Stumbling out of the freezer with a camcorder and a black eye like some kind of dandy from his opium den, Simon's clicked. Prophet-style. The mousy kid in the biomedical department with the cloyingly flat affect who is polite enough to stand for the bizzarity of his experiments’ requirements while pretending to be vaguely interested from a…likely biomedical perspective always looks up at Simon when he leaves like she hasn’t a clue where he emerged from. Tonight, she’s actually looking him in the eyes and not the carpetbag under his arm like he was always smuggling an illegal animal inside to perform some horrible bout of chemical tests on.
Now, Simon doesn’t really know for sure if the freezer is soundproof, and he’s never asked. It seems perfectly natural to suspect any sane person of being put off by the course of his research, of beginning to notice - are his eyes getting worse? Since he started to take note himself of the remnants of every session with the crown, the things that didn’t scrub out, he’s lived in fear of Betty, of freaking her out more than he already has. When he realizes the lab girl’s looking at him like that because of the black eye, he can’t help but laugh.
It isn’t just phenotypical, though, not at all. For a while now, he had been paying attention to these ghosts, these beings on adjacent planes of existence. They were mostly the fantastical conjurings of any hallucinogenic, but sometimes he studied that Infant of Prague doll he and Betty had brought back from the trip where she asked him to marry her and swore he could feel the breath coming off his chalky mouth. That, and the stalking thing. Either some poorly-handled little boy is trying to target him for God knows what manner of juvenile extortion, or he’s hallucinating it for some reason, his skater-boy shaggy blonde hair and albino eyes and something off about him - he doesn’t seem American, but Simon can’t be sure of that one. Even if he’s perched on the backrest of a bench in the middle of the scantily-lit, frosty, empty campus stretch he has to cross when he leaves the lab.
If someone else could only take notice of him, he’d know it was real, but Simon can’t bring himself to approach the kid, never. He’s not scared of a child in the dark, he’s not, he’s not. He needs a drink, he needs to steady out. It doesn’t even matter, though, because he’s clicked.
There were three voicemails on the answering machine, and the crows were coming back to roost. The first was from an asshole in Maine who wouldn’t quit on this well behind his house he swears to be magical, polite suggestions of “It’s not exactly an artifact - more of a, uh, landmark?”, falling on deaf ears. Apparently a group of dumb kids had lowered one of their own into the depths, and he’d been pulled out speaking in tongues. The other two were from Betty.
Birdcall wafting around, as if ever there was a better omen, Simon braved the first two messages from her, halfway to the door by the time the accursed machine had screeched and begun to play the third. Key in the lock by the time it ended. She can take care of herself. You breed this mutual dependency. You know you’re doing it.
I know I shouldn't have, not before asking, but I did, I'm probably just freaking out. It's not that I don't trust you- The fucking key is sticking, again.
I just…I’m worried about you. About both of us. We’ve been…spinning…
Simon lets his head fall against the brass H-one-zero-M-zero-eight gripping the door with half their intact nails, a microscopic slip of his will, the ringing in his skull metallic, a sleigh bell, a carabiner unclipping from a belt loop, swaying from a finger in the stairwell. A sphinx, the hallway’s length her only riddle. Melt into the floor, do it. Die right here. Illuminate her once to the constant, circuitous fear of -
“Stuck again, huh?”
His hands are frozen stiff on the doorknob, a warm, ungloved hand passing over them, finessing the body of the key away from him, grinding it in, pulling out then stabbing back, arms rattling his so delicate, each unexpected touch sending a shock through him recalling an abused pet, but her hand is firm on his, so he doesn't dare move, not even to prevent a horrifying spilling of tears over her freckled wrist. It doesn't even cross his mind until the door breaks open to her will and they're safe in the dark that Betty didn't even wonder if he was trying to get out or in.
Now, that night, his back pressed to the glass doors in their loft that should lead to a balcony but don’t, just waist-high bars and floating graves of strawberries, it is all he can do to watch her. Beside him on the floor is a collection of Tennyson he doesn’t remember leaving there, the cover bent upwards to him. He had cracked it open to find it split by a correcting pen, and - oh, cute - a passage circled beneath it. The one that went again; the red fool-fury of the Seine; should pile her barricades with dead. One of Betty’s hidden messages.
Then, sometimes, he watches the weeping of a candle beside her that illuminates the reading she’s in the process of, the hot spilling of red wax down its length and onto the shoulders of another riesling bottle.
Perhaps it wasn’t very responsible, but it was economical, a slew of cheap candles and anything from empty bottles to abalone shells to catch the wax - she’s smart like that, cornering the electric bill, that and cold showers, however lengthy, he supposes may cancel out the absinthe on the coffee table, not even touching the cost of the crown (it’s going to pay for itself, anyways). Ascribing prices to ceremony, now, that is another story. They need these guiding lights, it keeps them steady.
As if to prove him wrong, the next card in Betty’s hand hovers above the carpet for a heavy, hot pause, then, like a boomerang, slices through the air for a wonderful second before flinging itself upward, almost turning back around on her before toppling to the floor. It’s still at arm's length and she wastes no time, pries it off the hardwood, and before he can even get a look at what she pulled, she’s already dipping it in the candle flame. Well, it kept them steady as best it could. They’re both so mad lately. Unemployed, childless, unfocused, and sad, and taking it out on eachother in ways that didn’t so much dissolve the curse on you, just left its slime all over the victim in the backswing.
So he laughs at her, little tendrils of snow from his latest trial emulsified in the crevasses of his consciousness, still below freezing point and not melting any time soon. “Which is it, love?”
“Star.” The short little flame glides over the laminate on the card like it is a duck feather. She was having problems with that one. If Simon were apt to ask spirits for help and they kept coming up with this dumb ebullient white baby straddling a horse with his naked legs and these two dogs and a lobster and all the fucking pentacles, he’d get sick of it, too, so he wills himself not to make fun, leans away when she rises with the singed card in the tips of her fingers and steps over the spread and opens the door and flicks it out and doesn’t even watch to see how far it flies. When she drags the doors shut again, a pillar of freezing air squeezes in front of them. He leans into the wash of it, kisses the back of her leg.
The little fires keep them sharp. Early in the depths of their retreat from the world in a scatter of book money and catching little pink tabs on their tongues like snowflakes, they'd both lit the apartment on fire, hours apart and under completely altered circumstances. It had been a bizarre glitch that only lent to their curiosity in the hallucinogenic lines of research of that distant Stanislav, Betty's namesake, completely strangled by conventionality. And still, they had something he did not, a certain metaphysical truth. And, they were both fucking crazy.
Betty is so much smarter than him, so curious, Checklisting out to him on her fingers that are not wrapped around a volume on the Papyrus of Ani. Khabit, the shadow. Sekhem, the double. Then Khat and ka, the body and heart. All elements of the same being. It is this Voltronian way of looking at them that enables Simon’s contentment. When the physical becomes unbearable, he turns to those: khaibit, sahu - but, as any infection, ka is a well of poison that trickles out into his little heaven and stains it. It was this cursed body that the crown wanted and that was yearned for in return. When these terrible needs are eradicated, and the fortress recenters itself on him, things inevitably start to…burn. He's a trash fire. But who ever said the body was all there was? There is a complex inside him, a gathering of elements, each with a different set of eyes, ones that he does not always recognize when they meet with his own.
Betty is never going to marry him in time. If she refuses to confront the importance of the crown to him, then how the hell is she to confront the rest of him? If her truth is all hidden in cards? Book or no book or academic recognition or love or money (which is simultaneously everything and nothing to him) he is bound up like a prophet at Golgotha - cursed by the damn situation to be simultaneously, startlingly aware of the cosmic time bomb and the blindness of his peers to it, to the stars that had been catching fire as they gazed at their shoes and got high off things they could afford and fucked nightclub girls that at least probably loved them but wouldn't for much longer. All hail that great equalizer.
Well, fuck ‘em, fuck ‘em he's the king of the whole fucking winter. Joan of Arc. The cockshy second coming. In a frozen home-recording, a room of jerkoffs stared eternally dumb at a neon red thorny crown on his head announcing 'faggot!', and routinely failed at the how of it (this is strangely affirming). Luckily, in a sense, the kids in the scene kept their eyes rolled far back enough that darling Betty never had to pay the karmatic piper for leaving the office door unlocked, as she routinely managed whenever she came in to kill time before her evening class - they had to stop, he should have quit working there so long ago. Well, nevertheless, it was remarkable how densely his surrounding of idiots could pack around the banquet table but not fucking listen when he predicted to them the future - but come, now, even Christ was laying his disciples. You're just useless, clutching your holy book and speaking of the end, of otherworldly voices - you’re not the only one who they clocked as a witch. Though Betty is sort of capable of being…everything and, and you’re a-a-a Jesus freak on the street. Why the hell would you even keep that tape when you knew it came out unuseable, why did you think you needed it? Truthfully, he doesn't even remember what he put on it. Just that it did not lend to his thesis.
Now the disciples are a slew of crumbling bone and the things that don't rot and get carried off and littered around by the birds. The birds that lived, that thrived, that would have toppled a food chain if it wasn't already, The birds that overflowed in population so incredibly at a time that he once watched a vulture kill a seal. Reasoning himself a selkie, he nightmared the vision of it over until he had to go spear one of the fucking things himself, play cannibal, relapse terror, send the pain below.
