Work Text:
“Gloria, the mailbox,” Barbie says, her voice breathless, her eyes red-rimmed. “The mailbox is still there, right? He can still send his letter, right? He’s been working really hard on it.”
And…
Okay, look.
Gloria knows what it’s like to not be able to say goodbye. She’s not sure if there are many humans who don’t, but whether it’s a semi-universal experience or not, she’s seen how it breaks people’s hearts in ways that aren’t quite fixable.
And Ken is crying in his room, and Barbie looks devastated in a way Gloria is sure surprises her, and Gloria says, “Yeah, it’s still there.”
Even though she shouldn’t.
Even though this is worse than the lie of omission she’s been telling for days.
But is it really the right time to break the news?
It’s never going to be the right time. There’s no good moment to tell a heartbreaking truth.
Barbie gives her a quick hug and then runs to her room with the scrap of comfort Gloria’s given her.
Gloria knows she fucked up.
But she doesn’t know what to say.
+++
The day after Ken’s hospital visit, Barbie takes him to Beach because Ken—Human Ken—has to start leaving the house at some point, and if he keeps putting it off, she’ll talk herself into thinking it’s for the best that he just stay stuck inside for the rest of his life, and that makes her uncomfortable.
It’s hot out, though, and Barbie works noon to six, so it’s eight in the evening by the time they actually leave the house.
Barbie can drive now, so she does, using Gloria’s car. Lately, her savings are all being funneled to getting her own car, with getting her own place fully secondary at this point, but she hasn’t found anything yet. It doesn’t help that she’s not an experienced driver.
She politely pretends she doesn’t see Gloria crossing herself every time Barbie uses the car.
(It took her a while to figure out what the gesture even meant.)
She’s extra careful, though.
Barbie hates being bad at things, so when she’s in danger of below-averageness, she puts all of herself into learning.
In other words: experienced or not, she’s a certified good driver now.
Ken stares out the window with fascination as Barbie drives, occasionally sneaking sideways looks at him even though she should be keeping her eyes on the road at all times.
Ken doesn’t cross himself when he’s in the passenger seat and Barbie’s at the wheel, and it’s not only because he has no idea what the motion means.
It’s because he has no concept of worrying if it’s Barbie behind the wheel. His trust in her abilities is as overarching and unconditional as her knee-jerk dismissal of his.
He’s always been like that, barring those feverish, surreal days of patriarchy.
He gets squirmy and anxious, drumming his fingers against the car seat as they get closer to Beach, but once they’ve exited the car, Barbie sees how his shoulders relax, how he breathes more easily, like his lungs have opened to the ocean air.
Beach may not be all that he is, and it may be different here in ways he seemed to try to reject before, but Beach was still woven into his creation, just like being everything was woven into Barbie’s, and that’s not something they can forget.
(And yes, Barbie knows she’s supposed to call it “the beach,” not “Beach,” but she slips up a lot.
For some reason, she lets herself.)
Venice Beach is bathed in moonlight, and Barbie likes the way the ocean water smells, the way the air feels different in her lungs from how it feels in other parts of the city. There’s so many different things here, in the Real World, just starting from the fact that not every day is the best day ever.
That’s still exciting, even if having bad days is objectively pretty horrible.
Ken’s shoulder brushes against hers, and Barbie clenches her fist to keep from taking Ken’s hand as they make their way to the sand. She doesn’t want him to get the wrong idea.
(They woke up in the same bed, and it’s been a while since Ken’s had the wrong idea.
So maybe Barbie’s just afraid.
It’s not Ken she’s afraid of, but it is something inside of him, as if his pain will rub off on her when she touches him, like color transfer from a bright pink handbag to a white dress.)
To distract herself from thoughts she’s not having yet and doesn’t want to have ever, she points at a nondescript area of Beach that she recognizes, instinctively, as being near where she always appeared after rollerblading out of the portal.
“Before the Interdimensional Mailbox appeared at Mattel, I used to send letters through here. I mean, I’d bury them here, near the portal, and they’d get to wherever they needed to go. The Interdimensional Mailbox is easier, though.”
