Work Text:
Mark is very gentle with her, kind, that first and only time. She wonders if he knows no other way to be. He was, of course, only born some 400 days ago—give or take a sick day, two.
Helena was born 33 years ago, and she’s been unkind for every single one of them. Hateful thing, her father used to hail her. Wretched child.
Mark calls her Helly, which no one else has called her before, because it’s not a real name. Mark wants to know if she is alright, often, until it is not a question anymore. She likes it better the second way. How it hews quite close to affirmation. She arches to Mark's alright, believes it, finds a satisfaction in it that is not unlike earning something without ever having had to try.
Even as a child she had been Helena, sometimes with the vowels given long and keen. Like she had come from lines of kings.
Mark, named for his great-grandfather the auto insurance salesman who had died on an aeroplane, looks at her with a costly mix of bleak wonder and grim devotion. He touches her with hesitation, then with an ease old instinct must remember. She’d read his file several times, blithely at first, then with renewed interest just before and after coming down here. Yesterday, even. Last night.
He squints, not quite in pain. Each iteration of him is so much a widower. How can he ever be sure who it is that he is missing?
And why should she care? She likes his nervous smile, his flinch. She likes his pale cheek. She likes that he is always looking and never finding her, a woman who could love him more.
The question of how long it takes to learn meanness is not interesting to Helena. She has lived a life founded on endogenous nature. She sleeps with her forehead turned to Mark’s inner elbow, unabashed but not unshaken. It is the terror of her. She has always gotten, more or less exactly, all that of which she feels she is deserving.
—
The worst thing had been to imagine her left hand without half of half of her fingers. Not a clean slice, but an ugly, uneven wrench above some knuckles. She’d examined herself palm to wrist in the low blue light of a fifth floor bathroom. It wasn’t that she was above a little maiming.
At fourteen, she’d wanted to see an animal sent to slaughter. Her father’s absurd refusal, baffling her. It’s just a fucking goat! It’s part of the entire thing. Aren’t I, like, supposed to be learning about our lineage, or something.
Besides, she did not mind a little blood. Wasn’t that the point? Its logic made sense to her. Blood explained a lot of things. What it meant to be duty bound. The rushing thing beneath the way she endured her father’s little lectures and petty sermons, her sharp Eagan’s chin pointed, baleful, at the floor.
Here, Helena had said to her father, I’ll prove it. One smooth motion: a fountain pen’s fine point drawn straight down into her forearm.
Malicious child, vile girl. Helena had stared hard at her own hand as though she did not possess her fingers. The fountain pen stuck clean up out of the flesh below her elbow like a claim, staked. The awful good urge to laugh. She could not feel it. It’s okay, she said. I really cannot feel it.
Malice, she’d learned early in life, had the dull blank eyes of a ram. It could not be killed. Or, at least, ridding oneself of it did not stop with the killing.
Helena had never understood this. Blood ran from her arm, triumphant, down her sleeve. She understood death in the same literal way. It was final. The end of things. There was nothing after.
Hence, said the old goat, her father, you will not be allowed to look at it, for you do not see.
Helena looked at her hand, then her whole self in the fifth floor bathroom mirror. A weekday after five. The blue light was the color of her skirt and sweater, was the color of the pooling dark outside, of black ice gathering in the parking lot under hard white lights. Accidents waiting to happen, to everyone, all of the time. She flexed her even fingers.
‘Coward bitch,’ she told the cool smirk of her reflection.
You hateful thing.
—
Helena likes to think she does not believe in half measures. A Sunday, late night. She apes the motions of preparedness in the same insolent way she had as a child, slouched now over the sheen of a monitor instead of her father’s fat books. The tap of her foot against the long cocked bone of her ankle.
The video feed is grain and texture. Sometimes she can’t see what it is that she is looking for. There are many angles, most of them bad, poor audio synching. Out of joint with time.
On a notepad she scrawls: UPGRADE CLOSED CIRCUIT SYSTEM???
In the watchable footage, Helena gets familiar with the back of her own head. She finds her eyes sliding off herself. Her round dark skull, almost hot, too slick. Like facing a mirror with only your spine. Like looking into cold water, flush with freezing.
She watches Irving often, the way he keeps her cradled in the corner of his eye.
Mark even more so. His awkward routs and easy habits. What she knows from his file translates well to the screen, except it’s more interesting now. A dollhouse. A small, good play.
On a notepad she makes two columns.