Nailed it again! The coffin that was his famine-exacerbated disordered eating, that is. A seal was a creature pure as snow, so bloody inside the flesh was almost black. Hunted as they were to extinction while his vision wavered, that is all he can tell Marceline of their existence. He will not recreate them. He cannot recreate viscera. Only transplant it. The storm drain channel of his absent rib keeps this knowledge sacred.
It was a week before she last tried to leave, maybe, maybe two, three A.M. when he found Betty with sage, wandering like a sleepwalker, swaying in the dark to an Angelo Baldiametti score that had somehow hooked itself up to the speaker system of his shadow thoughts. Betty wasn't a sleepwalker, but he'd asked, half-shy from the doorway if she was awake, half-relieved when she put the theory away, only to go inside-out with worry.
"I had a weird dream. I think there's something dangerous in here."
"Doll?"
"No."
An owl groaned from somewhere in the park across the street.
Streetlamp-light was shooting under the blinds and crossing the living room floor, her sweater, the little plume of smoke in her right hand wheeling out as she turns to look at him. Oh, fuck off. He’s not the one she’s been talking to. He had thought he had extracted Betty from this recurrent red-room nightmare of his when she first awoke in his castle.
The king despises these dreams of ‘himself’, that pathetic creature that took Betty from them. The one who messed it all up, in his stupid suits, that dumb look on his face like he might cry at any moment. Behaving like usual, acting a fool in his work, acting a hysteric in his apartment, his hair falling into his face, those blown out pupils dark as holes. When the king tears his eyes from her dead, terrified gaze and faces up to the true object of her conversation, this Petrikovian bitch who has been standing right there in the hall like some kind of sleep paralysis demon, he gives himself one of those demented smiles like he’s been waiting to be noticed. Undisciplined in his mania, biting his lip.
He thinks of attacking his twin right then and there. Fleetingly, he wants to tell Betty to run. Before he can try either of these, he feels Petrikov’s fingers stabbing between his - a perfect mirror, and they do run, out the door, down the stairs, and escape that burning building, screams all around. Betty must have also seized him or has been seized by him, for she is right in stride with him, hand trapped in his, fading into the thickening smoke.
Out of time and place, Seattle Betty has no logical home here, suspended in amniotic water with the king and fucking Petrikov, moving between stifled scenes Daliean, exploitative, tiny alleys and concert hall lobbies, mountain passes, an on-ramp crammed with half-gnawed bodies, the blood still wet enough to catch the sun - she shouldn’t be seeing this, she shouldn’t be this deep inside, she’s much too sharp for him. She kisses the back of his neck. The yellow ribbons wound around her arms fluttering in the wind. Her hand wrapped around his mouth.
Something’s amiss - he doesn't dare say it, but when Betty whips around now, teeth sharp and snarling, her hand in Petrikov’s hair, everything seems to go shattered-thermometer red. A zombie has found her, and he takes note of how green her eyes are when they meet his.
Well, one of us has to do it, huh?
She whips her body back now, takes Petrikov stumbling down with her and she's tearing at him with her claws, ripping his outstretched hands, wrestling him back, and the king feels the blood cut off from his own wrists, his breath hitch. Something about his defensive fighting strategy, how he screams when her face is thrust into his throat, her hair falling all over him, is so stupidly girly.
The king takes a deep breath, reminds himself that he’s dreaming, and thrusts his arm into the fray of them, not allowing himself the time to think about it - he’s accomplished much worse with this methodology - and finds the throat under his desperate mouth, wet with blood fresh and warm, all red and pink, his teeth so tightly gritted, and holds it, watching his eyes go the color of ink, face twisted with betrayal. The sides of his fingers are brushing Betty’s jaw - her smile through her matted hair, his red-haired reindeer-dog-girl, unlatching herself from his neck breathless, lips falling against his knuckles. They are a four-legged monster, two jilted paths perfectly impaled on one another, a chromosomal chimera - even if this is his path inside the circle of his hands that are slipping down from the force of his arching back and the slickness of the blood she drew, stilled the second he gets his thumbs back at the furrows of his jawbone, stilled until he wakes in a hypnic jerk, fighting to breathe.
Sleep comes slippery and mean, and not from arterial spray. And yet, yet. And the empty bed. For a beautiful, orgasmic moment, he’d won, he’d really won, he had shattered the mirror sleep had trapped him in as a spastic firefly. His hand on his ribcage as it sometimes is when he wakes up, prying his thumbnail under the rough tissue, but he manages to laugh through it.
“Princess? Are you in here?”
How wonderfully prophetic. Although, in the castle, it is typical to find Betty trying to be the things she once feared inviting into their home, wrapped up into herself like a bird in the far corner of the clawfoot tub, nightgowned, hair down her face, or once, with one leg over the windowsill, a cute ghost in fluttering curtains. Something hot creeps up like a migraine, then cools at the sound of a low whistle vibrating off the walls, the arched doorway. She is in the music room, the song one of prayer, a mantra, a deviation from her usual aimless pawing at the organ keys. She is playing that riff that descends the way it ascends. Over and over, backwards, forwards again, the tempo dipping intermittently. A variation on a theme, that's right.
Sometimes she acts just as finicky as he used to be. Amounting it to nerves, to her having to come to terms with the vampire situation - nevermind his recent medical trends with her - he’s resolved to pay the princess more attention than even before. God help him, she is too smart for utopias. Skating around the patchy areas to a fault, he’s tried his best, such fantasies, such adventure, trailing her along through endless forest, to the peaks of the mountains, through some of his more incredible projects that lay underground, hidden springs, dormant beasts. They play together, absent Casio and hand-me-down violin, the acoustics dreamlike, filling the entire castle, every crevasse, every keyhole. She stabs endlessly at his wall. She seems happy.
At her beck and call every moment, the king has never felt closer to his true self with Betty now, so tall at her side, tying ribbons everywhere, their kingdom spread out at their feet. This is my apology, all of it for you. I've made it all right, all better, I can finally give you what you deserve.
"Apology for what?" Damn, for what? She was so smart.
"For how I was before. For how weird and sick I was at the end of it." The “end” of it? It is so easy to dig oneself into a hole. Betty doesn’t seem to have noticed.
Working out from beneath a blur of starched trenchcoats and video cameras, she was looking for Simon, resolute to get the fuck back home with or without him and wash that day’s book signing saturnalia down with the spiced rum and a few pills and maybe turn the bathtub into a float chamber. Or whatever it would take to free her brain from the sounds of these press-jerks squawking around trying to build their tabloids off her back.
Simon had called her twenty minutes in, and failed to express just how impassioned the whole affair was going to be. “Please, please, please, you know I’m no good at this, I’m still a joke to these people, they don’t know you, and what if they ask about Shabaz, or-or-or bug milk, Betty, you know everything about bug milk.” Nope. Maybe she did write half the book, but she wrote it well, a full print-out of her brain, and she fears now that she has nothing else to offer. “I know nothing about bug milk. Nothing.”
“Fine. I’ll come skulk around if it makes you feel better.”
“You’re a saint.” She keeps him safe best she can, even if her best isn’t very good.
Establishing a sightline between the façade of a full-length library window and a wake of white-collared vultures, Betty tries to light another exported clove cigarette stolen from the hoard above Simon’s kitchen sink, finds the wind too mean for her dehydrated little lighter, and takes advantage of the next die-cut suit with a thumb over her polar-roid dustjacket face so tiny in the crook of his arm to revive it. The magic word is ‘Stanislav’, it will get her anything, sweaty palms, shiny, hinged lighters that look as stupid as they feel to use, vodka-mixed drinks that taste like battery acid and apparently, I don’t know, girls?
She is standing half-shadowed by a plastic trash bin someone has put out here for all the damn pseudo-intellectuals here under the impression that a record of electromagnetic flux in some early Roman child’s barbie doll meant champagne cups somehow, metaphysically speaking, would from now on just wink out of existence once they left your preoccupied hand. Betty has taken up the study of the kids-size white lighter whose opacity masks its so-very-finite measure of lifeblood and thinking about how she will still be twenty-seven for a month, when a giant bird collides with the glass inches from her head.
“Save. Me.” The bird is mouthing at her through the shifting, interposing glare of a million vultures. It is more of a pretty coyote. Stiff little tendrils of its combed-out bangs are getting trapped between its forehead and the window and unraveling as it slides; still pressing these soundless words on her, smiling in between its pleas and between its clawing, slipping hands Betty sticks the cigarette in her mouth to match with her own. They’re eating you alive, huh, sweetheart? It's plain to see how much he enjoys it, this kind of momentary powerless-power that's been dropped in their hands, a scapegoat, maybe, a pseudonym for nothing, what might as well be Alice in Wonderland, a copy of a copy of a copy.
They are alike in that way. Playing pretend where everyone can see them, if only to express how far above everyone else they feel when together: it's like they’ve forgotten how to be alive, he’d say. All of them dead. Not you and me, we're scrappy. We're survivors. Here at the glass, a single shadow of a corpse rises behind their forbidden union - just in time to see her tap with surgical precision the cherry of the cigarette against the cloud of Simon’s breath on the library window. The rest of him held captive in second-hand Chanel, darting away quick as a delinquent caught by a security guard.
Oh Syoma, circle of life or whatever hahaha Betty telepathizes at the empty glass.
