"I can't even feel it anymore."
Autumn had flaked and Betty needed a new coat like she needed a hole in the head. The lining in the pockets of this thrift was so torn it swallowed keys, chapstick and lighters like a black hole or a tax collector or something of this poetic redundancy. The snarled threads now caught up in the wheel of her lighter is another little punishment for having so far staved off its attempts to drag her fingers-first into its depths; her bones crunching as they are sucked with careless brutality through a mouth the size of a camera lens. It didn't help that they'd narrowly missed the bus home, and it didn't help that the season had crept up while Betty’s head was in the clouds, despite the second scarf there to choke her when it came back down. Her thoughts, a recounting of a passage on star death, falter in the wake of that little comment of his.
Reaching around herself, behind her left shoulder, she cupped his forehand with a hand. She had only followed the sound of his voice and it was a dead shot.
"You feel sick?" His smile cut a cold little gash at the nape of her neck.
"Not at all. Interesting, isn't it?"
“You thought about going to a doctor?” It’s a silly question, Betty had to turn around, scan his face to know just exactly how silly, but when she did, Simon was already halfway down the block, turning back, just putting out a cigarette, trashing it. Meeting her gaze all blank like he didn’t hear her, mouth already full with its successor. Shaking his head fast, jerkily as he stuffed his hands back in his pockets and started back, floaty. She’d given up on the lighter now, finding her key, seizing that instead, playing at trying to press warmth into the freezing metal.
“You think a doctor would know half as much about this as I do? I-I mean, at this point. This stage of the game.” Betty could have predicted that. She did predict it. Everything that was about to happen lay behind her somehow, tugging at her sleeves, the hands of children, speaking in languages she's never learned. They were waiting for the last bus home, at the abandoned glass shop-stop with the four four-step stairways leading to reddish, busted doors that flank their cosmic drama, their perpetual engagement on death row. The brick running on either side into the dark is cut with a billion white veins converging a billion times over in the rusty sky-map, shaky, mottled, yet so perfectly equilaterally traceable.
“Hey,” He was at her shoulder, now, a second hand inside her distended pocket. The moon was low and exposing its underbelly to the black sky, Betty could just hardly see it between the high-rises, the prick of the space needle. Simon likes to pretend he doesn’t know what she does, where her mind goes. “You’re smart to be so concerned - you’re probably a lot smarter than I am, at that.”
“I could have told you that.” Simon was pressing his cold little fingers up her wrist then, so his thumb pushed into her palm and her glove started to slide off. They don’t feel all that different out here. It was indoors that she sometimes thought with her hand held two inches from his shoulder she could feel his blue aura below her like an open freezer. But Betty was probably making it up. Why must something be wrong, something to fixate on, some catch? Maybe these were ill omens, allegorical tests of her will - she wasn’t acing it, that was for sure.
“Betty, think about it." A fluttery thing about his voice at her neck. “Why do you think I started taping? Look, even if you don't want anything to do with it anymore, I’ll make sure this time, your name comes first. Anything. It’s a matter of…manifestation. Dictating our reality. Our future. Don't feel so hopeless."
As if she cared so much about the order of credits - but the rest was true. Iceland was a premature honeymoon, a glitch in time, something secret only the two of them and a sea-beaten fisher knew, with his black carpetbag of fog she signed herself away for, her little name in his mouth. She had begun to refer to it, half-jokingly, as Petrikov Effect - he was blessed with one of those sharp and clearly foreign names so aesthetically provocative in all their pretentious Seattle haunts - it made Betty look good by proxy, she felt, even if the depth of their relationship did not jive with their academic interests. What was that effect again? She'd had the preliminaries all written out but didn't have a clue how to test it. No control, no variable. Fuck, she can't remember it. But she doesn't remember much of anything lately. Anesthetic, it was anesthetic. She lets him light her a cigarette off of his, offering it out to her as if it is a diamond. Even if she knows it will work its way all up into her head and start dragging brain matter out.
Alright now, where were we? The anesthesia. He always did have this sway over her. Simon always made things better. Nevermind. Apathetic. But she had never felt so weak, for everything she loved before to fall away, a big, blue artifice frozen in her ribs, everything else aching, everything else under the effect. A billion scarves, a billion books, a billion fingers encrusting the cold, waning core of a white star. A human in the image of their god, who, of course, must come in the image of their maker. Copacetic. If she is the princess, he is the king, somewhere her pride clings to life and demands blood for its spurned title-weight. Heavy on her tongue is the admittance dizzying even to admit in the confine of her own mind, he made you, he made you for this, you're his torture device, his iron maiden!
“That being said,” His return frightens her in a very, very, very small way, deep inside her brain. “We can't stay here forever. In the castle. I think you know that.” He’s already said this, a million times over, and Betty still doesn’t know what Simon’s talking about, at least, not yet. She runs a finger down the teeth of her key.
