Chapter Text
…
Ben has changed the locks to this apartment three times in about as many weeks, from chain to dead-bolt to flat wafer, but apparently those charges of breaking and entering weren’t quite so trumped-up as Snoke has led him to believe.
“Think of me as Schrodinger’s cat,” Snoke says, his boots propped up on an empty kitchen chair. Chunks of ice and rock salt fall off his heels onto the peeling laminate floor. “I’m always here, even when I’m not – you never know which one it’s going to be.”
Ben remains standing. The kitchen is cold, as are his fingers, but there’s perspiration down his sides beneath the threadbare sweater that he wears. In one hand he holds a half-empty cup of thick black coffee, which happens to be the second thing he’s consumed all day. The first was a can of peaches in light syrup at around 2:45 AM.
“That’s not how the quantum superposition principle works,” he says.
“There, now, you see? I don’t understand why you’re always in such a holier-than-thou hurry to send me packing these days.” Snoke grins. It pulls at the long scar across his face, made by either a switchblade or a piece of glass depending who he tells the story to. “What other person in this sinkhole of a city would willingly sit here and listen to you spout that pointy-headed bullshit?”
Ben glances away.
Dirty plates are piled in the sink, while a stack of mail sits unopened on the counter. A red light blinks on his phone, as usual, and there is a large dent in the wall beside it. The cast-iron radiator gives off a smell like paraffin wax.
“That’s true.”
“You know it is.” Snoke pockets the roll of dollar bills Ben has permanently loaned him. “While we’re on the subject of quality companionship, though – who was that delicious little morsel I met out in the stairwell earlier?”
Ben glances back at him again.
“She moved into the apartment next door.” He distracts himself by sipping the now-lukewarm coffee, but has to spit it back out. “She’s not your type.”
“Never use the word ‘type,’ my young and deeply ignorant pupil. I prefer the word ‘yearly models.’”
“She’s not your yearly model, then.”
“And you know this – how?” A glint appears behind Snoke’s pale eyes, and Ben wishes he’d simply swallowed the disgusting coffee. “Are you looking to make a purchase, Mr. Kylo Ren?”
(That’s a running joke between them, of course, although only Snoke finds it funny nowadays. Ben can’t remember if it ever really amused him or not.)
But here is what Ben-Ren knows about The Girl, after having had her as his neighbor for two weeks:
She’s twenty, maybe twenty-one. She wears floral print blouses and shamrock-green nail polish. She does not appear to own a car, although she keeps a red moped and rides it everywhere regardless of the weather. She leaves for work at 6:15 every morning, humming folk music as she goes, and comes back early every evening except for Saturdays, when she gets back closer to 11:00 PM. On Sundays she stays home. Twice he’s met her down in the apartment complex’s basement, seated atop a clothes washer with a highlighted anatomy textbook in her lap, although he’s never said a word to her either time. On her balcony there is a hanging bird feeder, painted to look like a spaceship, but she’ll regularly toss out extra sunflower seed along with stern orders for the sparrows and chickadees to stop fighting one another.
Ben is thinking of this bird feeder – she may have built it herself, judging by the rough edges, and there’s a stack of empty terra cotta flower pots on her balcony as well – when he answers.
“No,” he says. “And I’d recommend that you leave her alone, too.”
“Oh, that’s great. That’s phenomenal.” Snoke slaps his hand against the table. “I’ve always said you’re the most sexually repressed tight-wad I’ve ever seen, and there’s my proof. I can’t believe it.”
“I’m not –”
Then Ben hears a door slam in the hallway. The first few choral bars of an Olivia Newton John song come swinging through the thin wall. His nerves stiffen, and Snoke sets both feet down on the floor again.
“Listen, now, Ren. Do me a favor – or I’ll do you one, maybe.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. His hands are thin and long and remind Ben of a spider’s legs. “Go ask her out.”
“No.”
“Now, Ren, don’t go being an emo pussy on me again. I always give you good advice, don’t I? Sometimes it’s hard to swallow, I know, but I’ve never once been wrong.”