They speak so little now, having developed this impossible language through the veneer of sleeve-tugs, jerks of the head, sequences of blinks. These squirrely fanatics, always the opposite with their memo pads and tape recorders and their business cards, make little sense to Betty, dead or alive. Perhaps she is disillusioned - never, however, disenchanted. Simon and her might discover Atlantis and still she'd set them away from human society, all attention bad attention if unprotected by book covers, dark glasses, snow white feathers stitched in rows like laminar armor down to your ribs, nothing underneath. Tracking down abandoned castles in Spain for the scene of their elopement. This was before they found the crown.
The crown.
When Betty was younger, she didn’t even need a crown. She already lived in the sky, magic angels dancing around always to protect her, a horse she dreamed of as a little kid and couldn't figure imaginary, a goddess, the scary kind that eats you whole or whatever. These and the rest of the pictures silhouetted in glowy stars that lost their grip far too often from the popcorn ceiling. Flat on her back on the shag carpet until she fell asleep or was ordered to school, music lessons, so many useless things - he’s an appaloosa, no, a blue roan, no, both, chimera, powdered sugar freckles on his shoulders. When the sky had bested her, there was no way to go but down. By the time earth had bested her, gravity had become frustrated trying to help. She wanted the ocean, hundreds of miles of it with no resistance, concussed herself against the floor of her neighbor’s pool, dialed back and started digging.
The angels gathered above. They craned their necks down at her and whispered their riddles, aimless on a train; on a sleeping bag at the foot of a mountain in Pakistan, a polaroid in her hand; shivering under open bedroom windows. She used to write stories for them as a wild, weird kid more afraid of the dark than a snake, anxious about sleeping and anxious about not. Great battles, quests for strange, magical artifacts of legend. They started as twins, a blue moon and an orange sun in a dichotomous way a teenager with a weak grasp on poetry might find profound, until one night she looked up and found them locked together, and the one she was calling Casper at the time had discovered this odd attentiveness, this strange way of gesturing with the arcs of his wrists, fingers like coral tentacles. Eyes always covered. They both had to die. She tried to cut them out of her, pour their liquid organs down the sink and follow it with a turn at the garbage disposal, but they were too real by then, never quite letting her reach the keyhole valves at the napes of their necks. When they couldn’t seduce her out of it, the two always managed to wrench themselves away, slippery and cold as fish.
She feels so thrust from her old ideas now, all that she does in the name of Simon Petrikov. He is in her bones, but she seems to exist in the imagination of the king like a pretty ghost, a heavy-handed reanimatorre.
Betty is happy here, but sometimes, she wonders what it would be like if she did truly feel nothing at all, how long he would keep leading her body along - and how different it would be from her current state. She can’t hear her voice over her shoulder anymore, she is too accustomed to it, which was a little mental victory, but now that Simon’s reminded her, she can’t seem to kill the memory of someone who she hardly is anymore folded up on a street corner with her arms over her head, and somehow, even though he was the one freaking out on her to begin with, wishing and half-expecting Simon to be the one to come save her.
Not that he didn’t, after all. That night was the first time he’d put on the crown. He didn’t know what he was dealing with, that was why he started making those tapes. Of course, Seattle Betty did not think this. She struggled against it, she was so naive, thinking herself some kind of chic wizard, so receptive to the radio signal correspondences of the outer realms that she went antichrist-in-a-churchyard whenever Simon so much as brought it into the apartment. Even if he was probably smuggling it in, anyways, he who wears certainly cursed amulets over cashmere sweaters like peace signs, he who converses with everything from keyboard to the rain, yet remains insistent in his skepticism to the death. He needs it, needs it pretty bad, she has come to accept, and not just because it is their ticket or key or whatever.
Sometimes, still, she catches him conversing with the princess, which is what she calls her angel on the fritz, her blank shell of a supernova, with which Betty has a way of getting confused. In ethereal sequences of travel and seance she nearly forgets her own name, especially now with all this magic wound around her, the postpartum high of their success at Mystic Rituals, at seamlessly interweaving their writings on all their treasures, going so hysterically affectionate when they finally found it on a library shelf that they were kicked out - fuck a post-graduate degree. Fuck all degrees. They are bound together now, her bipedal balance a thing of the past. They needed to stay that way.
Click, the tape starts to buzz from inside the television's body, click goes an imaginary front door, and in the time it takes to register on the sharp blue square in front of her, Betty rushes to the bedroom door, closes and locks it, her reflection in the mirror hanging on the back of it bug-eyed and clearly guilty. Not that she wouldn't be totally hopeless if she was caught this way anyways - what unworrying reason would she have to lock herself in here? She thought to take the stolen tape out of Simon’s apartment to watch it, but couldn't think up a convenient vessel capable of playing it. Furthermore, its contents made her anxious. December 14th was all he had penned on its side, and then, obviously after the fact,"ocular albinism".
Clearly something was wrong with Betty if she couldn't even see him through a T.V. screen without smiling, even darkened with the silence and concentration of someone who had been locking himself away to make these "documentary" tapes since they flew the crown back - really, since they had found out that first night how powerful it was.
He's stoic, meditative. December 14th, 1997, ten p.m., currently- he reaches through the upper wall of the screen, up on his knees. Zero degrees celsius. Since the findings of our previous session, I believe the best way to continue my research is by standardizing the temperate conditions of each session - His head turned down, clearly taking a note as he talks, then bouncing up, as if talking straight to her, a white glint through the left side of his mouth. I promise I don't enjoy hanging out in meat lockers. We’re not so psychopathic just yet.
It goes on like this. She's biting her nails again, didn't even notice, and even if she doesn't fully trust yet how Syoma is choosing to deal with the crown, something twists in Betty’s stomach every time he looks at her. I broke my own rule and watched a couple of these back, and I noticed something, or I may have, so - his left hand suddenly in frame, that glaring bright circle around it - you had no way of even knowing how long he had been holding it - and already on his head.
The last time Betty saw this happen, she'd ran, and it turns out the instinct persists, just a little. His other hand reaching towards her, the frame now way zoomed in, half crown, half face, staring, something flickering, a twitch, sometimes darting away. His eyes are so hard to meet she spends ten seconds watching a kiss-curl on his temple and not even noticing that they aren't his anymore, that they have been erased.
When the frame pulls back, he's smiling, not his press-smile, the little white bird dancing in his iris swirling, wild, her love an acrobat, beautifully troubling, the pure hubris agonizing. Betty could have told him! He was always so skeptical, so unlike her, so confident. On the verge of screaming, she's rocking, half her nails in her teeth by the time something settles in him, the cold of the locker, hopefully, and it's off.
There were a dozen of these tapes now. She hates that fact even more in this moment, finger hovering on the eject button, the slow movement of his eyes somewhere to the left of her, as if the filming of this doesn't even matter anymore to him, or hasn't yet returned. Staring, lips parted, then with both hands on his face, then softly, slowly. I keep returning to something Foucault was…was speaking of, actually. It seems to help. Enkrateia, it’s…Aristotle or something. I’m fucking cold.
Then, as if to pluck it out of the air, he reaches out and replaces himself with darkness.
It is better to see Simon focus than not. Lately, it’s been electrical-fire hazardous, centipedal trains of fairy lights, VCRs and telephones and those little tape recorders (the voices change, he insists, he’s doing some long-haul research project on it that he has taken to a back burner since the crown). Astronomy, heart surgery. Lepidopterology - Betty was in the habit now of plucking dead moths and butterflies from city streets, hand cupped beneath the breakable thing in her pocket, spilling them across the kitchen island mortuary slab. The feng shui is in shambles - their eighth-floor palace looks like a futuristic library beset by thieves, like a changeling-gone-serial killer’s psychedelic lair. The king can be…wonderful, but he can scare her to pieces, too.
"We're in denial, you know.”
She met him at the corner store - he was early. Three blocks down her route to him. Or Betty’s made herself late, wasting her time on that tape like she didn’t trust him, then following her whim of scrubbing the dry-erase marker off every mirrored surface in the apartment. It had been that way for a week, but it was starting to get frustrating, these half-legible and half-allegorical affirmations-delusions that crossed out your face in a runny scribble when you stood in front of it.
When Simon turns into the wind to light a cigarette and they lock eyes, the smile grows onto his face like blood spreading under a shirt. He gives up on the cigarette which is probably sensible because it's about to rain, Betty can smell it on the air, even though the sky is already that watery dark of twilight. He doesn’t have the crown with him, dangling a red and white plastic bag from one wrist, the neck of a bottle of rum poking out, shoulder bag propped against the brick with the escaped slushy straws and cigarette pack plastics. Gathering her up like they haven’t seen each other in centuries.
This slips away. One night, he comes home and strips their bedroom wall bare, murals it in mini rollers and secondhand spraypaint bottles with Gothic arches, ruby red, all abstracted roller-streaks like a palette knife. Fairy lights and cheap candles. The next night, he’s counting forgotten years-old antidepressants on the edge of the bathroom sink. Sometimes, he’s only a locked door, as if she didn’t know he was using again, or he couldn’t face up to the fact that he was. These are the things she remembers. She kisses him so hard their teeth smash together, yanking his head back so she can’t look at his black eye. Something else that has slipped away. I deserved it/ I’m so sorry for messing it all up/ please don’t leave, princess. It’s becoming hard to decode these signals, run, stay, run. Every time she leaves, he falls apart; every time she stays, she gets a little harder. Death awaits at either angle.
