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Rattle. Rattle. Taptaptap. Click. Rattle.
Myka raised her eyes from the newspaper, again, and made eye contact with Claudia, who was sitting across from her at the kitchen table. Claudia was slumped in her seat, and she had been engrossed in something on her phone until her attention was torn away from it. Again.
Rattle. Tap. Tap. Clatter.
Claudia raised one eyebrow and turned her attention back to her phone. Myka sighed, eyeing the offending teacup, which was wobbling noisily against its saucer. Though, the teacup couldn’t really be blamed for the irritating noises it was making. The table itself was shaking. But, was it the table’s fault? The table’s actions were, naturally, determined by the actions taken upon it, by outside influences, seeing as it was inanimate and did not generally tend to move on its own. Myka cleared her throat and placed her newspaper upon the table, where it began, too, to vibrate.
The only other object physically connected to the table, aside from the saucer, the newspaper, a book, and (obviously) the floor, was an elbow. The elbow, in fact, of a person who was tapping their foot restlessly; rather quickly, and with high amplitude. One could cite Occam’s Razor to infer that, in all likelihood, this was the source of the chain reaction causing the very annoying noise.
Myka coughed again. “Helena?”
Helena, the owner of the elbow in question, didn’t seem to hear her. Her eyes were glassy, and she gazed out the kitchen window into the chilly early February morning. There wasn’t much out there to be looked at (the skies were clear, and the only thing betraying the harsh cold that awaited them outside was the slight howling of the winds as they whirled around the B&B), but that wouldn’t matter to Helena, because she was obviously not looking, but rather seeing… if even that. Myka imagined that it would have made hardly any difference to Helena if she had been wearing a blindfold.
She leaned forward and repeated, “Helena,” tucking a lock of hair behind Helena’s ear. Helena startled and tore her eyes from the window. The teacup, for the moment, was silenced.
“Hmm?” Helena hummed, an air of confusion about her. She was making eye contact with Myka, but it appeared as though her eyes had only half-unglazed, and she seemed to be watching Myka with only partial recognition.
“Are you all right?”
Today was far from the first day of this, whatever this was. Myka had wondered if it was some kind of seasonal depression; something to do with the long, dark nights and brutally cold days with unpredictable weather. It was, after all, Helena’s first “normal” winter living full-time at the B&B. But, if Myka had to try to pinpoint the start of it, it wouldn’t be at the beginning of winter; it probably would be about two to three weeks ago… the beginning of January? The middle of January? And it wasn’t that Helena seemed bored, anhedonic, or sad; she just always seemed distracted. Always in her head; never present. When asked, she always gave the same not-so-useful answer.
“I’m quite all right, just thinking.” She smiled and covered Myka’s hand with her own, then picked her book up from the table and began to read.
Myka hummed her satisfaction and sank back into her chair. Claudia sat up and crossed her legs, biting her nails as her eyes scanned whatever was on her phone. Myka savored the whistling of the wind outside, cozy and comfortable inside the heated house, and returned to her newspaper.
Taptap. Rattle. Click. Rattle.
Myka’s eyes rose from her newspaper, and her gaze was once again locked with Claudia’s, whose eyes reflected the same exasperation as was no doubt in her own.
One of the perpetual “extra” bedrooms in the B&B had been unofficially converted into Helena’s personal workspace in the last few months. The others had taken to calling it “H.G.’s Arts and Crafts Room”, a name which Helena could only poorly pretend not to be annoyed by. There really had been no reason for Helena to claim such a space: her own assigned room now went completely unused, since she slept in Myka’s bed every night. This was no secret, and couldn’t be a secret, really, living in such close, cramped conditions with at least three other agents. But Myka was glad to see Helena settling in, so she wasn’t going to be the one to bring this up.
On this particular day, when Myka poked her head into H.G.’s Arts and Crafts Room, the room’s namesake herself was hunched over her desk. Myka couldn’t see what she was working on, but she could hear the faint sound of trickling water.