(Ben has recently begun keeping a bulleted list that contradicts this statement, and he might also say a thing or two about burden of proof, but these things also sound excessively pointy-headed.)
“No.” Now the Girl’s footsteps go padding towards the elevator. “Absolutely not.”
“Ren, Ren! Be reasonable. Who got you that job at the loading docks, remember? You’re the one who lost it, obviously, but I’m the one who wheedled them into giving you a chance – oh, and who covered for you when you fell behind on rent, last week? What upstanding citizen is single-handedly responsible for any social life you still manage to have?” Snoke opens his arms wide in self-presentation. “I’ve spread a veritable cornucopia of opportunity at your table. You’d realize that if you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up – ”
Ben stares at him. Snoke re-crosses his arms, concealing that large tattoo on his wrist. It’s supposed to be a symbol of some kind, white against a field of regularly-refreshed black, but it’s always reminded Ben of an opened bear trap.
“ – And I know you’ve just been panting for any half-assed excuse to talk to her, so by all rights you should thank me for putting you up to it. Am I right, or am I right?”
He can offer no defense, clearly, because it’s true – Snoke always does that, peers straight through his head as though it’s made of glass – and so Ben sets his coffee cup aside and leaves the apartment with his head ducked down.
Snoke hollers his well-wishes.
“Ah, yes. There he goes, our thirty-year-old virgin martyr. Godspeed, boy!”
At the hallway’s far end, The Girl is stepping into their apartment’s capricious elevator. She has a laundry basket balanced on one hip and a pair of headphones over her ears. Ben sprints to get there before the doors close.
“Wait,” he says, already winded. “Hold that. Wait.”
“Sorry?” Her humming stops. She pulls the headphones down to rest around her neck. “Oh! Yes, come in. Which floor do you want?”
“Uh. Basement.”
“Good. That’s where I’m headed.”
He boards the elevator alongside her, about five seconds too late to remember that his feet are bare and that he has no change in his pockets for the vending machine and so he really has no valid excuse for going downstairs at all. He showered and shaved this morning, at least, but his hair hasn’t been properly cut in months and this sweater is unraveling at the elbows.
(“…If you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up.”)
Shit.
He stares at the elevator’s buttons, half of which have needed to be written over in permanent marker because they’ve gotten rubbed away. The Girl switches hands with her laundry basket, full of clothes stained by what looks like motor oil, and then leans herself forward into his vision to offer out a flat, unexpectedly callused hand.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve introduced myself yet.” She has a strong grip, too, as Ben discovers, which jars somewhat against her polished accent. “I’m Regina – well, Rey. I go by Rey. I live in 701.”
“Ben,” he answers. “It’s not short for anything.”
“Ben, you said? That’s my grandfather’s name. Which apartment are you in?”
“703.”
“Oh.” Rey frowns, slightly. Her eyes flicker down the scar that bisects his face from brow to jaw – he’s impressed she can avoid staring at it for any longer than this, really – but then the former polite neutrality replaces it. “Do you happen to know anything about that bald man, in the black shirt? He was here earlier.”
“Yeah. He’s a friend.”
She lets his hand drop, although Ben almost pulls away first. He’d also like to back up further, into the elevator’s corner, because he always keeps an arm’s length of space between himself and everybody else as a general rule, but that would make things awkward.
Or more awkward, rather. More awkward than they already are.
Rey turns to face the elevator doors again. Ben watches numbers light up dimly overhead. Blood throbs in his ears and throat.
Shit, shit, shit, shit.
“Uh,” he hears himself say, again, gesturing towards those palimpsestic elevator buttons. “So what landed someone like you in this dismal trash heap?”
“It’s all I could afford while I was going to school.” She turns to sift through her clothes again. The frown returns. “And I didn’t think it was so bad, really. It’s better than a lot of other places I’ve lived. I like the view you get of Takodana Bay.”
“If you can see it through the smog, maybe.”
“Hmmm.”
Ben feels his insides curl up like shriveling leaves. Of course she’d think that way, a person who keeps hand-made bird feeders and flower pots and prefers to shorten a name that means ‘queen’ into one that means ‘sunshine.’
