It's Always Time

by Oblimo

  Black Cherry fixed the stock boy with her bottomless stare. "What's your name?"

  "Uh. Eddie."

  "Do you sell paint, Eddie?"

  "Aisle three," Eddie the stock boy said, unblinking.

  She took a step closer. "Do you sell black paint?"

  "Aisle three, freezer-side left," Eddie gulped, gooseflesh prickling his arms and neck.

  She stepped closer still, her wings buffeting his hair. "Do you sell black latex paint?"

  "Aisle three," Eddie croaked, "freezer-side left, center shelf. Just a pint or two, though."

  "More than I need, thank you. Say, Eddie…" Black Cherry gave Eddie's cheek a friendly tweak, raising a bruise. "Has anyone ever told you that you look good enough to eat?"

  "Do you really think meliae can make more meliae?" Yves wondered. "We're dealing with magic and dream-logic, here. There could be a rule against it."

  "There's also a rule that nanomek never does what you expect," Dee said. "It's the most important rule, apparently, so maybe it applies to meliae too."

  "I don't know what's worse," Yves said, scrutinizing the hallway again, "Cherry Cupcake planning to make more meliae or Cherry Cupcake making more meliae that don't turn out as planned."

  "Jesus, I hadn't thought of that."

  "I've run out of ideas, myself," Yves said. "We have to check out Bee's place eventually, anyway." He stepped through the doorway. "Let's get it over with."

  They sidled down the hallway. "Who else lives down here?" Yves asked.

  "Esteban. You know," Dee said into Yves blank stare, "good looking guy, always acts like he just broke up with his girlfriend, goes home with a new girl every other night? Not your scene, I guess. I doubt he's home."

  "Is he Bee's next door neighbor?"

  "No," Dee said. "That's Kay."

  "Kay's back from Iraq?"

  "Don't know, but don't worry," Dee whispered, "Kay sleeps like the dead, no amount of noise can wake him up—unless you're trying to be quiet or sneaking around, that is."

  "Like we are now?"

  "Shit," Dee said a normal volume. "Good point. Sorry."

  Yves marched to the door with the jar sitting in front of it like something left out for the milkman. He nudged the jar aside with his foot, his eyes focused on the glass peephole directly in front of him. He rattled the knob. "Locked. Do your thing, Dee," he said, moving back, "and don't be sneaky."

  Dee kicked out. The metal door refused to bend and Dee's right foot punched through it like an awl through leather until his leg pushed knee-deep. "Cheap door," Dee said, hopping on his left leg to keep his balance.

  "That's what it's supposed to do, I think," Yves said, backing even further away. "Although I doubt the designers ever took into account someone strong enough to actually puncture the damn door."

  "Okay, then," Dee grumbled. He reared up, shifting his full weight onto his trapped leg and butting the door with his head. The hinges groaned, the door caved in, and Dee toppled into the apartment.

  "That would have woken the dead," Yves said after a long pause. "I don't think Kay's home."

  "There're Styrofoam peanuts all over the place in here," Dee remarked.

  "How does it smell?" asked Yves.

  "The peanuts?" said Dee, lying atop the pierced metal door and crammed into the apartment's tiny foyer. Paint scraped off the walls whenever he tried to move. "Yves, I need a little help here. I think I'm stuck."

  Out in the hallway, Yves fell into a ready stance. "Try thinking for a second, Dee, and tell me if you smell anything."

  "It is a little ripe in here, now that you mention it. Sickly sweet, like—Oh, shit." Dee bucked, bending the door at a ninety-degree angle, only trapping his right leg tighter. "You don't think Bee made two of them, do you?"

  "Sickly sweet like what?"

  Dee shuffled, making no progress. "Not like cookies, thank God. Garbage and air freshener. No, not air freshener…Galatea."

  The door shred like tissue paper under his hands and Dee stumbled into the apartment's living room. A moment later Yves followed, picking his way through the sharp strips of shorn sheet metal. "This place is directly below yours, Dee," he said, "so that makes sense. Check out the ceiling. It's tie-dyed mint green."

  Dee relaxed enough to take in his surroundings. "The fridge's wide open but the light's out and I don't hear the compressor running. I guess that's where the smell's coming from. No sewage-meliae to worry about, thank God."