“I'm not sure we're coming through this one. At least, I'm beginning to seriously doubt it. Notice how we didn't even have an autumn this year? That's how it works. Gets you in its sights while your brain's still on vacation-" a cigarette caught in his mouth for a moment with his bag drawn around his hip, wrangling the plastic-clothed bottle into a burrow only as wide as a handrail, brutalizing loose notes. "Pants down around your ankles. No chance in hell."
She had been getting sick of this wartime poet façade, but not too sick. There is something edgily romantic about it, the bombings across the sea, and here, everything so cold and dark, where you had to choose to live either in fear or anticipation - or denial. And they two engaged, the only living girls in Seattle.
"So why are we wasting our time being all, like, dour and reflective?" The twist of his head, back and forth.
"You’re so sweet." A wistfulness in his voice. They play the usual game with two way-traffic, edging into the street with locked arms just slow enough that it'll give time for a handful of southbounders to cross before they get there, but not enough time for the ones going north to intercept. It took such synchronicity of judgment. "I-I-I don’t know, I can't shake this, this push.” His thumb and forefinger latching around his forehead. "It's not helplessness, but the feeling that I can do something, that there's some dragon I'm supposed to be slaying." Right on the nose, doctor. "I guess I do just feel helpless." Idiot. "But I really think I'm onto something with my research, I do! It's one of the only things that feels…comforting? Certain?" “I feel the same way.” The two of them had breezed through Scandinavia weeks before this whole foreign conflict Betty doesn’t even have it in her to keep up with, and Simon was smart in this way, brandishing this ruby-laden sunbeam like this is all a PR stunt, like the allure of such a powerful artifact uncovered in Iceland, as it was, in the shadow of all this cosmic, frighteningly Biblical drama, was only juiced by the carnage that dictated every newspaper headline. But it isn’t their fault, after all, and Betty is trying to find a job, she is, shunning classes she no longer cares to finish, and Simon’s trying to dissociate himself from the whole university before the gentle harassments regarding their academic relationship turn to legitimate rumors - hey, at least he has pride, right? Even though Betty is playing broken record saying it won’t make a difference if anyone knows about them - and she’s trying to keep up this regiment with the injections, and-
“We have got to get married, before it gets any worse.”
Betty is repeating it to herself like a spell, this is the key, just believe in him, just a little longer and everything will be okay. But one day, she will be sick of wrestling his strengthening nihilism back from that unwavering belief. He is her shining one, her brightest star, occulted by ambition, by an invisible entropy in his head that is metamorphosing, threatening to shake him out of the sky. Betty knows this. Enkrateia, he says. His claws are dug in, hers too. They will reach it, this doorway soon, this kingdom in the sky circling her head. There has to be a way through, some kind of interdimensional portal, one that runs no risk of spitting them out the same as they went in.
“What happened to your mouth?” Certainly, he was going to notice and ask about it eventually. It doesn’t mean Betty’s thought of a lie. So she tells the king the truth, swirls a hand in the air, looks up, looks down, doesn’t look at him.
“It’s a personal… cathartic thing. I’m not exactly sure I-I don’t think I remember doing it.”
“Cronenbergian of you. And see how you’ve outlived it all?” A magic spell in reverse - see, she can do it, too. His head snaps in her periphery, a pale blur. “What was that, the-the Japanese manner you were infatuated with so long ago?”
“Ero guro.”
“That’s it.” You’re so perfect, princess, you’re so smart, you’re so-
In dreams, a memory, a handful of blood. He has to pull Betty’s away from her face with his one free hand still wet, twisting it, clamping it down on her forearm. Even though she doesn’t let him go, her head sinks down even further when he does, hair swinging forward, hidden. It feels like floating in a swimming pool with your wrists tied to your ankles. Gagged and blindfolded with the ribbons that are starting to feel more like avant-garde mummification tools than the sweetest way to hide her little curse. The water gone iron-red.
The portal, she kept claiming, you remember, right? We were trying to find the portal? Looking straight at him, crazy-eyed, as if he should know that, This time even worse than her Isabelle Adjani stunt - next chance at clarity it allows him, Simon needs to get that bread knife out of the bathroom sink - and instead of it getting easier, the incredible gnawing of sharp teeth on every soft thing inside him builds into a tearing, a brutalizing. They're getting tighter, every time we go through, it gets a little tighter, doesn’t it? One mental stumble away from slicing his own arm open, pressing them together, or letting it drizzle in - feeling through his own blood, even after it escapes, feeling it from inside her. This is what he was thinking when he magicked himself numb and broke his ribcage in two places, the pain still horrifying enough he had lost his voice. It was what he was thinking when his hand was inside her mouth.
If he were less faithful in the universe, the king would find the sculpture the princess has been carving into his wall as brazen an omen as acid rain. That, and the lovely verisimilitude of it, her endearingly cannibalistic inclinations on display - whether or not consciously applied, the lacing together of their bodies, bandaged in flowing silk at once high fashion and baroque under their upthrusting haloes. If it is an omen of the gate they climb towards so excitedly now, the spires visible over the horizon, then so it is. And yet, a startling lack of owls.
The last tape still fresh in her memory from that afternoon, she had gone back. Back to the chapel. She was brave now. She had brought a weapon. Her adze. It was already in her fist when she decided to go back. To pull back the veil. But Simon was onto her. He had shortened her leash. Had she broken the rules? He’d taken her key.
It’s what she hisses down the phone at Babette, who didn’t bat an eye when she was all but handed a dorm room to herself two years ago because of Betty’s so frequent absconding to her uptown kingdom or even further. Who doesn’t care about much, but is always talking smack about things her errant friend does that don’t seem smart, like this didn’t seem smart. But Babette still owes her, something, anything, she thinks, shaking in the phone booth. I don’t know where else to run.
When she does not run, Betty hovers often against the bathroom door, half-shoed, waiting for the sound of keys in the lock in the hallway that meant Simon wasn’t just out for a cigarette but was disappearing again, her relief at avoiding another altercation outweighing her concern for his stability. She'd cut him to pieces, that psychotic Osiris, if she thought she might sew them back together in a manner more functional. Erase the spell from his brain that he couldn't keep from his mouth, the one that made him bad, or slice the chords that gave it voice, or the tongue that lifted it into the freezing air. Feeling them out behind her back, the wing-clipping scissors in the desk drawer, their location long since memorized. No more fingers with which to lift the crown onto his bleeding head, no more fingers stretched to the floor, tapping out one-handed echoes of the most despondent Radiohead tracks on that battered Casio for long hours of the cold nights, no more separation from him if she didn't want it. She could carry it forever, his ring finger, the one with the scarred knuckle from an uneven punch to a shattered window; his eye, the one that always looked milky, paler than its twin; his upper left canine. Maybe Betty is the crazy one. No, no, she absolutely is.
“Betty, what the hell, man,” Fluffy static sigh. “How is it like this?”
“How is it like what?”
“This like, existential, all-consuming shit. It’s not good for you. You’re still as naive and obsessed as you were before you even met him, you see that, right? I get that you have the book, and stuff, but that was like...a year ago.” The sides of the phone booth rumble every time she kicks it, drowning out the bullshit. Had it even been that long? What was she thinking? And there’s no way she can speak of the crown to someone on the outside. “Maybe you just, you know, pick a direction, go do something else with your life, that astronomy study, with uh…uh…Egypt, right? Mummification stuff? Or just come back to class, for a start. One way or another, you need to say bye-bye dreamland already.”
“Fuck you.”
“Open your eyes.”
“No, fuck you. You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
One of her last bridges burned, then. How the hell did Betty stumble into her wildest dream, in the flesh, and it felt like she was screwing herself? Perhaps she was guilty of stifling even the concept of outside friendship, canceling spring break plans from train stations, riding down love on a line of stardust. Emergency excursions to fucking Madagascar, short-circuting the whole city's power only for to see him better. Look, he’s even got you saying shit like perhaps. Stupid girl. But their loss, right? They’d never see it, they’d still be staring at their hands with their mouths full of her awkward work, blink at the back cover and drop it back in the library depository, the princess of Seattle with her hood pulled up and the other half of one of the last clove cigarettes from the kitchen, bouncing on a street corner and waving to no one. Free. At once betrothed, dumped by the side of the road like a mutt, and free. Always in orbit. She mulls it over until the wind smokes her cigarette for her, watching something in the wash of a streetlamp that looks like a peacock butterfly, but surely couldn’t be.
"Chauffeur?"
Talking to bugs, are we? No, dummy, this is a special butterfly, she knows enough of entomology, just barely enough, so fucking noncommittal, her usual angle. An angel!
He’s going to come save you.
A lure? The shimmering wings bobbing around the corner of the city garden, between the flayed bodies of empty trees. A will-o'-wisp! Where is he? But the answer is on the back of her tongue, he's gone too deep. Okay, so let’s play each other's part, she decides, hot on the butterfly trail. She knows Simon's in there, in his tower, but he's been made a prisoner of the evil spirit that snuck in after them from Iceland and he can't come to her.
Yeah, damn right she's in dreamland. It’s no different than any foreign country, all you have to do is play by the rules. So she will find a way to undo the curse, flaming sword, her poor-girl’s lyre of Orpheus and a length of horsehair dangling two halves of her snapped violin bow from either end.