MARK SCOUT: alcoholic
MARK S: makes a lot of coffee
Helena has never made her own coffee. It looks terribly time consuming. She skims through the footage. The back of her head appears at the bottom of the screen. Sleek and shining. Mark glances up from stirring a little stick into a rounded mug. Hey you.
Helena writes: looking for her. She writes: all the time.
Across her notepad, irrespective of architecture. Outside a new work day dawns.
—
Later, from the pond, there will be audio but no images. In Helena’s mind there will be an absence like a dry socket. Cold clear water, flush with freezing. It’s okay, I really cannot feel it.
Then: choking up nothing but bile onto glib linoleum floors. Mouth like burnished tin. Throat raw from long ago crying. Dressed warm and dry and all in blue again. Coward bitch. Goddamn it. Turn it off!
You hateful thing.
She is officially fired on a Thursday. Natalie grins broadly across a lacquered table.
‘Your executive office and title, are , of course, yours by blood-right and therefore non-negotiable,’ she says. ‘But on the severed floor - ‘
Helena holds up a hand. ‘Tell the Board I understand perfectly.’
Natalie puts a finger to her ear. She nods eagerly. ‘Yes,’ she agrees, parroting, ‘but you do not see.’
Helena thinks she does not believe in half measures. Friday comes in its usual sour color. Approaching the elevator, she thinks of this again as going all the way. Severance creates abundance, she’d once told a blinking blond TV news anchor. It’s not about dividing something in two; it’s about creating a unity that cannot be divided.
Her security clearance has been altered in accordance with her new position. But last night she’d managed to flummox a night guard into letting her access the Woe’s Hollow tapes. It had been like that her whole life: her name, her flat look, the word ‘probity.’ And she was in. Doors too eager to open themselves for her.
Everything muffled by the deep lining of jackets. Helena itches to write NEW FUCKING AUDIO EQUIP??? on a notepad only she didn’t bring anything to write with. She sits with her legs up in the big sec-comms chair, elbows around her knees, the scar from her fountain pen a pale dimple. She thumbs the tape deck.
Commotion and shouting, Mark’s startled cry. Her own voice, before the water, protesting. This she zips through, a whirring. Later still, Helena will be able to remember all that she had said.
The waver of bad tape and cold shock, prelingusitic. An abrupt clarity: ‘ —y fault, irving, no, it is, i i - i’m a bad person, i’m a - rea - i’m a real - piece of sh - it up there , mark,’
Spine in the mirror, featureless and blind. The hot slick horror of her own voice on tape, speaking from the place absent of sensation.
Then Mark’s voice, familiar, out of breath. Not hard to listen to, but hard to hear. As though quite close to her, as though very far away.
Helena inclines herself toward the speaker.
‘no, you didn’t do anything wrong, - ‘re not a bad person.’
Helena listens closely.
‘—ou’re alright? you’re alright, helly.’
Helena kills the tape.
—
Friday evening, she watches the parking lot from the fifth floor. It is already well after dark, though it is hardly after five. Winter has been long for years, and some years even longer. From this height, at this time, the asphalt is marred with grey snow like the grain of bad video.
At five-seventeen, Mark leaves the building. She waits for him to look back. She thinks that he will. His winter coat hunches him, a wounded beast.
He turns his head. In the crouch of the office building, Helena steps to the glass. But his face is so far away, so small and dollish. He looks blank, scrubbed clean. He turns back toward his cheap car. Helena waits for its headlights to swing into the nothing beyond the lot, toward an empty gap behind a cage of trees. From below, the dumpy little waterfall at the park really had looked bigger. Above it, wide and brutal, sky.
Helena waits a little longer, and longer still. Dylan leaves, then Seth. Irving already so long gone.
It takes her much too much time to realize. What she's waiting for, her. The back of her own head, ducking out into the slick black lot below. Helena shakes herself, pinches hard the skin of her forearm. Idiot girl. Hateful thing. Who the fuck did she think was going to walk out of here without her?
She puts on her coat and smooths her deep blue skirt. She takes the elevator down four floors. The guard at the door holds it open for her.
‘Quitting time, Ms. Eagan?’
Helena says, ‘Never.’
The air outside is an open palm, a cruel slap. The guard regards her warily.
Helena relaxes her jaw. She says, ‘For now, yes.’ She says, 'Thank you.'
In the dark lot above the bright office where she spends long blank days, Helena treads carefully. She can’t afford any more mistakes. She looks down to avoid them, though she can't ignore the urge to step wrong, and hard, and to feel it. A hollow pocket of bad ice, an accident, a thing you never can earn twice. She goes home indivisible, alone.
.