Ken stares at the space Barbie’s pointing at with wide-eyed interest, drifting closer to it, fiddling with the bandage around his arm.
Barbie pokes his shoulder gently. “Stop touching that,” she says. “You don’t want it to come undone or it’ll take even longer for them to take the stitches out.” She’s not sure if that’s true, but it seems pretty reasonable.
Quickly, Ken puts his hands into the pockets of his khaki shorts.
He doesn’t respond to her other than that, just keeps walking forward, brow furrowing. For once Barbie follows him, because she thinks she feels what he feels, some vague sense that something isn’t the same.
They stop in the middle of the boardwalk.
It’s eighty degrees out at least.
Barbie feels cold.
Ken says, “Barbie, can we go to the car to get our rollerblades?”
Barbie says, “You feel it too, right?”
“Our rollerblades,” Ken insists, his voice strained.
Ken hasn’t been back to Barbie Land since becoming human. He’s planning to write them first to tell them what happened, especially since everyone’s a little concerned about how his new body might react to Barbie Land, though it probably can’t react worse than his old one.
But Barbie visited Barbie Land exactly once after becoming a human, insistent on tying up some odds and ends with a perfect little bow, and she was sick for three days after she returned, her body rejecting the homeland she’d left behind.
(It’s funny, because Gloria and Sasha were fine after their trip to Barbie Land.
It’s one of those things that doesn’t make sense, Barbie guesses.
Reality has a lot of those.)
“Barbie!” Ken says, bouncing on the heels of his feet, badly-contained anxiety crackling in his body like electricity. “We need to get the rollerblades!”
Under any other circumstances, Barbie would talk Ken out of this.
You want to write the letter first, remember? she’d say, and Ken would say oh, you’re right, and maybe he’d sulk but that would be that.
But under these circumstances, Barbie says, “Yeah, let’s get the rollerblades.”
Because she can feel, all over her body and inside it too, that no matter how fast they skate or how hard they hope, they’ll only end up on the Venice Beach boardwalk, but she feels with just as much certainty that she has to check to make sure it’s true.
She owes Barbie Land that much.
+++
Ken throws himself out of the car the second Barbie parks it and maybe a little before, bolting inside the house while Barbie calls after him.
He rushes past Gloria and Sasha and Fred, who are watching something in the living room, and stumbles into Barbie’s room, slamming the door behind him and tossing himself onto the bed, shoving his face against the pillows before bursting into tears.
He did a pretty good job of holding all these feelings in during the car ride, mostly staring out the window and occasionally at Barbie, whose lips were pressed tight together and whose eyes were shining so bright Ken thought maybe she’d cry and then she did, two tears running down her cheeks and that was the point where he looked away because he had this churning feeling in his stomach like he wanted to yell at her for it (why are you acting sad? You don’t even care) and that felt so wrong, it made no sense, it made no sense, nothing makes any sense anymore and it hasn’t made sense in a while but it’s so much worse now, his head is so full and it hurts so bad—
Ken heaves out sobs against the pillows.
He’s discovered that it’s harder to cry now. His lungs keep getting in the way. He has to sit up, choking on his own spit and tears. He’s never felt so disgusting, but he’s thought that every day about something or other since he’s become a human, and it’s been true every time, so maybe he’s just disgusting.
His knees sting and so do the palms of his hands.
It’s because he hoped that skating faster and faster would somehow pull him back in time, would fix the fundamental not thereness of the portal.
But all he did was fall, and Barbie screamed and then she wouldn’t let him skate anymore. He didn’t fight her on it. The hope was already gone.
(He used to have nothing but hope. It feels strange to have nothing but reality now.)
It’s weird now, falling. It splits open his skin and jars all the squishy things inside of him. He doesn’t fly through the air anymore, always landing on his back on the plastic ground. He falls forward here, most of the time, and doesn’t even mean to put his hands out to stop his face from hitting the ground but does it anyway without thinking.
Like a human.