Helena heard the door creaking open wider and looked up, giving Myka a genuine, if slightly tight, smile.
“A fountain.” Myka said, view now unobstructed. “It looks nice!”
“I wanted some more interesting decorations, and I thought it would be fun to build.”
“You thought?”
“Well, it’s not working.”
Small streams of water dribbled down smooth black stone. “It’s not?”
“No,” Helena sighed. At Myka’s expression, she added, “The water pressure is too low compared to what it should be. And I have no idea why.” She huffed and pushed aside her scratch papers as if it was their fault that the mathematics scrawled upon them was incorrect. Myka would not have been totally surprised if that was, truly, how she felt.
“That sounds frustrating.” Myka crossed the room to wrap her arms around Helena, who finally gave her a full, happy smile.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Myka replied. “The others are thinking of going into Univille to go eat at the Italian place. Would you like to come?”
Helena gave the fountain a pained look, seemed to consider for a moment, then sighed and flipped a switch on the side. “That sounds like a good idea,” she said.
Myka took her hand as she stood from her chair, then changed her mind and wrapped her arm around Helena’s waist, pulling her close as they left the fountain behind to fend for itself.
Myka was tucked into bed, curled up with a new fantasy novel her father had recommended and a cup of Helena’s special, expensive tea. She was the only one who was allowed to have Helena’s special, expensive tea, which made it taste even better.
It was hard to tell what time of evening it was, these days, because darkness fell so early. It was improving, but it was pitch black outside before 4:30pm every day, and Myka was beginning to yearn for the infinite daylight hours she recalled having during summer. Despite the early dark, she knew it was quite late in the evening when her reading was interrupted by a loud clattering from next door.
“Hmph.” Myka put her tea down on the nightstand, marked her place in her book, and crawled out of bed. When she arrived outside H.G.’s Arts and Crafts Room, the door was shut.
She knocked gently. “Helena?”
A pause. A… muffled sigh, perhaps?
“Come in. It’s not locked.”
When Myka opened the door, she was met with what her mother would have called “quite a scene”. Bits and pieces of laser-cut plywood were strewn across the floor in all directions. With Helena in the direct center, it gave an almost cartoonish effect, as if a 3D puzzle project purchased from Michaels had exploded outward from her.
“Was it something you said to them?” Myka asked, bending to pick up a small plywood gear at her feet and examining it.
Helena scoffed. Apparently, it was not time for jokes.
“Nothing is fitting together. Or, some of it is. Most of it, I suppose.”
“But some of it isn’t?”
“Some of it isn’t!” Helena said forcefully. “The moving parts, mostly. The fun parts.”
Myka held back her smirk, trying to avoid trivializing Helena’s clear frustration. “The fun parts?” She asked.
“The gears won’t fit together the way they should.”
“So cut new ones. We’re not exactly in a plywood deficit.”
Helena gave her a look that said, clearly, do you think I’m daft? “I did. What do you think all this is?”
Looking about the room, Myka conceded that this was far more wooden gears than could ever conceivably go into a small puzzle project.
“Do you know what time it is?” Myka asked, changing gears (so to speak).
“No,” Helena said, shortly. She picked up something that looked vaguely clock-like, also entirely made from plywood, with the exception of what appeared to be a small motor on the inside. Myka supposed that if Helena’s project had been going well, Helena might have some idea of the time, and she regretted her choice of words.
“What I mean is,” she said, “that it’s probably bedtime.”
Helena set the clock down and rubbed her eyes, and when her hands came away from her face, Myka noticed the dark circles there. “You’re right. Let me just clean up a bit.”
“You can clean up tomorrow.” Myka dropped her gear and held her hand out to Helena, who gave her a small smile and accepted, pulling herself to a standing position. For all her complexities, the map to Helena was fairly simple to Myka, and she knew that after a few minutes of hugging her and stroking her glossy hair, she’d be fast asleep, all thoughts of gears and fountains banished from her mind.