  "I was thinking more along the lines of other bits and pieces of Bee," Yves said, rummaging through the clutter of old mail on Bee's coffee table.

  "Ew. Thanks, I'll keep that in mind." Dee rifled through the cushions of Bee's black leather couch. "We're looking for the nanomek, I take it?"

  "Yeah, on the odd chance we've lucked out and Cherry Cupcake doesn't have it, we've got to find it and put it somewhere safe. Man, look at all these mail-order catalogues. Did Bee collect anime action figures or something?"

  "Trust me; you don't want to know," Dee said, "I'll check out the kitchen."

  Yves contemplated the ceiling. "It's not seeping down," he pondered aloud. "It's spreading across."

  "What?" Dee said from the kitchenette.

  "I'll be in the bedroom," said Yves.

  The refrigerator door was propped open by a massive, metal mixing bowl. Dee rolled it aside and shut the door, ignoring wilting vegetables spotted with mold and a burst, soupy package of ground beef. He hefted the bowl off the floor, testing its weight. Dee sniffed a hint of chocolate cherry cordial candy. "Speaking of magic and dream-logic," Dee called out, "you should see the bowl Bee made Cherry Cupcake in. It's a god-damned cauldron."

  Dee caught a glimpse of the kitchen table and whistled. "Holy crap." The mixing bowl thudded onto the stove. "That's a lot of Jell-O. Yves! There must be two dozen empty boxes of cherry Jell-O in here. All that collagen; no wonder she was so strong…Wait a minute."

  Dee bent down and picked a lone, empty box of Devil's Food instant pudding from the floor. Its cardboard was crusted with a dull russet stain. Dee wished it were ketchup, beet juice, or even Cherry Cupcake cum, but he knew better. "Devil's food." He turned to the mixing bowl. "Witch's cauldron." There was more russet on its rim. "I bet he bled a little into the mix, too." He glanced out the bay window into the golden dawn. "All on a night of the New Moon. Bee, you idiot."

  "Dee," came Yves' shaky voice from the bedroom. "You'd better get in here."

  Dee crossed the living room and trod down the little hallway to the bedroom. Galatea's scent mixed with the earthy must of mildewed plaster. Yves stood in the bedroom doorway. "Don't freak out," he said, moving back. "Just look and tell me if you think there's anything we can do."

  The bedroom ceiling was pitted with lime-stained fissures and craters. Strips of greenish drywall formed stalactites around a broken plywood support beam breaching the spongy stucco and blemished the walls. The catastrophic water damage barely registered. Dee's attention was transfixed by dozens of containers. Salad and soup bowls, aluminum pots and steel pans, glass beer mugs and countless plastic cups littered every flat surface in the room. "He was collecting her," Dee whispered. The Devil's Food box tumbled to the floor. "Her, uh, runoff."

  "I know." Yves picked up a nearby Pyrex measuring cup and handed it over. A rind of pale green powder coated the mouth and walls of the glass and a thick, florescent green sludge glazed the bottom. "They're all pretty much like this, mostly evaporated. Do you think there's anything we can do? If Cherry Cupcake knew about this, she wouldn't have left anything here if she thought we could."

  "Maybe she didn't know everything," Dee said. He pressed a finger into the measuring cup. The sludge felt cold and lifeless, the fingerprint he left in it as unchanging as an astronaut's footprint on the Moon. "Maybe she didn't know what she never experienced."

  "What are you thinking, Dee?" Yves asked.

  ["…nanomek always holds a little energy and some of your cum—maybe a milliliter or two—in reser
ve, out of instinct or something like that…"]

  "You're so quiet I can't tell if you're freaking out or not," Yves added.

  "I can't afford to freak out," Dee said, "now that I can bring Galatea back."

  "How?"

  "Three Ds."

  "What?"

  "The three Ds," Dee repeated, searching out glasses and clear plastic cups. "Remember? She said that's all she'd ever need."

  Yves thought for a moment, then twitched with sudden recognition. "I can help you with the first two," he offered.

  "I don't think we'll need more of the third."

  Yves was collecting plastic cups near the bedroom window when he said, "What the Hell is this?"

  Dee glanced up from his growing stack of glasses. "It's a webcam on top of a broom handle." He pointed at camera's winking LED light. "It's on."