Ken wants to scream, but he doesn’t. He’s pretty sure he’s not allowed. That’s not something a Ken can do.
(Though he’s not a—)
Ken tries to take in a deep breath, but he chokes on tears. He grabs a pillow and hugs it to his chest. Why does he keep crying? He’s pretty sure humans don’t actually cry this much just because they can. Especially not human men.
He doesn’t think he likes being a human man.
Ken feels like there’s something clawing him from inside his chest and his head feels spinny, like he’s been flung through the air and is flying flying flying but hasn’t fallen yet and he doesn’t know when he’s going to fall or why this is happening in the first place, everything is going too fast and it’s so confusing and he wants it all to stop, he wants to stop spinning, he needs to make it stop. He shuts his eyes tightly, tells himself, You can stop now, stop now, stop now, make it stop now, I’ll never do anything wrong again, I promise.
For a moment, everything stops. Ken slumps with relief.
The door opens. Ken wants to tell Barbie to go away, but the truth is that he’s never wanted her to go away and he doesn’t think he actually wants that now, or maybe he just isn’t sure how to not want her around.
“It’s gone!” he tells Barbie as though she doesn’t know everything better than him.
Barbie takes a shaky breath, sitting next to him on the bed. “It’s gone,” she says in a small, distant voice, as if she’s saying it to herself, but the next time she speaks it’s louder. She’s speaking to him. Human Barbie talks to him so much.
(He used to think she was what made Barbie Land the place where he was meant to be.
That wherever he was, it didn’t matter if it was with her.
He used to think that.
He kind of wishes he still did, instead of having the beautiful truth ripped away from him like this.)
“I asked Gloria,” Barbie is saying, her thumb absentmindedly rubbing his shoulder blade, “and the Interdimensional Mailbox is still at Mattel. We’ll still be able to write letters to them.”
There was literally no moment that Ken thought they wouldn’t be able to, but that’s nice.
“I’ll write them a good letter,” he whispers against the pillow.
He’s pretty sure Barbie can’t hear him, but it’s okay.
Maybe the words aren’t for her.
+++
Gloria comes into work and finds Aaron hovering nervously next to her desk.
Gloria narrows her eyes at him. “What?”
Aaron sets something down on her desk. It’s small and pink and Gloria thinks she’s seen it before, a splash of color that just kind of appeared one day in the sun-starved basement cubicles and allowed Barbie to finally stop having to bury her letters on Venice Beach under the constant threat of being accused of littering.
It was much, much bigger last time she saw it, though.
“Is that…?” Gloria starts, but the words get caught under the lump in her throat.
Aaron nods. “It was like that when I came in today. And I asked, and…it looks like the portal’s finally closed. Just…by itself, I guess.”
“Oh,” Gloria breathes out. “Oh, no.”
“At least Ken made it here,” Aaron says.
“Yeah,” Gloria whispers in response. “Thanks, Aaron.”
“Are you going to tell them?”
“What else am I supposed to do?” Gloria asks, exasperated at the dumb question. “I can’t just pretend to send letters if there’s no one to write back, and it would be…it would be wrong.”
“Yeah,” Aaron sighs. “I know. It just sucks.”
That is something Gloria can agree with.
Gloria puts the tiny toy mailbox in her pocket. It burns there all day and then all evening as she tries to find the words to tell Barbie and Ken about reality’s latest surprise.
In the end, she promises herself that she’ll tell them tomorrow, and then, late that night, Ken cuts his arm open, and the mailbox catapults to the back of Gloria’s mind.
+++
Gloria and Fred are out of the house at a doctor’s appointment (they’ll be back soon, they said over and over again) and Barbie’s at work.
(Ken’s main plans are to lie in bed and reboot his brain into something that’s less not okay with having lost at least three fourths of everything, so they all reluctantly decided it was fine to leave him alone for a while.)
Ken’s still lying on his bed inertly when Sasha slips into the room.
(Mostly alone.)
Ken flops onto his back to look at her better. “Hi, Sasha,” he mumbles.