As usual, the princess is being a little dramatic. Betty still has her key, after all, still turning it over in her fingers deep in her pocket, but Simon must have changed the locks while she slept or something, or he had to have done it while she was in class. It just couldn’t fit right, anymore. His key is the one that always sticks in that ancient lock. She’s exhausted her pocket change trying to call him. She’s pounded on the door until the neighbors came out. A pang of guilt still racks her every time she thinks about the last tape, about how she came back like she said she wouldn’t until he evened out and couldn’t bring it up, couldn’t ask if he was okay, couldn’t keep him safe. Betty is supposed to be the one kept safe. She is the one who doesn’t seem to know her own body and its place in the universe, running in circles, she is the one who goes too deep.
So she doesn’t cry the next afternoon when her tilted orbit leads her, smack, around the corner of the bodega aisle, armful of cheap wine, straight into him. She claps her free hand over her face. She keeps her mouth shut. She stares at the freezers, their glittering perma-frost windows. Were you hiding from me in some other dimension? Trapped behind the T.V. screen? Prove to me you didn’t just slip out from that freezer door, prove it, Simon, why else do you look like this, St. Laurent and all clean-shaven and your eyes all pretty and sparkly-
“I’ve been looking for you all over town, sweetheart, where were you?” Their arms all a tangle now, voices low, hidden like they would have been when they used to care about reputation. This is so stupid, she thinks. This is so stupid. The window into their bedroom has been open this entire time, even if it faced the back of the building and the fire escape; she could pull it until her fingers were red, it wouldn’t go back down. He’d fused it open or something. Hey, it's your apartment. It is his apartment.
“Wait a minute, you’re the one who disappeared on-”
“Can we get out of here, first? Then we can talk?” A fluorescence does seem to be trying to chew on them in this terrible butterfly house of car juice and chemical candy. They all but run. He asks if she wants to keep running. She does. A club, a fucking library, anything, please, can we just take another new combination of turns until we find a new gas station like we used to do? When she couldn’t keep circling the block the night before, and she didn’t know what else to do, Betty climbed a tree, fell asleep. She was used to getting drunk in the park. Tagging messages to him in forgotten language on well–traveled streets. Waiting, just waiting, telling herself it was just like always, just one of his little breaks, that it was better to be free this time, and not trapped in there with him.
It is a war of dissonance between the future and the past. A dissonance between the many selves, projections and shadows. Simon and her lost somewhere in the crossfire, half-escaped.
“My key is broken.”
“Hm?” A candy wrapper skids across the aisle of the bus floor. It looks like a butterfly, too.
“My key. It wasn’t working. I thought you locked me out. I was worried maybe you’d-” His face totally blank, eyes glazed, fixed on her, Betty flounders, lies. “That you were mad I watched your tape.”
It’s the wine they swapped between them waiting for this bus, bleeding her so conspicuously handled backpack dry in under ten minutes like they are catching the last bus out of Seattle, and they are the only two who could feel the ground shaking with each approaching missile strike. Betty no longer drinks to keep up - an underage drinker's common naivete - she runs laps around him. She’s so lightheaded her hand isn’t even cold in his, clammy, prickling when Simon unfastens them and turns from her, only long enough for her to blink, then it’s back in her lap, a ring of keys inside spilling into her open palm. She pulls the keys from her coat pocket, slowly, disbelieving.
“I need to get that lock changed. But you can’t run out on me, now, we have to stick together.” When Simon holds his hand out for his stolen keyring, he does it palm up, then twists, quick, and takes it from her fingers instead. Allowing only for a short glimpse of the bruise in the center of his palm, or maybe a burn, reddish-black.
“Hey, don’t look at me like that, you were in a hurry.” What could he possibly be doing to cause something like that? Was it any worse than the frostbite in her brain? The same hand is now on top of her head, fingers a dome, pulling it to the side with no resistance. “See? On perfectly straight.” They go into one another, his hands, and they go over his face, fingers bound together like a book, chin atop hands atop knees. Drawn up, mud-scuffed italian leather oxfords wedged into the bracket of the bus seat in front of them. But you changed it, she wants to scream to this entire bus of zombie-people on their way home from classes they’ll die before they pass, jobs they’ll never finish, you did change it, you did, you’re scared of that tape, aren’t you? I know you way too well to believe you. Or I did before this. Admit you changed it, that you were scared.
“I certainly was scared, how couldn’t I be? What if you slipped out the back gate, or worse, and something happened?”
Oh, don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare. But she’s talking only to herself. The channel is closed. Maybe Betty should heed his concern just as well, her jaw set, staring down at the frost-dusted carpet in their Beauty-and-the-Beast library where she found him in the seizure of his research, half-draped across a chaise that looks like a diamond with his elbows on an atlas-sized astronomy volume. There’s a cigarette holder balanced between his lips, a long, noir-style one, but there isn’t a cigarette in it. When she tracked him down to confront him over the key, the king had recited his explanation with such levity that it gave Betty a head rush. Enkrateia, right? Is that right?
“I wouldn’t do that. I didn’t know before.”
“And what doors do you so desire opened, darling?” Oh my god, it isn’t about that, Seattle Betty screams, but Princess Betty, for some reason, flashes hard back to that slice of darkness she found in the catacombs, the mausoleum-chapel she was too frightened to unlock. She’s still working on an answer when he takes the cigarette holder between his fingers and jabs the page in front of him with it like he’d do to a slide. Betty hadn’t noticed the Book of the Dead is lying face down on the polished floor.
“Look, this is the only door we need, isn’t it? Whatever you’re looking for behind all these locked doors, I’ll get for you, or I’ll find for you, or I’ll make for you. Or kill for you. Or be for you.” The tail end of that list spoken around the pipette in his teeth as he shuffles pages around, raised upon one swanlike arm. “Marcy wants to be a crown-bearer. She wants to ride in on a wolf or goat or something like it's a horse. Did she tell you that?” His laugh is short, high, mad. And yes, Betty has been helping him plan their wedding, quietly working up with him the time, the place, the conditions, another one of his impromptu “spells”.
“It’s so close now, you know? The portal.” She’s not thinking of flaking. It was her idea to begin with.
The next few minutes all play out before her: would the king really ration it worth the concern or the effort, frankly, to prepare the sentries for another fire-escape-scape, another ‘Adjani Stunt’ as they call it, another ribbon? He’s gone from blue to yellow recently, the spool must have run out. Anyways, why would she want to upset herself right now by pushing it? That’s how they get to these points that they do, these bloodlettings, these alleyway fights these circuitous, abandoning trips, through realms metaphysical and terraneous. Shadow work, he'd call it, it's healthy, sweetheart. Consensual chaos. Enkrateia.
So, petrified, Betty cannot answer, hardly capable of meeting his eyes as she finds him now so beautifully macabre, bleached ends and blueberry-muffin grey, bizarre, biological. Slowly revealing it to her in mirrored rooms, this unruly, kabukian creature Betty lets herself accept has always swam in these chlorinated waters and is not frightening but rather an elegant, psychosexual being that contained and coveted the source of power. Its flaming pearlescent eyes orbs of light reflecting red and gold as it works as ark and conduit to the energies of the crown. The crown which was not taking over her Simon but was sort of unfurling inside like those magic-grow dinosaur capsules, and sort of was him after all. Or at least no less of him than this newspaper clipping of a press photo, desaturated and grainy with her one eye caught like a drunk butterfly in the bottom left, or these polaroids bookmarking every volume Betty has never finished reading, tulip-headed, dizzy-eyed Hindu Kush forest fairies lost and forgotten between the annals of Foucault and Fight Club. Perhaps Simon is not entirely alone in that labyrinth of his.
Simon’s blonde-headed boy hovers in the street where the bus should be, watching him with eyes so blown wide and pink mouth trembling, he almost considers acknowledging his presence. Betty is pressed up at his shoulder, again, where she belongs (her words, if she’d ever stick to them). She smells like peach schnapps and a cigarette burn on the collar of her jacket. They’re both drunk, but something else is working on him, chiseling away up there, a lobotomy from a poltergeist.
“Would you love me if I was a butterfly?” A lobotomy from a butterfly. With little bug tools. Cute, cute, so cute. “I should have been a butterfly. Or maybe I’m screwed and that’s where I’m heading next, and it’s-it’s the universe giving me clues, or…or-” Her head is almost completely sideways on his shoulder. Arms criss-crossed, gripping her shoulders.
“Simon?”
He can’t really hear her, is the problem, not over the screaming. The boy is calling to him in Icelandic, he’s figured that much out, but Simon only remembers enough from their trip up there months ago to recognize the articulations, more of a whiny yelling than a scream. Whatever it is, it’s seriously wrapped up in the crown, which is seriously, carefully wrapped in a sweater in his bag now, its electromagnetic feelers buzzing once in a while down his leg. No coincidence, this kid is a long way from home. He should jot it down as best he can and translate it, because it’s sort of repetitive, his calls, each lilting at the end. Oh, come on, now.
“It's a sphinx.”
“What?”
“A sphinx. Guarding the portal.” Carefully, Simon slips his hand under the flap, and forces through its wrapping and to the metal, the tips of his fingers vibrating at the touch in a way not unlike the caress of an electric fence. He lets it trickle up to his head, cascade back down as glittery rain.