And now she probably thinks he’s a whiny tool, too – not that this assessment would be inaccurate, obviously. He tries again as the elevator shakes and jostles around them.
“What are you studying in school?”
“Massage therapy.” She smooths back a lock of hair behind her ear, where it’s slipped out of that quirky triple-decker bun. “I still need five hundred hours of supervised training to get my state license.”
“Massage therapy?” Ben parrots, and then snorts with derision before he can stop himself. “You mean all that holistic dithering about energy balance and acupressure points? Is there any money in that?”
(Ben’s inflection on this last word ‘that’ makes it clear he intends it to modify the unspoken word ‘crap,’ even though hearing this cynicism in his own voice draws him closer to certain blotted-out places inside his mind.
He has quite a few of those.)
“Well, I’m working at the city junkyard now.” Her voice takes on a sharpened edge. “They put me in charge of the trash compactor. I thought classes would be a nice change of mood – otherwise I’ll sit there all day and imagine I’m crushing people’s heads.”
She makes a deliberate, calculated gesture here, pinching her fingers together as though she’s squashing a large beetle between them, and keeps her eyes fixed on him while she does.
“Oh, do you?” This is like writing cursive with the wrong hand, he thinks, like pulling frayed thread through the eye of a needle, and just now Ben can’t decide whether he’d prefer to kill Snoke or himself. “That’s funny.”
“And tell me, what do you do that’s so important?”
Something shoves hard against his heart.
Nothing, Ben could tell her, absolutely nothing, even though his mother still deposits money into his bank account for rent every month – all cash, probably so some libelous reporter won’t find out about it during campaign season. Days when he manages to make it out to the convenience store are considered good ones, shining highlights, and last week he woke from a nightmare about screaming brakes and twisting steel and shattering windshield glass that made him vomit.
(Which he hasn’t done in months, come to think of it, not since the earliest stages of his withdrawal, so maybe that’s another accomplishment to pride himself on: something he can paste onto his CV, alongside the unfinished degree in theoretical physics and the 18E Special Forces service ending in an OTH discharge and all those front-page newspaper clippings from two years ago and a recent twelve-week stint at the Alderaan Rehabilitation Center. He could tell her about that, too.
“What do I do? Why, I’m the family disappointment. It’s a round-the-clock occupation, but somebody has to do it.”)
“That’s none of your business,” Ben says .
Her mouth flattens into a line. Her nostrils flare.
“I don’t think I’d want it to be.” The elevator shudders to a halt on the basement level. Rey leaps out, smacking the ‘close’ button with one arm as she passes. “You know, I’ve been hit on by some jerks before, but I think this lovely conversation wins first prize. Have a nice evening – oh, and tell your friend he’s a fuck-trumpet.”
“A what?”
But the doors slam shut before she can educate him on this innovative kenning, so Ben rides their elevator up to the seventh floor again in a compressed and confessional silence.
(It stops, briefly, on the ground level, but he gives the two men waiting there such a vicious look that they swerve around and head towards the stairs.)
Snoke is gone by the time he returns to his apartment, as Ben half-suspected would be the case, although someone has taken the last of his orange juice and put back an empty carton. His coffee can of grocery money has been emptied.
Well.
Ben rummages beneath the sink until he finds two plastic shopping bags. He makes a round of his apartment, plucking burned-out lightbulbs from the desk lamp and the bathroom and the closet. He ties these up together – double-bagged for safety, of course – takes out a claw hammer from his tool kit, and then smashes the glass until its shards resemble fine white sand. The sound is so bright and so loud and so sharp that it crowds everything else out of his head, temporarily.
When Ben is finished, when he catches his breath, he throws away the bag and lies down fully clothed atop an unmade bed. The clock reads 8:42 PM. He stares at its glowing digital numbers and does not fall asleep.
At 1:13 AM, he gets up to press a play-back button on his answering machine.
The messages go on for several months, left weekly like clockwork, but by now the recorder has run out of space because he never deletes anything. He listens to them all, although only to the first parts.