“Hi, Ken,” Sasha says, settling on the edge of the bed. “Mom and Dad and Barbie said not to bother you, but they’re just grown-ups, so. I don’t give a fuck.”
Ken sits up, looking at her through swollen eyes.
“I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to say fuck,” he points out.
Sasha rolls her eyes. “Nah, it’s whatever.” She looks him over, gives him an exaggerated grimace. “Damn. You look like you’ve been put through a meat grinder.”
Ken wrinkles his nose. “What’s that?”
Sasha rolls her eyes again. She’s always doing that, but Ken gets it. He really likes rolling his eyes too, even though he’s not supposed to. “It’s like, you put meat in it, and you turn a handle? And the meat comes out in strips. Or something. I’ve only seen it in movies. I don’t even know why I said that, my dad always says it. Gross. It just means you look like shit. You know what that means, right?”
“I think so,” Ken says miserably. “I…I feel like a meat grinder. Is that a thing people say?”
“No,” Sasha deadpans.
Ken huffs unhappily. “I feel like shit,” he attempts.
Sasha’s eyes light up. “People do say that!”
Ken can’t help but feel a little spark of pride. “Yeah?”
“Yeah!” Sasha confirms, smiling, but the smile fades as Ken’s does. She swallows, looking down, picking at the comforter. “I’m sorry about Barbie Land. I mean, I kind of think it sounds like it sucks but…clearly you’re not cool with this, so. I’m sorry.”
Ken isn’t sure how to respond to that. “You didn’t do anything.”
“Duh. But I’m still sorry, because you’re, like. Sad.”
“Oh. Thanks, I guess.”
He is sad, but he’s glad he’s not crying anymore. He doesn’t like crying in front of Sasha. He’s not sure why, but it seems especially unfair to her when he made her cry so recently, and she’s so young.
Ken was never a child, though he’s always known what children are, obviously—they’re what built Barbie Land, in a way—but Sasha’s a little harder to understand, because she’s older than the kind of child Ken is fundamentally familiar with and she doesn’t even like dolls, or that’s what Barbie told him when she was trying to explain why Sasha might be mean to him.
But Sasha was only mean to him for like five minutes, and he definitely deserved that because of patriarchy, and now she’s his friend. They play games together, which Ken appreciates, especially since he doesn’t have the other Kens to play with anymore.
(He misses them so much it hurts.
How can so many things hurt at the same time?
If he’d turned all the way to plastic, would he have just gone completely numb?
He doesn’t think that sounds awful right now when he feels this bad.)
Also, when Sasha talks to him, she usually doesn’t say “never mind” or “don’t worry about it” or “it’s not important” when Ken asks questions, and Ken appreciates that too.
“I don’t like how all my feelings squish together and get confusing to make big feelings,” he admits. “Before, my big feelings were like…one thing at a time. Now they’re all mixed up, and I have so many more of them because there’s so much happening.”
Sasha nods. “Yeah. It’s the worst.” There’s a momentary awkward silence, and then she asks, “You wanna play Animal Crossing about it?”
Ken pauses for a bit to incorporate the sudden change in topic into his day, and then he shrugs. “Sure. But then I have to work on my letter.”
“Your letter?”
“To tell everyone back in Barbie Land what’s going on,” Ken explains, digging out his Switch.
Sasha brought hers with her. She powers it on. “Right. Don’t they already know?”
Ken shakes his head. Then he hesitates and shrugs instead. “I don’t know. That’s why I have to write the letter. And if I can’t say goodbye to Barbie Land in person, at least a letter will…” He pauses. “I don’t know. A letter will be something.“
“I guess,” Sasha says. “I mean, why the fuck not?”
Ken turns on his Switch. “I really don’t think you’re supposed to say fuck.”
“Shut up,” Sasha says, rolling her eyes, but she’s smiling.
It's nice to make someone smile.
+++
Ken gives Gloria a letter. She holds it in her hands like it’s delicate, like it’s made of crystal, looks down at the envelope where it says, in Ken’s careful looping penmanship, TO BARBIELAND. Next to the word, there’s a smiley face, and then a heart, with several hesitation lines around them like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go with the smiley or the heart until he just chose both.