The end of February was fast approaching, and though Myka was looking forward to the warmth of spring, she knew she had to savor the waning coziness of a cold winter spent indoors. Under a blanket, and with a hot beverage, of course: as she was now, resting back against the cushioned arm of the couch, tucking her feet under Helena’s thigh to keep her toes warm.
The B&B was empty, save for the two of them. Last time this had happened, Myka had enticed Helena (though, did she really need to be enticed?) into some fun activities that could not be done, at least without embarrassment, when the other occupants of the B&B were home. This time, however, Myka was coming off of the worst cold she’d had in a long time. Her head felt like an overfilled helium balloon, and her voice was so rough it was nearly unintelligible. Ostensibly, she was enjoying a thick Stephen King novel about the Kennedy assassination, but really, she had her cell phone out and was screwing around on the internet, because the discomfort made it difficult to focus.
She fidgeted with her mug and looked up at Helena. She was drawing something on some graph paper, with a clipboard. Myka couldn’t make out what it was, but she could tell that Helena was drawing and measuring with extreme care, chewing her lower lip as she focused intently on the pen in her hand.
Then, suddenly, she grunted and scribbled out the work she’d just oh-so-carefully finished, pulling the sheet of paper out from the clipboard’s clip and setting it aside. It was then that Myka first noticed that that discarded sheet of paper was just the top of a small (but growing) stack of other discarded sheets of paper, all scribbled on, and some even torn slightly.
And it was then that she noticed, upon examining Helena further, that there was liquid pooling in her eyes.
“Whoa, hey,” Myka said, voice too-rumbly and too-quiet, but it was the best she could muster. She put her book and her phone aside and crawled over to Helena’s side of the couch, drawing her into a tight embrace.
“I’m fine.” Helena blinked away her tears. “Really, there’s nothing terribly wrong. I’m just… so frustrated. Sofrustrated.” She sniffled, and Myka pulled the clipboard out of her hands so that she could hug her closer. She rubbed a hand soothingly up and down her back.
“Frustrated about the design?” Myka asked, nodding toward the stack of ruined papers.
“That, and everything else.” Helena pursed her lips, and a tear broke loose from her lower lashes and fell to her cheek. Myka wasn’t sure if it was unkind of her to notice how pretty Helena was through her tears, cheeks slightly flushed and eyes shining, lips swollen from having been bitten.
“Everything else?” Myka prompted.
Helena shook her head, covering her face with her hands. “The clock,” she said, voice muffled. “The bicycle. The robotic arm. The water wheel. The hydroponic garden. The fountain.” She swallowed and pulled her hands away to, finally, look at Myka. “It’s been over a month now, almost two; all of my projects are just… not quite working. I feel like I’m going mad.”
“Ugh,” Myka said, squeezing her more tightly. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t noticed. It had been a while since Helena had come to find her, excitedly, to show her the result of her latest endeavor. For weeks upon weeks, it had been one problem after another with Helena’s personal projects, and Myka supposed that she should have put two and two together to see that this was, indeed, why Helena had been so distracted recently.
“I’m sorry,” Helena said, wiping her cheek. “It’s embarrassing. It doesn’t really matter.”
“It does matter,” Myka reassured her. “These are the things that normally make you happy, and now they’re just frustrating you. I’d have jumped off the nearest cliff already if I were you.”
Helena chuckled wetly. “Well. I’m not really sure what to do about it.”
This was something that Myka well and truly did not know how to help her with. “Maybe,” she began, gently, “it would be a good idea to take a little break? Maybe for a couple weeks, you spend your free time reading, or writing, or… I don’t know, you could knit something?”
Helena snorted. “The yarn would develop sentience and strangle me.” She chastened. “You’re probably right, though.”
“It happens sometimes.” Myka leaned back, this time pulling Helena with her, until they lay in a warm tangle of arms and legs, sinking into the deep cushions. That is, until Myka was wracked with a series of deep, painful, hacking coughs, and Helena withdrew worriedly.
“That cold is really hanging onto you.”
“Do you think,” Myka began roughly, “that if you were to microwave some canned soup for me, the microwave would explode?” She braced herself for impact.