All this set aside, she's got the key. Betty was given the key the day she woke up. Almost as long as her palm, the grip all rococo, the teeth notched like a maze, it teeters forever over the ledge of her ribs. It's allegedly the key to the entire kingdom, master to every room in the castle, every closet above sea level. Below, the icy roots of Simon’s labyrinth stretch down, way down, and you can get lost, or fall into a ravine; these wounds haven’t been filled in because you could always rely on the earthquakes simply undoing the repairs.
The castle sits nestled between badlands and more badlands, the ones to the east infested with vampires, the ones to the west perpetually and sickeningly drenched in that sort of oleo-saccharum no one seemed to know the source of. To the south is nothing, the two regions slowly encroaching on one another until they meet in the middle, and to the north is more tundra, an embryonic peninsula desperately extending itself as far into the sea as it can without falling in. You can run laps around the highest turrets and never see another shadow travel past the kingdom gates. You can stare into the sea from dawn til dusk, and never see a ship. You can beat him into the snow, screeching with laughter and half-undressed - love-drunk, that seemingly endless supply of dark, ichorous wine inexplicably powerless, and expect no contest. Everything inside you is in such perfect harmony you are hardly touching the floor. Music is always playing. The air is always incensed. No one -
Hell is other people, or whatever, hell is any time they are not in step with one another. Hell was leaving him for the first time after they had returned with the Enchiridion - it was probably why Betty had tried to run off to the warmer weathers of Australia. Here it is, her fantasy treehouse embraced by the unknown. You couldn’t be happier when it was only the two of you and your hallucinatory kingdom. Destiny princess. Endless rapture. Anemic attendant “scouts” dressed in suites, the Disneyish, cutesy woodland animals, all tongueless, all content with her.
Except, Betty really sucks. Betty really loves screwing things up. Horrible, ungrateful girl as she is, with her beautiful half-husband and her satanic violins and the key around her neck, she still can’t keep from lighting fires in the snow, way out by the balding coast where vapid courtsmen don’t find you and the little animals have nothing to chase. She stabs away in the Old Master way from a wall of ice tall as a phone booth and surrounding the courtyard like a swimming pool, and trails the king like a dog, fighting to keep up with his brilliance, fighting to figure how he managed to escape from the crystal ball in her mind. She occupies herself, studying the night sky from an observation deck, tracing Regulus as it stalks the sun, knowing that when it arrives, it will open a chapel-door-shaped portal from which there will be no egress.
A long time ago, so long that a cold sheen lay over her memory of it, Betty had set this cosmic destiny of hers into motion. She had the odd suspicion that most of everyone in the world was dead at this point, which made this whole endeavor all the more impressive. It ascribed to her some importance.
“Do you think we should get married?”
Their rented car was tumbling through Slovakian country roads on an adoption quest for some statuette of infant Jesus they both wanted to be haunted by, and it was taking them to a chapel, somewhere that seemed so beautiful to be shut inside with a girl of avalanche velleity.
“You mean, uh, r-right now?”
What might have changed if she’d said yes? If she’d said anything instead of chucking him on the shoulder and going on translating the road map, would there still be this disquiet in the voice of the waves? No, she is thinking of it in terms too simple, too juvenile. It’s the vestigial apocalypse that has her on edge, and it’s certainly that crown. They had already pulled back up to the hotel, one cursed doll richer, seven thousand Koruna poorer, the night black and chilly and foreign, by the time he’d said yes.
She was cut from ice, and her veins were full of magic and she smelled like cinnamon all the time. She didn't turn out perfect, but Betty wasn't perfect, was she? He'd never considered that.
The whole issue was that she came out too smart, but of course she was. She remembered things she hadn't known. The king is surprised at the power this entails - he didn't mean to give her that, all the memories, when he pulled her from his dreams. His attention was vague. Now, what does that even say about a human soul? That Betty couldn't be Betty without first tumbling through all those little grains of sand silly humans imagine when picturing something as straightforward as the passage of time? Funny, how it all comes back around to the butterfly effect, he realizes much too late, back pressing into the sharp teeth of the steps to the altar, trying in vain to draw himself up against a possessed doll-version of a princess, teeth bared, bisque skin scored as a birch tree without any blood.
How did he rationalize creating her? Well, he was making up for something, obviously. And God, he missed her, even now, no matter how that naivete intoxicated his actions. It was not enough, a church for her eternal funeral. The king had to stop saying and start doing. He was clear, he was capable, he was not a threat to himself, much less others. She would love him better now, that was certain. better than she did before - vacant, romantically inept, scared of himself. A wreck. He knew the finger positions now, what produced what sound, he would treat her better. He has. And will, for as long as he can hold out.
Everything she wanted, everything she might want. Before she awoke, he had made ready the music room, every single sheet of music he could find in the land - what better way to pass two years? - seven types of stradivari, all replicated in ice, of course, but each one finished with a little magic. They'd sound just how she would want them to, iridescent flashes across their chiseled planes from the thirty-foot windows behind her, all constructed of little shards of frozen this or that to mosaic pictures of all her favorite gods in every color. Of course she had to have her own library, it was hardly a question. The only other offering of note, aside from an occasional effigy, was the four-post bed almost as tall as the windows, that instead of draperies he'd managed to hang with strands of the littlest crystals, in prismatic shapes of stars and suns and crescent moons. They nearly glowed. He didn't use any servants, not to say that would be any less effort, if one really thought about it.