The tenderness Gloria feels is unbearable.
Her mind churns through scenarios, ridiculous possibilities—take the letter to Mattel and put it in her desk drawer and tell Ken she sent it, maybe, or pretend it got lost in the mail forever, or—
Yeah, no.
That’s completely untenable, not to mention cruel when she’s already withholding reality because she’s scared, because she doesn’t want to hurt these people who’ve become members of her family, because…
Because she never wants to believe the world can be this unkind, even when it’s been proven time and time again that the great unfairness of life is part of being human, and she can’t protect Barbie and Ken from humanity. She can’t hide them away from reality any more than she could hide her own daughter, not that Sasha ever let herself be hidden.
Gloria takes a deep breath. She holds the letter to her chest, presses it to the love there as though it’ll give her strength, and maybe it does.
“Hey, Ken?” she asks. “Can you get Barbie? There’s something I need to tell you.”
+++
It’s probably past midnight. Barbie and Ken should be asleep.
They’re not. Of course they’re not. They’re still trying to wrap their minds around their new reality.
Their new new reality.
Barbie feels like her insides have been scooped out and replaced with fragile things. She has to move slowly, breathe carefully, to keep from jarring them, because they’ll grow stronger but they haven’t yet.
It’s the feeling of trying to get used to something, she thinks.
“I can’t believe you don’t miss it,” Ken says, voice sullen and hoarse, from where he’s sitting next to her on the bed.
It’s funny.
Before the Real World, Barbie didn’t really miss things, because she had everything she could ever want.
It was only when humanity started to seep into her like water through a towel—though she had no real concept of such a thing at the time—that she began to miss things, even things she’d never had.
Or maybe that was just her feeling, for the first time, that she was missing out. Before, she always did exactly what she wanted, and she was always happy with her decisions because she didn’t know any better.
But then she realized she was missing out on the laughter, the tears, the intensity, the complexity of the human world that terrified her, intrigued her, called to her and called to her until she couldn’t help but answer.
She’s glad she did, and she doesn’t regret it, but…
“I do miss it,” she says, because the place where she first existed is lost to her now, all the way lost, and it’s pulling her heartstrings so hard she can feel them snapping.
Her words seem to yank Ken out of the growing resentment that makes Barbie feel like she’s being cut open, if only so he can tilt his head at her like a curious seagull. “Really? But I thought you liked it here.”
She does. She likes it so much. But she can like it here and miss being there at the same time. She can want to stay in the Real World and be sad that she’ll never go back to Barbie Land.
So many things can be true, all at the same time.
“Yeah, I like it here, Ken, but sometimes I…I miss never being too hot or too cold. I miss the starlight. I miss the bright colors everywhere. I miss floating. I miss not worrying.” I miss not feeling bad about anything or for anything. I miss thinking I didn’t love you because the love I feel for you is too complicated for a doll to comprehend. I miss taking everything for granted. I miss being perfect. I miss girls’ night. “I miss the other Barbies and Kens and all the fun we used to have together.” She grasps the memories, cradles them like a baby. “I miss a lot of things.”
“Oh,” Ken says after a beat. “I miss all that stuff too.”
Barbie reaches out.
She takes Ken’s hand.
He flinches, and she almost pulls away, but then he holds on tighter. He must’ve just been surprised.
She usually only holds his hand when he’s hurt.
“I really wanted to send that letter,” Ken whispers.
Barbie nods. Her face is raw with all the crying she’s done today, but she can’t cry anymore. She wasn’t aware she could run out of tears like this.
There’s still so much she has yet to discover.
(And isn’t that marvelous?)
“Yeah,” she says. “I know.”
“My throat hurts,” Ken informs her.
“I know,” she says again.
Apparently done telling her things she knows, Ken lies down on the bed, on his side.
She takes the invitation, crawls under the covers next to where he’s lying on top of them.