"How many children were killed over there this week?” Betty’s turned just enough to look at him, face slack, eyes narrowing as she processes this question. Simon wishes he could tell her this isn’t her fault, but that he’s so glad, so glad his fist is wrapped around the crown and he feels so, so, in control, and getting closer to fully comprehending that control. “More than usual? That’s why he’s been following me. I finally get it.” Betty follows his gaze into the street. It occurs to Simon the same way an open flame left unattended might, that they never talked about the tape. That he doesn’t even know what’s on it, and he should, because the way she looks at him now makes him feel weird and angry. He tightens his hand on the crown, and everything else loosens.
“Simon.”
“Do you know? Neither do I. Wow, this is crazy.”
“Simon.”
You know, I'm really glad we’re never having kids it would just make this harder-”
"-Don't." He remembers it like it was just last week, clear as day, though the Simon Petrikov in this scene probably should have been institutionalized, so far gone he was blind even to the little things like the half-conscious, desperate jab in her voice.
"I really am. If not all the evil in the world, we would find some way to kill it ourselves, right? Betty, what the hell are we doing, anyways? Why’d you come back? A-are you sure you meant to?" He had meant it.
Several feet back from him now, she had thrown her hands up to her neck like she knew that, like she had heard the four words that he, or whoever’s voice it was, didn’t say. Because it wasn't him, it wasn't his voice, at least not back then. Betty! Betty, I’m sorry, you know how I get, I’m your selkie. Or, maybe you’re mine? Isn’t the idea of that silly, the two of us in the shallows trying to rip off each other's skin with our soft little paws for three years? Marry me. Now. Damn the rules, damn the stories the fucking stories what do they know and what does it fucking matter it’s not real none of this is real in fact this is all something we made up to take the edge off and you know that as well as I do, sweetheart so it’s alright in the end, whenever the end does come.
Now they know how to communicate without talking over one another, him and this misty, white star Betty made of him through some kind of horrible, forced cytokinesis, who just can’t die because it still lives inside him. They sit entwined. He needed to only ask, and it told him, just as he once dove, blizzard-blind, into the labyrinth of his head to request, please, lead me back to her, show me where to find her, and it gave him that, drew him back into step. The madness wouldn't kill you as long as you made love to it - and it could read your thoughts. It could move your limbs. It could use your mouth.
Black tears up in a line from the bow in the king’s lip. It breaks the curse. It always breaks the curse. Little scratches on his ribs, hardly cracking apart the skin in little pinpricks, a handful of bloody noses. Seattle Betty had convinced herself one dizzy night that there was something wrong with her inside, something evil snarling up her veins, her head going foggy, and not sure if it was how heavy they'd gone on the self-medication earlier that day, or if she was losing her grip on an instinct she had so far been able to keep docile, but she had awoken to her left arm dead asleep and curled beneath a canvas of wobbling binding sigils finger-painted in flaky, dry blood. This was all laughable, of course, forgotten the moment he shut the door on the subject. He's smiling at her now, mouth half-open in surprise, then pulls himself up on one arm, cigarette holder rolling between the cushions, and runs the tip of a finger across his upper lip to collect the bluish runoff, welling thick as a raindrop at the end of the gash.
"I-I wasn't sure you still could anymore." Eyes flickering up between hers and the blood he smears away with his thumb, as if confused by the bizarreness of her claim - but come on, that was fair. It certainly doesn't look healthy, or human, or-or-or… And she is all but a corpse, herself.
"I deserved that, didn't I?"
"I'm sorry." Enkrateia, princess.
His skinny hand up to his chin, which collects another little river from his busted lip, the king is staring at her like a begging animal, smiling in that constant way that he does, now. Immediately, the princess knows what he means, slings the key around her neck and into his palm and watches him smear his other thumb across its gears, hovering a centimeter away, changing it in midair. He had all the twists and turns of it memorized?
It’s a tricky business, their twin victim complexes, their possessive nature. The violence that gripped her, the only possible evolution of Betty’s fanatical young idolization, the satisfaction of simple victories such as the side of a hand on a page, an image in a photograph, three-finger touches only leading way to more possibility - a borrowed scarf, a tongue, a bed, binding rituals, names. The princess takes the bloodied back of his hand and holds it to her lips, then, when his smile breaks once more, sharp and glowing, drops it, drops to one knee on the edge of the chaise, and takes his face in her hands. Twists it, and licks his mouth all the way across, a dark smear over his stupid, dazed smile when she pushes him back.
Would Betty have done that back in Seattle? No, they had both lost themselves a bit more, that was why he kept using that mantra of his - he was failing at keeping it in. In the same way she blames Simon for seducing her into a violence she once did not know, she has become a catalyst to his delusions and knows it - they'd always gone off the rails easier together, shy, geekish alone, dangerously flammable in each other's sights. Pushing it, pushing it, locking the door, hiding the key, drink me, take me, roll me and smoke me, please, please, I don’t care, I don’t care, worry about it later, until she couldn’t see anymore, couldn’t breathe, so deep inside she still doesn't think she'll ever have the strength to pull away.
The first time they had done this, this licking of wounds, it hadn’t been by design. Before Simon had invited even the idea of evil to her, Betty had smuggled it in herself, walking right through his door with the blood still stinging against her sleeve, and they were getting way too close with one another now for him not to notice. A moment’s touch on the spine of a book at shoulder height, and he was half-dragging, half-pressing her into the bathroom, not giving her any choice in the matter, tunnel-visioned in an enchanting way, but humiliating still. Hand on the back of her head, yanking loose her ponytail. Two weeks before, he had finally kil- he had finally kissed her for the first time. That zombie virus had started going around. Or it was the vampires, but one way or another, she suddenly couldn’t get deep enough, trying every door, letting herself run free only to languish in these fruitless, clawing efforts to break into his torso.
“There.” She had opened her eyes to his hands at her wrist, pulling something sharp edged and still soft, the ribbon from her hair - into a bow. Such a perfect bow, his fingers pulling the ends of these tight and even not quite yet committed to her memory. “Doesn’t that feel better?” And it did. So she let him keep doing it.
“February the eighth.”
“This tape is not to be included in the body of work I have compiled up until our last entry.”
There is no use, now, in watching this tape. Simon simply wakes up loading it in the VCR, as he said he would, telling himself he needed to see it, to see what Betty saw. Whatever could he have done? What could the crown have done? At the sight of himself, his hands go into fists, then spring open just as quick, leaving him hissing in pain. The frostbite is getting worse. He is addicted to making it snow, ever since that last night Betty ran out, a pattern he has started to process easier in the past few weeks, that maybe she would vanish for an hour, two, creeping back in under the cover of night, shutting all the windows she could, turning off the ceiling fan, Petrikov pretending to be sleeping, her moving soundlessly around, drunk, an errant flake of snow, only to collapse in a breeze of nicotine and sweet wine, burrowing into him like she didn’t remember what happened between them, either.
Now, these mountains of quilts surrounding the dark gashes of his window-eyes lie untouched, twisted in the piles he built of them to fruitlessly guard the silk from dripping paint, and the heat bill beckons, but he really doesn’t care. With luck, this stretch of Betty’s little portal wouldn’t last until the first of the month. How he can gauge this whatsoever, Simon can’t explain, only lay receptive to the soft gush of wind moving through the open windows, over the bed, transcribing each note, turning it around. They’d talk for hours, this feral, bitter, needy thing with its promises of grandeur, him casting the snow up at the ceiling fan, repeating each syllable as they die as tears around him on a bare mattress. Something Betty did to him kept this fever away, and she's been gone, again, and he isn't sure if - and a whispery, powdered sugar voice says she’s gone, Simon, don't worry, let’s do it again, she can't try to stop you, you don't have to hide it anymore, what you really want, what you really need.
Long distance call. The signal is touchy, because the crown isn’t here right now, it’s in the ceiling panel above his desk. It hurts not to need her more than this, but Betty really has to stay away, or he’d ask her to go bring it back. She’d do it too, and she’d know she shouldn’t, but she’d do it anyway. Simon’s sending out a message of his own, under his own radar: Betty, you have to help me get it out. Please. I can circle exactly where it is inside me.
Always looking inwards, Betty has this way of reaching around inside and conjuring up something in there you didn’t even know existed, apparitions and storybook villains and surgeons and kittens. All he’s ever found is entrails and little pieces of metal and new stains to soak away in the bathroom sink. She flicks his mouth open like a latch and draws a violin bow from behind her back.
If the king knew it to be so easy, he would say to her look, let's take this apart, let’s really sit together and unzip and take our notes, does this look a few shades wrong to you? Is this supposed to be moving a little faster? This is too cold - hey, you know what, is the organ store open this late? The snow has all but melted and there’s that place across the street that sells the sake in those cute little cans you like those little cans-
Or Here, no, hold it vertical, drag down. It must be easier to do it on oneself. But you don’t even know if it’ll make you feel better or worse, sweetheart. Why open this door, when it hurts and it’s all messy, and look, maybe I remember the steps of a thoracotomy, but, let’s be serious, here, love-
Or What, you’re hungry? Here’s a bone to gnaw on! That’s how he sounds. Not as if he feels good about it! But with the crown, they are both hard as diamonds, he knows for a fact that his organs are a wreck, that he probably wouldn’t live five minutes if the power decided to go out.
-so what difference does it make if you think there’s something wrong with your heart, huh? Like I said, I remember the steps, I’d never let anything happen to you.