  Yves followed the camera's cabling to Bee's worktable. He fished a receipt out of a plastic bag crumpled by the keyboard. "Bee bought a three hundred gigabyte external hard drive a few days ago." He sat in Bee's mesh desk chair and brought his computer out of hibernation. "It's full." He hunched over Bee's computer monitor and called up an image viewer. "Oh my God," he said, mouse clicking furiously.

  "What?"

  "Well, Dee," Yves sighed as the monitor flickered. "I've always wondered, and now I know, thanks to you, Galatea, and a little help from Bee."

  "Know what?"

  Yves punched a key and a high resolution video filled the screen. "I am completely, one hundred percent, absolutely gay. This stuff isn't turning me on at all."

  Dee came up behind him. "That's a prototype of her bed trick, I think. Too bad we never got to try the final version."

  Yves pressed his palms against his cheeks, aghast. "I'm not turned on but I can't look away. How are you breathing between those?" He advanced the video a few minutes. "Or under there?" He advanced it again. "Or in that?"

  "That's when I learned how to hold my breath for half an hour," Dee said, blushing. "At least. Never found out how long I could go. I, uh, kind of take over in a little while. That's part of the game…Yeah, there I go. Huh. Wow."

  "'Wow?'" Yves laughed, hitting the fast forward button. "I see how you learned Goojitsu." He turned to face Dee. "Why aren't you angry? The Dee I know would be punching holes in walls and threatening to kill Bee."

  "He's already dead," Dee said. He waved an arm over all the containers on the floor. "Besides, if this works, he's given Galatea back to me. I let all this happen—I gave him the nanomek and then I pushed Galatea away. And now thanks to Bee I have a chance to put things right."

  "Except Bee will still be dead," Yves pointed out.

  Dee shrugged. "I don't have a problem with that, to be honest."

  Few minutes later they had almost a dozen cups and glasses filled with water catching the sunlight from the sill of kitchenette's bay window. In the cloudless dawn, the water looked polluted with algae and silt. "Maybe we should stir it? I mean her?" Yves suggested after staring for a long while. Silent minutes crawled passed and he added, "Uh, maybe I should lie down for a while and you could work on the third D. I'm beat. Literally."

  Dee took up two cups, careful not to spill a drop. "The bathtub." He made his slow way to the bathroom. Dee placed the two cups gently on the bathroom's linoleum floor. He hunted down Bee's drain stopper and made sure the seal was air tight before he poured the cups' contents into the tub and started the tap running warm. Yves came in with two more glasses and Dee said, "You rest a while and I'll fill the tub. Maybe if I can collect enough together…"

  In about an hour the tub was half full with warm limeade. "I'm going to have to call in sick soon," Yves called from the couch.

  "Maybe you should go," Dee said, watching the random ripples of the green bathwater, hoping to see any kind of pattern. "It looks like she's going to need the final D after all—or maybe this just isn't working and I need to find where Cherry Cupcake's taken the rest of her. I still have to do that, no matter what happens. There's no way I'm going to let Cherry Cupcake hurt her—any of her—anymore. But I don't want her to hurt you again, either."

  Yves shuffled in and put a kind hand on Dee's shoulder. "Forget that, I'm sticking with you." He took his hand away. "Although I will duck out for this last bit."

  "Of course," Dee said, his smile wan.

  "Maybe there's something I can do in the meantime," Yves suggested. "There's no window in here. What if I borrowed some grow lights?"

  "Some what?"

  "A natural light lamp," Yves explained. "You know, for tropical fish? Or indoor gardening? Or…"

  "There's only one person I know who, uh, 'gardens' in a closet," Dee said.

  "There's only one person I know who'd be crazy enough to believe us."

  They locked eyes and chorused, "Ursula."

  "I'll go talk to her," Yves said. "You should stay here in case Ursula is affected by your public fuckability."

  "We definitely need a better nickname for that, too," Dee said. "Do you really think Ursula would be affected? I mean, she's gayer than you."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "You came out of the closet five, six years ago, right? Ursula took a cheerleader to her junior prom."

  Yves waved his dismissal. "Okay, okay. The truth? I hope not but I don't want to find out. Do you think your friendship with her would survive something like that? Plus, you've got things to do."

  "Good points all," Dee said, sitting on the toilet. "Get going, and close the door behind you."