Last time they slept in the same bed, just a couple of nights ago, they didn’t touch.
This time, Barbie gets close enough to press her forehead against Ken’s, their hands still intertwined between them on the sheets.
Usually, Ken would tense, vibrate with excitement at the contact, but now he seems so tired that all he does is hold her hand tighter.
This is what’s left of what used to be.
This is it.
+++
Barbie and Ken are sitting across from Gloria at the dining room table.
Carefully, she sets down the letter in the middle of the expanse of wood between them.
(When Gloria was little, her dad would take her band-aids off like uno, dos and then he’d tear it off before tres and Gloria would shriek in delighted betrayal because she understood that her father was just trying to make the pain more bearable and she loved him for it.
By the time her father died, Gloria’s parents had moved back to Honduras.
Gloria got the first flight out when her sister told her he was fading, scrambling to find coverage but willing to lose her job if she didn’t, tears pouring down her cheeks as she shoved some mismatched clothes into a suitcase and told Fred, “I don’t know when this happened, two days ago I talked to him and he wasn’t even sick.”
When her plane landed, he was already gone.
That was ten years ago.
She still dreams about the alternate universe where she held his hand and kissed his forehead and said te quiero and goodbye.)
Barbie and Ken watch her curiously.
Uno, dos…
“The mailbox is gone,” Gloria says. She doesn’t mean to make her voice so gentle, like she’s talking to frightened children instead of adults.
“Gone?” Barbie parrots. There’s a waver to her voice that tugs on Gloria’s heartstrings.
(At first, Barbie didn’t realize that that was a figure of speech, went to Gloria with an anatomy book and pointed to the picture of a heart and asked where the strings were.
Once Gloria explained, Barbie seemed to grasp it pretty quickly.
“I think I understand where it comes from,” she said. “The metaphor.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Because I feel it sometimes. Like my heart is a guitar, and every time someone plucks at it, it sends this…vibration through me, and it feels like…” Barbie frowned, here. “Like saying goodbye.”)
Gloria nods. “Yeah. Gone.” She takes a deep breath, and (uno, dos) she finally explains it all. “A couple of days before you two realized the portal was gone, I went to Mattel and the mailbox was…” Gloria swallows. She digs into her pocket and sets the mailbox on the table. The tiny plastic toy clinks against the wood. “It was like this.”
“A couple of days before?” Barbie says, looking at Gloria with eyes glossed over with tears and a hint of betrayal.
“Yeah,” Gloria chokes out, because she always tries to do the right thing as though her daughter is watching her even when she’s not.
She’s still not strong enough to keep herself from making excuses. She can’t stand the idea of them hating her even though she’s not sure they’re even capable of it. “It’s just that—I didn’t know what to say and then…that night, you know…” Gloria inclines her head significantly in Ken’s direction. You’re throwing him under the bus, she points out to herself, and she hates herself for that but doesn’t take it back.
Ken’s looking down at the dining table as though he can see himself reflected in the dark wood he’s been cleaning all day.
(He cleans a lot. Gloria thinks fingerprints bother him.)
“And then,” Gloria continues, “you were both so…so attached to the idea of writing letters, of him writing a letter.”
“To explain,” Ken cuts in softly. “And say an in-person goodbye even if, if I had to do it out-of-person. I just wanted to explain it’s not that I’m not coming back because I don’t love them, and it’s a really nice letter and I worked really hard on it and then there would’ve been more letters, but I can’t even send one?! That’s not fair!”
His voice rises in volume with each sentence. Gloria suspects that if he were standing up he’d be stomping his foot.
As it is, he moves to slam his hands on the table. Both Gloria and Barbie flinch, and Ken hesitates before gently lowering his hands, spreading them out on the table instead and staring at them.
The bandage around his arm is clearly visible; Ken exclusively wears short sleeves.
Gloria feels her stomach lurch when she sees his hands, cuticles and nails picked at and chewed on, every imperfection worried at until they’re impossible to ignore.
Barbie has the same problem, but a spinning ring and a flawless manicure every time she gets her hair touched up have mostly taken care of it.