The king had found he was more powerful than expected when separated from the crown, but he’s still no good at unfeeling. It’s been freezing the skin off his palms like stigmata, and it’s worse now than it was last week, or the week before, and Simon hasn’t even been paying attention, but the second he does, he can hardly hold a cassette anymore. Keys are out of the question, bottlecaps impossible. What he can do is turn the tape back on.
“I’m not sure what this is for. I felt lucid. I wanted to take advantage. I wanted to…uh, what, get to the point? While there’s still time? If there is?” Questions, questions, questions, who the fuck are you talking to? Who?
The screen’s angle is fucking jagged, but the king can still glimpse the edge of a doorway above his reflection’s head every time it moves, and its easier to look at it and think of its intrinsic promise than it is to look in any mirror these days - it’s his eyes, every time they meet, it’s someone else, the way acid or some childish play-pretend Bloody Mary games could fool you. Stand there and look at yourself until your body starts to resist it, until it starts to slough off what you’ve spent a lifetime micromanaging, and the truth comes out - that you don’t know who this is at all, that you’re just a consciousness, only possessing a physical body that you were convinced since birth was only yours, and could not be usurped. Ocular illusion, that's all, maybe if you didn’t shill out for a doctorate of dead shit instead of the few things still living, you’d know that. There it is, your breakthrough! In film, in living-ish flesh.
I get it, ok? I get it, you don’t have to keep telling me. I knew it was stronger than me, and I didn’t care. I still don’t.
“It’s this war. I have to blame it on that, to some extent, right? It’s telling me how it will end, and with me at the crux of it, right where the tide turns. Compelled to…to get it over with, but to survive, too. To allow this power to move me, with all its rage. But…I find it hard to trust this rage, these terrible impulses. The-the hallucinations, they are so…primordial. They cannot touch me, but I-I feel them inside still. Crawling, needing something from me I don't know how t-to give so I just sit there, let it take-”
Smack, somehow it works, the screen swallowing itself up once the remote hits its frame in the vague location of the power button. If only it were that easy to knock out your batteries, to break the glass, huh?
She finishes it in the middle of a sleepless night. Right on schedule. The last night before the opening of the Regulus Portal. Betty was never any good at finishing anything without Simon. Theses, engagements, projects like this. It brings an unfamiliar, rushing high across her, with tools thrown aside save for the adze that has managed to stay hooked through the sash of her dress, up against the back wall. Strangely out of breath, as if she had to tear them out of herself by hand, a mess of ribbons and cables in tight coils of strangely pornographic rigidity, not unlike medieval torture device scans in books she used to like, the snaking lengths of these questionable and surgical devices gripping jagged flesh of withdrawn arms and ankles, Bouguereau’s Psyche in reverse, and maybe somewhat forceful, but only for the fact that Betty never fixed her mouth, left it ragged, a black hole. It was poignant or whatever. Before that, it was dumbed down to an approaching kiss.
Freehandedly scaled one-to-one, it’s an organic mirror, that’s all, deliquescent and still. The serenity and elegance of sainthood powder-puffed all over a scene from Dante. If things were still normal, this would be an open invite to a spiel of the king’s on the act of creation, on Frankenstein’s folly. But there is something stillborn in it, no matter how you look at it. Releasing them from their icey grave could not invoke, what, life? Much less a couple hundred pounds of flesh and bone. It’s only an effigy, a true shesepankh. Ha. Haha.
“Betty?”
This time, he hasn’t snuck up on her, is moving across the shadowed wall like a wraith, going quiet for a moment, careening to a halt. He’s looking at it, for real, wavering, arms clamped around his ribcage, the rest of him a ghost’s tail. Betty can't seem to open her mouth, and maybe she truly isn't allowed that, but it is not dissimilar to the iron choke of silence that came from all wild creatures wandering into your path or campsite. Petrified.
The king, index finger out, swiping it across his carved cheek.
“Couldn’t sleep?” He is like a star. It’s only a trick of the ice, the princess knows it well, by now, just like she used to know the rain, the moonlight dashing across it, ricocheting all around them. Every plane of his creation with faces turned at him, a thousand of his victims fainting as he turns on his heel, laughs, backs away until he hits the wall. Right under the façade of her face.
“I could ask you the same, couldn’t I?”
“You could do that.” Maybe all his dramatics would be lost on someone else, five seconds leaning, twisted, against the wall, against his own shoulder, shadowing it, his whole body a perfect curve, then dropping the act, striding over, quick, falling down next to her. For some reason, when he nears her, she thinks she feels warmer.
“I can’t handle my dreams.”
“Blame the moon, it’s getting close to full.” As if to remind herself there still is one, she cranes her neck and sets her eyes on it, waning, thinning herself, but it isn’t all that different from the view to her left. “Never?”
She turns to face him when he doesn't answer, and on cue, his head swings halfway to meet her, cornered between wall and shoulder. Eyes somehow bigger, or glossier, reflecting the dark of their past hue, eyelashes still as long, blonded. Something behind them cuts into the princess in a way that she can't feel but knows. Disrobed. Deassessioned, if only for a moment.
"I can't…" The piece of metal they treat like a golden fleece has not followed him. Betty watches how he grapples with himself without it, weird and kind of soft all of a sudden. It’s funny, what a difference of character could result from a change so simple, when you didn’t really belong to yourself. “You know, sometimes, it gets really uh…quite angry with me, if I try to stave it off. Makes me sick." Simon was sick when all of this went south, looking as he does now, this deadening expression and breathless, feverish affect. Acting as if nothing was real, clearly hallucinating sometimes, so that Betty could only stare at him and wait eagerly for some fucking explanation, the answers to any of her mounting questions. It never seemed to cross his mind that she was owed even one.
At least now, he seems to have evened out - didn’t they used to love taking their expeditions together to the z-axis? Doesn’t their kingdom prove his faculties - and doesn’t Betty see yet how right it was to run, to lock themselves away together, waiting, safe and hidden, for a portal to take them out of there forever? Before they run out of magic? Their little corner now, in the shadow of their twins on the wall, is starting to feel like a bubble. An invisible chamber with an air supply clearly demarcated.
"It-it can bring me right to the edge, until I have to open my mouth just to breathe, and it’s always, you know, cocked and loaded.” There they go, his hands, their glossy arrowhead points, always painted now, roaming around, entangling each other, wrapping around his jaw, hiding. Dancing around his mouth as if he isn’t sure whether or not he needs to shut up. “It doesn’t sleep when I do. And then, there’s this spirit, hallucination, whatever that always comes as an owl, a big, golden owl, and he’s not going to let me be until I solve his little…sphinxey riddle.” One hand fluttering around at that, illustratively flippant, tonally hopeless. “Fuck, princess, I need to tell you something.”
“Anything.” This clarity of his has her on edge, desperate, fallen against the wall, all but sunk into his shoulder. His hands over his face, side to side, his tousled hair swirling around.
“Alright.” Hands down, flat, smack, against his knees.
Not looking at her, but her wall. She knows it’s going to be bad.
“Marceline…we sort of…we fell out. A long time ago. But she’d be around and, well, she knew this girl - I mean, not even human, but she sort of looked like you. Acted like you. God, I don’t remember anything, just how bad it hurt. And it was so hard to go on after you left, centuries just...gone. As if I didn’t know what direction I had been running my whole life, and my legs didn’t work, anymore, and all there was left was my needing you and this…this body that only lived as a vehicle for the crown, that uh…that creature inside of it. Hypnotized…braindead, really. But so angry. So angry that I didn’t have you.”
Some horrible beast is stirring under the princess’ skin.
“Anyways, I guess there was this whole thing, then, you know, I realized that she wasn’t you. I was so out of it, I don’t know what it was I did, what…magic I still had control over, but somehow…I-I don’t know, I don’t remember. I just know she became sort of obsessed with me at some point, and I just realized how messed up everything was. How pathetic, that-that I would just blindly…throw myself at anyone who even reminded me a little bit of…of…”
He still can’t look her in the eye, but it’s telling, how his thumb has been drawing, very subtly, across that place on his ribcage he doesn’t let her see.
“Well, somehow, it gave me the clarity to realize what I had let the crown do to me, what it was turning me into, the creature that it needed for a host. So…so I-I learned to mediate it…but…but things still aren’t right.”
“What happened to her?”
“Whatever happened wasn’t my fault.” A quick little parry. “But I do, I plan to make it right! Everything right! That’s what tomorrow is about.”
The parasite inside her is twisting her brain stem into knots. It was the mention of that magic. The concept that it was the source of his power over whoever he wanted. Was the magic to blame for every time Betty came back? Every time she tried to leave him and lost? No, no she thought it through every time. She cannot think herself so dumb.
“Alright.”
“Alright?”
“Yeah, alright.”
She’s smiling, hardly noticing she is. So Simon had always been just as obsessed with her as she was with him. The princess doesn’t even have it in her to worry about some other fill-in-the-blank girl that occupied a space in her absence. She just doesn’t care. Should he expect her to care? The look on his face is impossible, slack, his breathing slow, heavy.
“Do you want to go skating?”
When she was getting her footing back post-comet, fuck, post-coma, they’d spent hours skating. Whatever it was that had possessed her, exhausted her power, this ritual mitigated things, took her back to a familiar place, and it kept her quiet, preoccupied. Their focus on one another always so intense: gliding, sometimes only standing still, a night breeze gently pushing at them across a lake as wide as a crater. Simon must have fallen into it hard, he's become so good at it without her, but he was always like that, throwing himself into things unheeded.