March brought with it some milder winds and comforting sunshine. Myka was able to wear a regular coat, rather than her thick winter one, as they piled into the car to drive over to the Warehouse.
“Ready for yet another beautiful day in paradise?” Pete asked no one in particular as he started up the car.
“Woohoo,” Claudia said from the passenger seat, deadpan, as she buckled her seatbelt. “I love working.”
“Love the positive attitude, kid.” Pete backed away from the B&B, then turned the wheel as far as he could with one hand and began down the road.
“Well,” Helena said, checking the time on her phone, “happy pi day, at least.”
“I didn’t even know there was a pie day. I love pie.”
“No, the number pi. Although, we should celebrate with dessert pie.”
Myka blinked. Cocked her head. Blinked again.
“Uh,” she said, “It’s not pi day.”
“Yes, it is.” Helena showed Myka her phone. “March second.”
“I don’t know what kind of rounding you like to do, but we say pi day is March fourteenth.”
“Why on Earth would it be on March fourteenth?”
“Um,” Myka said. “Because pi is approximately 3.14?”
“Pi isn’t approximately anything,” Helena scoffed. “Pi is precisely 3.2.”
The woman next to Myka in the car was suddenly an alien to her. “No… it’s not. It’s the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.”
“Yes. Which is 3.2.”
“No, it’s not 3.2. Pi is irrational. You can’t represent it as a fraction. The decimal never ends.”
“Myka, I think you’ve gone quite mad.”
“Not to take sides, here,” Claudia chimed in, “but pi is most definitely not 3.2.”
Helena was quiet. “I don’t understand,” she said, finally.
Myka was beginning to understand. She was beginning to understand the wooden clock and the bicycle, with its circular gears that wouldn’t fit together, and the fountain, whose circular pipes may have been too wide, and the bridge design whose arched supports didn’t match up properly, and the water wheel that couldn’t turn efficiently, and…
“When was the first time you got frustrated because one of your projects wasn’t working?” Myka asked.
Helena sat back, and Myka watched as the understanding slowly poured in behind her eyes. “It was the ninth. Of January.”
“Do you remember what you were doing in the Warehouse that day?”
Edward J. Goodwin’s compass was an unassuming-looking tool. Though, of course, the vast majority of artifacts looked unassuming. But as the five of them, Artie, Pete, Claudia, Helena, and Myka, stood over the desk staring at it, Myka found it unnerving that so many of Helena’s projects had been ruined by such an ostensibly innocuous little thing.
Nearly two months. Helena had been sad, frustrated, distracted, and angry; she was losing her sense of self, in some ways, and it all came down to this little compass. The idea that an artifact could insidiously slither its way into their lives like that was almost more frightening to Myka than something “bigger”, like the Minoan trident or the astrolabe.
“All this, because some dumbass doctor thought he was better at math than actual mathematicians?” Pete said, voicing Myka’s thoughts, in so many words.
“Yes,” said Artie. “Goodwin actually got this bill introduced to the House in the state of Indiana, and the only reason it didn’t pass is because a professor from Purdue happened to be there the day it went up for a vote. At least somebody realized that teaching children that pi is 3.2 was a bad idea.”
Myka found that she couldn’t stop shaking her head. “It’s unbelievable.”
Artie grunted his agreement and carefully picked up the still-sparking compass with thick purple gloves. “I’m going to go return this to where it came from.”
“Back to work, I guess,” Claudia sighed.
Pete clapped Helena on the shoulder, startling her into a little yelp. “Hope this fixes ya, H.G.”
“Thank you,” Helena said weakly.
As the others strolled out of Artie’s office, Myka placed a hand on Helena’s lower back. “Relieved?”
Helena took a deep breath. “Unnerved,” she said, furrowing her brows, but then, slowly, she smiled. “And relieved, yes.”
“I want that fountain in our room. It’s pretty.” Myka pressed a kiss to Helena’s temple, then turned to follow the others into another wonderful day of work.