Ken swallows. He makes a face like he’s tasted something unpleasant even though he brushes his teeth all the time.
Barbie puts a shaking hand on his back. Her eyes are unfocused with the effort of adjusting her worldview.
Gloria says, “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I’m so sorry. I just didn’t know what to say. I still don’t know what to say, but I had to say something.”
Ken crosses his arms on the table. He rests his forehead on them, and he doesn’t move.
Barbie keeps her hand on his back. Her eyes are shining impossibly blue. She looks at Gloria and says, “So…I can’t send letters either?”
Gloria furrows her brow. Of course not, she almost says. I just said you couldn’t.
But she imagines that, for the moment, Barbie isn’t sure she wants to believe this truth, and needs confirmation that she has to.
Gloria shakes her head.
Uno.
Dos.
“No, honey. No more letters.”
Barbie swallows. “Oh.” She’s silent for a long moment, and then: “I wish I’d known. Last time I sent a letter, I wish I’d known I wouldn’t be able to…” Briefly, she lifts a hand to cover her face and shudders against it, but then she puts her hand down and gives Gloria half a brave smile.
You don’t have to smile through it all, she wants to say, but Barbie knows that by now, at least in her head, and she still does it, and honestly, if she started actually crying Gloria would probably start crying too, and then Barbie, endlessly curious as she is, would probably ask why she was crying and she’d have to explain how it’s normal to suffer when the people you care about suffer, how there’s nothing wrong with that, and she’s done with big conversations for the day, she can’t take—
“I feel spinny,” Ken says from where he’s still got his face down. His voice is surprisingly clear for someone Gloria thought was crying.
“Spinny?” Gloria asks. “Do you mean dizzy?”
“No, I mean spinny,” Ken mumbles. “The world is going too much.”
Distantly, Barbie murmurs, “Yeah. He’s dizzy.”
Gloria nods. “I’ll get him some water. I’ll get you some water too.”
(Humans don’t even drink enough water; dolls-turned-human never stood a chance.)
She stands and goes to the kitchen, filling two glasses of water. She hands one to Barbie, whose smile has slipped, and sets the other one in front of Ken.
She lays a careful hand on Ken’s shoulder, but he shrugs her off. “Drink some water,” she says. “You’ll feel better.”
Ken lets out a quiet sound of frustration, but he automatically unfolds, grabbing the water in a stiff motion and lifting it to his face.
He’s basically a pro at drinking liquids by now, but everyone slips up sometimes, and since now would be the worst possible time to slip up, he does. He tilts his head up and tilts the water down without putting it to his lips.
The water, obviously, ends up all over his face and his shirt. He drops the glass, sputtering. Gloria, with instincts honed from years of motherhood, grabs the cup before it can tumble to the floor, setting it back on the table.
Barbie was staring into space before, but she’s been shocked back into the land of the living.
“Ken!” she says, exasperated. “Drink like a—” Then she blinks, seeming to fully integrate the situation back into her present, and guilt floods her expression as she swallows down whatever she was going to say.
“Sorry,” Ken says miserably.
“No, it’s okay,” Gloria interjects, but it’s too late.
“Nothing works here,” Ken says. “I don’t work here.”
He pushes his chair away from the table and turns to the side as if he’s going to stand, but he puts his face in his hands.
Gloria braces herself for him to finally start crying, but he doesn’t.
Instead, he lets his hands travel down so that they’re covering his mouth, closes his eyes tightly, and screams, muffled but raw, into his palms, hunching forward with the intensity of it.
Barbie’s eyes are wide. “What are you doing?” she tries to say, but the words come out so faint that she’s mostly mouthing them, and Ken doesn’t hear.
Barbie’s not touching him anymore. Her hand hovers over his back.
He screams again, hunching even further, his forehead brushing his knees.
A tear rolls down Barbie’s cheek. Gingerly, she sets her hand down on Ken’s back again. She bites her trembling lip, but it doesn’t do anything to stop her tears from falling faster and thicker.
