve never looked at it with your right eye. You don’t know which outcome would be worse.
*
You think you’ll see her again?
You and Jet are drunk; too drunk. Stupid drunk. Sprawled out on the kitchen floor so you can feel the cool tile against your shins drunk.
“Yeah,” you tell him.
And him too?
“Oh, yeah,” you scoff. You didn’t know it wasn’t obvious; the fact that you and Vicious circle each other like colliding planets.
You’ll tell me, right? Jet asks. You look over at him; he’s staring at the ground, tracing patterns in the grout with his finger. Before I lose you to them?
Words bubble up in your throat. You won’t lose me. You already did. You never had me. You can’t lose me, you can’t, I’ll always be here, I’m already gone--
“I’ll tell you,” you say.
*
Here’s the riddle.
What business do philosophers have wanting to know in the first place? Does it matter to the ship’s crew, whether it’s the same one?
They just want to know how she sails.