“Hello, Ben. Are you there? It’s Mom. I was hoping this number hadn’t been disconnected. I remember you said you wanted space, but I hadn’t heard from you and I thought – ”
“ Hi, Ben. It’s not midnight yet, over here, but I have a meeting first thing tomorrow morning and so I’m going to bed early like a cretin. I wanted to call and wish you a Happy New–”
“Ben? It’s Mom. Again. I’m sorry it’s late, but I’m calling to see if we could find some time to sit down and talk about –”
“Ben, I’m not going to fly out there and force you to do anything. You do know that, right? I promised I wouldn’t, and I always try to keep my word. All I want is to hear if– ”
“Ben. I don’t know if you’re listening to any of this, but I still want you to know that I don’t blame you for what happened with your fa –”
“Ben, please pick u– ”
“Ben, I lo– ”
“Ben –”
“Ben –”
“Ben – ”
…
In February, he forgets his coat – the day is damp but mild, the old snow blackened where it’s piled on the sidewalks – and also happens to forget the keys that are inside of said coat pocket. He is left standing outside his apartment with wet shoes and a new box of saltine crackers in his hand, although he sets this aside to bang his fists against the door until they go numb.
Then Ben presses his back to the wall, sits down with his legs sprawled out, and prepares to meditate on his position as a worthless piece of shit until the second coming of Christ.
He closes his eyes.
(“I swear, Ren,” Snoke had laughed, once, “you’re the only human being I’ve ever met who’s more functional when he’s high. It’s the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s because I can remind myself to forget everything I know I should be remembering,” he’d explained, rapidly but quite reasonably. “That’s very difficult to do, otherwise.”)
Ben is not certain how long he sits there in the hallway, but eventually his thoughts are interrupted by what sounds like the crinkling of brown paper bags and the jangling of a keychain.
Somebody clears her throat.
“Are you locked out?”
Ben opens his eyes. Rey stands there in front of him wearing an oversized parka, an aggressively yellow and equally oversized scarf wound thrice around her neck. She has a bag of groceries balanced on each arm. Wholesome things like bananas and broccoli poke out the top.
This is the first time she’s spoken to him since that day in the elevator.
“No,” he says. “I’m admiring our wallpaper. I find the water stains very thought-provoking as examples of interpretive art – that one there behind you speaks particularly to my postmodern sense of meaninglessness.”
“Did you call the landlord yet?”
“No.”
“Are you planning to?”
“No. I thought dying and rotting here on my own doorstep might send a more memorable statement.”
“Jeez, do you ever listen to yourself?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Try it, sometime. It’s like talking to the unholy bastard lovechild of Franz Kafka and Oscar the Grouch.”
Ben isn’t given time to produce a witty retort, even if he could think of one, because by then Rey has vanished into her own apartment without shutting the door behind her. She is gone for about five fussing, muttering minutes, and when she reemerges she is carrying a small leather case and a twist-top flashlight.
She uses this to gesture at him while she talks.
“I’m doing this so I won’t have to look at you anymore,” she tells him. “But if things start to go missing around here and you point any fingers at me, I’ll kill you and feed your body through the car crusher at work. Understand?”
“Is my verbal agreement enough, or would you prefer a signature? I don’t have a pen on me at the moment, so I’ll have to open a vein.”
“Get out of my way.”
He slides to the right, rocks back onto his heels. Rey squats down, shines her flashlight through the keyhole for thirty contemplative seconds, and then unzips her leather case to reveal a twenty-piece professional locksmith’s kit.
Ben blinks. She selects one of the round-headed picks and slips it into place.
And then Rey becomes focused on her work, so Ben can study her profile. Up close he notices that there is a light smattering of freckles on her nose, across her cheeks, maybe from faded sunburn, and that her eyes are neither brown nor green but some shade of hazel in the middle.
(“…If only you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up.”)
“They don’t teach this in massage therapy class,” he says. “Do they?”
“Nope. Foster care.” She turns the stainless steel handle in her fingertips. “I spent a year with this one sterling-quality asshole who wouldn’t even let me back into the house unless I had money to give him – it was an educational experience, though. By the end I could steal a car’s hubcaps and radio in under ten minutes and still have time left over to write ‘wash me’ on the back windshield.”