The true masterpiece was still down in the catacombs, waiting, dreaming, and he had done such a wonderful job recalling her, the way her nose turned down just right, the angle of her lids, the meticulously charted flurries of dark lavender freckles across her splayed arms elusively three-dimensional, sunk beneath surfaces satin thin and white as arctic poppies. Sculpted from the source with his own hands, glacial water from the ruins of Iceland. Finally, finally released from her little glass chapel. Eurydice playing the part of Snow White, gaunt and pinkish in the way of fresh bone, still flushed with the marrow. When he recited the spell, when he kissed her, her eyes would flutter, she'd frown and stick her fingers in them, scrubbing away the frost that had grown in her tear ducts. Her spine would twist, she'd search for him and be relieved not to need search very hard, forehead knitting when she looks up at last, half-smiling, one awoken from a coma and not certain of its cause. It's hardly clinical. It's devastating. It's impossible. It's you and me, love, it's still you and me.
“Is it? Prove it.”
Hold it for a second, you fucking charlatan. It comes to him that morning, stops him in his tracks at the most noose-like stage in the tying of his tie. Now what was the use in reparations if he didn’t know what he owed? Tuning begrudgingly back into himself, the king finds it such a tired-out amplitude, the wet alleyway they often stalked each other in, safe from those funnels of wind that rushed through the empty city streets hard enough to knock you off your feet, to coax out a bloody nose. It spins the head. It seemed that they were always traveling back then, amnesiac nomad schoolgirls in their oddly coordinated fashions, always coming back downtown for some whim, slavelings to unreliable public transport that began to unravel the longer they let the night drag. The last time they’d been really free had been Iceland - and the product of that had generated so much work that their transience had to be sustained now on yearnings for concerts, an eight-ball, the Book of the Dead. They ran once to Anchorage, talking smack on animal cruelty, the Iditarod on acid - only sinking faster. Betty ran out of money, quit school. Simon ran out of patience, quit school too. The crown is their musher. The crown sets them free.
Quick, Petrikov, say something. Why demand such linear thinking of yourself? What could have possibly changed so - and-and I mean, are we not simply forming more comprehensive understandings of one another? Manifesting our own realities? Wow, dumbass, way to harp on mutual sympathies. Fingers numb, Simon was fumbling his wallet open like you would find a fire extinguisher jammed inside, digging between business cards, one fluttering down to rest amongst the tar spots, and thrusting at her the precious ex machina, folded twelve times. No, it didn’t prove anything, he wasn’t stupid, and neither was Betty. But he could finesse it.
“You’re still here, aren’t you? Have I ever left your sight?” Her stare over her piled scarves is daguerreotype stoic. “Have I?”
“No.”
"No, I haven’t." So that was that. Still, Betty was getting smart enough to identify when there was a spoon in her mouth, and when there wasn’t. Collaring her throat in her hands. “By my side. All the time.”
"Are you at mine?"
The warmth dies in the air, Simon still decoding the directions of the million little folds in that three-year-old note that would be so embarrassing to read now and so maybe it’s sweet he keeps it despite that, because if Betty could recognize how dumb it must have sounded at this point, then who knows how dumb it sounded to him. Glancing up at a sharp angle, quizzical, closing the wallet - then smiling, a pseudo-sneer, as if she’s said something truly unusual, which apparently she has. It is a logic of physicality as much as it is loyalty.
“Of course I am.” And yet, so earnest, she can’t help but laugh with him, and then she sees the eyes of a bus coming to them through the fog. And then, everything just started to get fuzzy, like the onset of some wonderful trip.
“Bad dream?” Endless preparations for her, and he doesn't have the slightest idea what to do with that, her first words to him in centuries. You or me? He finds himself nodding, quick, uncontrollable suddenly, over her, a loyal animal, the cased machine of her soft breathing the only oxygen tank left, and where was the mouthpiece - oh God, he’d known it from the start, he had made a deal no one should, he was going to die by this, she had his soul. It has been so long since he has been tasked with this feeling that he doesn't know where to put it down and ends up crushing it against her sternum, one of her perfect little hands already creeping up behind his ear. Princess over and over and over.
"-the hell did you do to your hair?" A pool of tears is gently fusing the side of his face to her chest, he can feel it prickling, the matting of eyelashes, the pull of her dress. She giggles, and for a moment he truly expects it to have thawed, rises to find her head twisted to one side, down at her shoulder, staring at him with her white eyes, so impossible and yet so herself and Simon so himself even more than he was last they saw each other and the war has been won, really, there wasn’t ever any war, in fact, she’s come back like always, and this time, he can’t let her go.