  "You can keep those pants when you're done. Jesus, Dee," Yves said, "for a guy who's about to win back his true love, you look miserable."

  Dee sat lost in thought. ["…When I fully split into separate, um, Galateas, I start acquiring separate memories…"] "When Galatea divides," Dee explained aloud, "her memories and experiences get split up, too." He turned toward the tub. "Even if I can bring her back, I can't know how much she'll remember." He pointed at the green, oily water. "It all depends on what memories are mixed up in there, how old all that stuff is."

  Yves smirked. "Maybe you'll luck out and she won't remember your hissy fit." His smile faded fast. "Wait, even if you can bring her back? What are you not telling me?"

  ["…Let's see if little Miss Venus had anything worth remembering. And then it'll be your turn, Dee…"]

  Dee did not look up. "The taste of tears."

  Yves hesitated. "Dee?"

  After a while, Dee whispered, "Just go."

  Yves left without another word, closing the bathroom door behind him. Dee waited to hear the front door of the apartment to open and shut, but after a quizzical, silent minute he remembered the front door was now scraps of metal scattered in the foyer. He leaned forward, clicked the door lock, and dropped down to kneel at the foot of the tub. "Okay."

  After a final moment of hesitation, he dropped a hand down into the tub. It made a loud slap when his hand hit the mixture and he jerked back, mournful. The liquid felt warm and tacky. His hand came away filmed with fluid.

  Damn. That felt awful.

  Resting his head against the cool ceramic lip of the tub, Dee said, "I can't do this."

  Yves trudged up the cement stairs to the second floor. Pain flared from his waist with each step. He felt like someone had kicked him in the groin, but he had felt that way for over an hour now and was growing accustomed. You don't get good at Aikido, he thought, without spending many years being bad at Aikido first. I've been hurt before.

  A stitch in the ribs took his breath away when he opened the door to the hallway. I've lost fights before.

  He moved down the citrus-perfumed hallway, resisting the urge to limp and favor his left leg. I've been robbed of my dignity before. I've even been—His right leg folded up under him so he sat there in the middle of the hallway, searching for balance. Breathe. Victory is not getting cut. Breathe. Eight forces sustain creation: Movement and stillness. Breathe. Extension and contraction. Breathe. Unification and division. Breathe. Solidit
y and fluidity…"Oh, for Heaven's sake," he said with sudden realization. "If Aikido has anything to do with goo girls and solid boys I'm going to take up ballet instead."

  Yves stood with composure and crossed the hallway to knock on Ursula's door.

  "Just a minute," came Ursula's dreamy alto voice. "Who is it?"

  "Yves Valiancourt."

  "Yves?" Ursula asked. The door opened. The funk of patchouli unrolled in the air.

  No one was there until Yves remembered to look down. Ursula slipped on her oversized, oval eyeglasses with wide, red, plastic frames and peered sleepily up at him, her angular face as pale as milk. Yves could see the mousy brown of the roots of her hair, dyed a lustrous black with some homemade henna concoction and pulled into two thick, braided pigtails curled over her shoulders and dangling down to her hips. She wore a tight set of boy's black sweats, a cat burglar's outfit ruined by an overstuffed pair of baby blue bunny slippers with long fuzzy pink ears. "Earth to Yves."

  "Sorry," Yves said. "I've never seen you…well, anyone…dressed like that. Ever."

  "I'm sleeping in today," she said as if that explained everything. "You look like Hell, Yves. Are you okay? What's going on?"

  Yves glanced down the corridor. I should have come up with something to say before knocking. Oh, well, bean spillage time. "Actually, Dee sent me because—"

  "Galatea's in trouble," Ursula said, not missing a beat.

  "God damn, woman," Yves cried out, "how do you always do that?"

  "Galatea," Dee said to the tub of sugary green soup. "I don't know if you can hear me. I don't know if you have any nanomek left in there. But I've realized something. I've realized why I couldn't do it that first time. It's the same reason why I can't do it now. And I want to explain."

  He turned and sat with his back against the tub. "I love you and I know you love me, and I've got this thing for you too, just like you have for me. But I don't have a thing for Jell-O, or goo, or maybe even goo girls. I don't have a thing for things." He laughed. "I know this is sounding like one of my rehearsed hissy fits, but it's not. Please hear me out, if you're in there.