Study him, in this case. Drop him in a room with anything like a piano. Put him in skates, ivory leather. You can't make sense of it. Whatcha doing with Psychofag, Betty, tag-team Frankenstein? You gonna summon him a dick to suck? “Hey, not a bad ide-” crack! Half the USC goth scene bore witness then to that insignificant player hooked three feet back before toppling over in a muddle of chain and ratty hair, and Betty never even had to stop walking. I think I just broke my hand, is all he ever said about it, wringing it out, sliding across three octaves. He didn't break it. He didn't even sprain it. Betty is suddenly reminded of the vampire they had killed together.
Anyways, he's obviously holding back for her. It's so wonderful to not have to worry about when or where the ice is safe, he keeps saying, and she thinks of the manufactured rink in the city that sucked them in every time they tried to pass it, high, always attached at the fingers, sometimes only spinning each other around in misshapen circles. In the forest extending behind the castle, every tributary is another road, even if the ground surrounding the ice cannot be traveled. You can follow this forever if you want to, the king tells her, sliding backwards into the dark of the holloway, it never goes back uphill. Trusting him, she lets go, the wind taking her, because where is there to go, if not after him? The banks of survival are something she cannot touch, despite them burgeoning on all sides of her, Betty lets her gaze drop to her skates and finds herself moving unheeded, only reflections at her feet.
Then, one of the truest sensations she thinks she’s felt since she came to the castle bursts from the slush of fluid in her skull, and the veiny trees start to tighten, and things start to get dark, and-
“Hey, Simon?” Why should she be worried? Should she even care? The river turns into a whirlpool in the dark that she spins on the surface of like a leaf. Then heavy, quicksandy, something she used to think about so much, when she was at least semi-autonomous, all that time once spent in Florida marshland, knowing good and well it wasn’t like in the movies, but wanting it to be. Sacrificing rocks into the depths when finally she did find some, mind on a Björk song she can hardly remember now, only the melody. Her bones are so dense now, and yet so crystalline, as if supported by butterfly wings extended behind her, certainly not belonging to either of the two of them, but familiar as her own.
Everything swims, everything that escapes this hurricane, running to the basement of her, anyways. Swish, swish, swish, the smell of rain on cardboard, spattering against brick and concrete with every passing car. A dead rat. Giggling. No, not her, her head, but from what it lays against. Scrunchie holding on by a tangle. A hand cold as death slipping against her side. Not a stream of black syrup on an ice cream cake, but an alleyway flooding.
“Fuck. Fuck.” Again? Right now? Betty is gathering her bearings, an unfamiliar scarf, the body behind her. The slushy ground under her boots toooooooo smooth. The second she starts to look around, hands appear around her, her entire body coming into existence in a bang. Sharp corner of the abandoned glass factory. The holographic glow off the bus stop sign. All of this of her, and all of this tangled in the yoke around her back.
“Wrong portal.” Something very tenebrous and hard about this little joke, a subdued breathlessness beneath it. It takes a moment for Betty to register it. Cold, cold. Is this what it is like to be an ember? Is it cold, the flesh that suffocates you? All he would have to do is twist his wrist towards her with the right tool fluttering silver in his fingers, and she'd be an ember and he'd be a scar, wait, no, a star.
Stifling the tremor it causes with a free hand, his chin pushing into collarbone-well, that immortal smile that wasn’t quite grimace, wasn’t quite psychopathic, wrapped around something…weak, animal, the soft underside stretched out, there for the breaking. If she had held her ear to his chest, Betty might have been able to hear him.
Without Betty, nothing survives. At every turn is a vampire, a zombie, and the worst of all, a body that could only lie still. Sometimes, it was laying bare in the open, leftovers like so many chicken bones down the side street from the sketchiest joint in town, crammed between that and the neighboring hookah lounge’s dumpsters. Sometimes, they had something you needed, so you had to check every single pocket. For every single body. A few memorable bodies:
It takes no more than twenty-eight days for both of them, but mostly Petrikov, to regret lab girl, who once upon a time and looking much too worse for wear for the accuracy of her propositioning to truly be embarrassing, offered up the crown from her backpack, a crumbley, limp ziploc of half-melted snow, to use the telephone for four terrible hours. Not a single one going through, finally giving way to that excruciating moment when she finally let her stiff hand off the receiver that divebombed, the cable bouncing limply from the weight of it before twirling to a violent halt against the doorframe. Her whole family would be dead, then, he’s sure. Truly a broken record, in the space of her silence Simon catches the rigored arm of the needle beside him that has been dead in orbit since her arrival. It’s seventh sense to him now, the coordinates in space of My Iron Lung.
Peripherally, he takes note of the full-body shiver going through lab girl. Her jaw slack above her series of upturned collars. Wavering under the weight of her stuffed bookbag. The king supposes she isn’t going to leave, even if it’s entirely puzzling how she tracked down his number, even in desperation. Was he really that high on the list of those left to trust? Well, Betty fled, after all. Gave right up. Sooooooooooo, lab girl, you can’t stand here in your ash-filmed glasses and dumb stare like you’re fucking her or something like I’m at all in a position to be your fucking protector or mother or fall for any of this shit again (cause she knows Petrikov is gonna fall for it and that’s why she broke into his office and got it for him, because she actually understands or she’s pretending to under stand because they forced the dorms evacuated or they’re all still fucking talking about it up there CHRIST kill half of them and they’d only talk louder, and hey, anyways, fuck you, he would rather save the passenger seat on this rocketship for Betty and if for nothing else, he wants people to know that, well, you know, if it was his choice it would be Jackson Pollock in two flavors across this…this grift.
Even if it was only a handful of sidewalk chalk in a box fan, a blizzard was rolling in.
“You need to run.”
“Are you running?” He can smell the fire on her from where he has been watching her botch her apocalypse plans, back pressed against the wall, far as he could get from the door, the box television aside it, behind the screen of which he has been keeping the crown, just in case, but which lies empty now.
"I'm trying to tell you it isn't safe here." It was all so heavy, on the tip of his tongue, but the crown was right there beside him, still wrapped up, and even if he wasn't afraid of telling her, he just seriously had no faith in anyone but Betty believing his story - god, what is her name, anyways? No, no, don't let it find that out. Keep it away. It's the hopeless hope that is all he can grasp for Betty, she whose name is written all over his arms and legs. “Quick, before he comes back.” He had figured, and figured right, that it would be just enough to scare her.
Out into just what, he’ll never know. The city was emptied fast, trains swished full with the unaffected. But Simon always figured her dead, for some reason. It helped him later on, rationalizing away his lack of confidence in protecting Marceline in favor of dumb, blind preservation - he was not going to make this mistake with her. Even though he sort of did.
Even yet, there exists this realm of love and beauty, a paradisiacal lion’s den hiding in their bedroom wall, the king can feel the vibrations of the avalanche that is coming to wipe it clean, piling over all the high-rises and the dirt and everything not worth loving or living, anymore, if they ever were deserving of such to begin with. When the snow settles, he terrorizes his consciousness with a kingdom of stardust, gleaming white at the center of this emptiness, and the new truth, that only the right incantation and the right conditions and the crown, of course, can garner the magic energy to allow them through the gate. He and Betty.
That is all he wants, Betty, Betty, Betty oscillating as usual, he is going to go find Betty and drag her back home from the depths of her solitude, if he has to, once the fever passes. They will get through this together, or not at all.
"It's so wonderful, you know,” when he finds her, when they have settled, up against this evergreen, the impossibly-high branches a canopy of needles.”Once you have faith, and peace, you know, enkrateia, or however Foucault put it. Take control of yourself.” the hand on her hip slipping, taking hold again at her belt, his chin hooking tighter around her shoulder.
“Do you…you think that we’ll know? That we’re there?” Betty asks him. He can feel her shiver through his opposite hand in hers, isn’t sure how it is possible.
“I have confidence in our ritual - you know, the experiment you were wanting to do. That hypothetical effect you always refused to tell me about.”
Is it…weird that he’s speaking in the past tense, or is she just high? Is she dreaming?
“You’re not falling asleep on me, are you?" Managing to shake her head. “Good.” Swish, another car sending up a shower of half-frozen gutter glitter. It begins to set in, the concrete steps under her boots, one of the red doors at her side, a strip of paint fluttering barklike. She can feel the breath at her ear like a puff of laughing gas, an illustrious circlet around her waist that ends in four tangled hands. Betty picks her head back up. The cold is seeping in again.
“Simon, did you…go back in time? Is that why you’re taking us through this portal?”
“Oh, no.” Skipping upwards into the side of her neck. “Yes, actually, yes. Not yet. It’s just mental, princess, you know, you wrote the book on that. How ruinous - ‘black hole theory’ is what you called it.” Betty wishes she could see his face. She knows all his tricks. And he knows that she knows them. “Even remembering is a sort of black hole, isn’t it? And it sucks just as hard.”
The Petrikov Effect is this “black hole theory”. With one stone, she can kill, like, four paradoxes. Trying to fight his war is like trying to light a fire in the airless vacuum of space. There is so damn much everything, it might as well be nothing. They are so much a part of each other, they never communicate, their lives no longer their own, and still they elude one another. All roads lead to Rome, and that’s where they’re heading fast, but in a city of immigrants and refugees, how would anyone get to know your name? It's in thinking all of this that Betty doesn't see the headlights of the bus until it has driven straight past them.