Gloria knew this would be horrible, but she still aches.
Briefly, fiercely, she wishes she hadn’t said anything, but she knows that sometimes there are no choices that don’t hurt, only ones that will hurt less in the long run.
Uno.
Dos…
Ow! Papi!
Tres.
Me mentiste otra vez!
Lo siento, cielito, pero no me puedes decir que así no duele menos.
(One.
Two…
Ow! Daddy!
Three.
You lied to me again!
I’m sorry, sweetheart, but you can’t tell me it doesn’t hurt less this way.)
That’s life.
+++
The portal is closed, Weird Barbie says. (She’s owning it, got bored of Sanitation Barbie pretty early on, didn’t like that her name didn’t match her house, because in Barbie Land they like things to match.)
Allan asks how she knows; she just does.
“Can’t you feel it?” she says.
“Not really,” Allan admits. “But I believe you.” A quiet, uncomplicated sadness pulses through his body, and he points out, “But Ken’s still in the Real World.”
Weird Barbie shrugs. The movement is flippant. The downturn of her mouth isn’t. “Yeah, pal, I don’t think he’s coming back.”
Allan sighs.
He knew there was a day Ken wouldn’t come back. He even thought it would be soon. Ken was so miserable near the end, and Allan knew it was fixable, and if something is fixable in Barbie Land, it needs to be fixed.
Once Ken’s consciousness started slipping and sliding and going all kinds of directions that didn’t make sense because that’s not how dolls are supposed to think—dolls mostly think in a straight line except for when they’re remembering, and when they are remembering, those memories are both as clear as they need to be and easily set aside—Allan tried to make him believe he truly wanted the thing that would save him with all of his heart, no reservations, but Ken never quite bought it.
“I just thought maybe he’d be able to visit,” Allan explains. “I mean, humans have been to Barbie Land before. If he is human. Do you know if he’s human?”
Weird Barbie hoists herself onto one of the many rafters in her house. “Probably. But I don’t know everything. I just know the portal’s closed and…” She shrugs again. “Badda bing, badda boom, Ken’s not visiting any time soon.”
As glib as the words are, her voice when she says them is tired and strained, delicate in a way Allan appreciates, because he feels tired and strained and delicate too.
Ken’s not coming home, and Weird Barbie hasn’t mentioned the Interdimensional Mailbox and neither has Allan because he doesn’t want verbal confirmation yet that it’s gone too.
Allan’s not going to have to deal with Ken’s crying or his confusion or his laughter or his effervescent babbling or his dazzling wonderment at the very idea of independent thought or his incandescent smile anymore.
Allan’s never going to have to take care of Ken ever again.
Not that Ken, at least.
Allan would say “his Ken,” but Allan knows he doesn’t have a Ken. Beach Ken was the first Ken and also the first Ken that Allan ever met, so Allan always felt a little like he was his, but the truth is that Allan was built for Ken, in general, before he got discontinued, and he’s still got plenty of Kens to play with, especially now that they’re including him more.
So that’s good.
Later that night, after breaking the news to the other Kens, Allan lies on Beach.
He stares up at the stars and the moon, and he remembers, or maybe realizes for the first time, that he and every other denizen of Barbie Land do things beyond what they were meant to do every day; that they are things beyond what they were meant to be all the time, and something doesn’t stop being true just because it’s not supposed to be.
And he thinks:
I’m going to miss my Ken.
+++
Dear Everyone,
I’m human now. It wasn’t on purpose but it means I’m not coming back.
Did you notice the portal is closed now? I wish it wasn’t so that I could visit. But I’ll still send letters which is something and something is something even if it’s not everything or even enough.
I wish I’d been able to say bye in person but it all happened really fast.
I will miss you and Barbie Land.
I already do.
It’s always going to be my home.
Please tell me how things are on the other side.
I hope it all just gets better and better.
Love forever.
KEN
P.S. Allan—I know you helped me so much. You probably thought you had to but you didn’t. You’re the best buddy ever and I hope you like all my clothes.