“And is that where you acquired your talent for honing such unconventional insults?”
“No, I learned that from a nun – Sister Maria Guadalupe Garcia Zavala. We called her Sister Maz.”
Rey doesn’t glance over at him as she says this. Her conversational tone doesn’t change. For another minute or so Ben listens to the clinking of her lock pick, the dripping snowmelt off her shoes, until she speaks to him again.
“Can I ask you a question, now?” She places an ear against his door to hear the tumblers turning. “I think that’d only be fair, since I just told you something kind of ugly about myself.”
Ben ought to let her know it wasn’t ugly, that he knows very well what can make a person ugly on the inside and what can’t, but instead he stares down at his spread-out hands and nods. She nods as well.
“Were you ever in the army?”
He closes his hands into fists, watches the skin over his knuckles turn white. She keeps talking.
“Your mail got mixed up with mine last week. I didn’t open it, obviously, but I saw you had a letter from the VA – my grandfather was a pilot in the British Royal Air Force, so that’s the only reason I’m asking. You don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to.”
Ben stares at his distorted reflection in the brass doorknob.
“My grandfather was a pilot too. 66th Air Base Wing.” He rubs a hand over his mouth. “I didn’t have the eyesight for that, though. I was in the 77th Special Forces Group.”
“Isn’t that the one they call the Black Knights?”
“Yes. I was their communications sergeant.”
“Is that how you met the fu – your friend, I mean?”
“Snoke? No. We met through a mutual acquaintance.” Ben taps two fingers against the scar on his face, where it carves into his jaw. The way it is reflected in the doorknob, it is his most prominent feature. “He introduced himself by saying we could get matching outfits, too.”
“Did you seriously just say his name was Snoke? Like, S-N-O-K-E? Really?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what it says on his driver’s license?”
“That’s what he goes by.” Ben lets his hand slide down. “He’s not so bad.”
“Neither is eating dirt, relatively speaking, but you don’t see many people lining up to do it.”
(He might have asked that same question, about names, except Ben had been so transcendentally drugged out of his mind when he first met Snoke that the attempt to introduce himself as Ben Solo had come out as Ren Kylo. Snoke had switched it around to Kylo Ren and made it stick, since he said this inversion sounded more like something out of a stupid science-fiction film.
He never did find it funny, Ben is realizing now, but he let Snoke keep using it anyway because it was better than the alternative.)
“…Did he say something to you, that day?” Ben asks.
“He said he’d like to –” Rey flushes red, although he guesses more in anger than embarrassment. “Never mind. It was really vulgar.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, good. Somebody should be.”
“Are you this forthcoming with everybody? It’s distinctly un-zen of you.”
“Only with people I’m not able to punch in the jaw. Your friend’s lucky I wasn’t – oh, hold on. I think I’ve got it.” There is a crisp, mechanical click, and his door swings open at a touch. “Ta-da.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Rey stands. So does Ben. “You’re not as much of an asshole as I thought you were, by the way.”
“But I’m still an asshole?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“That’s a conviction we both share, at least.”
He manages to summon up a smile. Rey smiles as well – then she salutes him, collects her locksmith’s kit, and leaves without saying another word.
Ben doesn’t say anything else, either.
He goes into his apartment and stands there without turning on the lights, since the windows have no curtains and enough glow from the streetlamps manages to get in.
Finally, he walks to the sink and washes off the scummy dishes stacked there. He lets hot water run over his sore hands – that’s right, he had pounded the door, why had he thought pounding the door would be helpful? – after he’s done, until his fingers begin to scald. He puts everything away where it belongs.
He still doesn’t fall asleep that night, naturally, but at least this gets rid of the moldering food smell. He plays through the messages again.
In the morning Ben flips through a phonebook, until he comes to the ‘L’ section of the yellow pages, and by that same afternoon his front door sports a ferociously complicated keyless lock complete with a spring latch and a six-digit entry code. He tapes a note above it, its message written in neat block letters:
“Let’s see a partial differential equation get you past this one, you fuck-trumpet.”
…
On a cold, bright Sunday in mid-March, Ben pauses to inspect that big dent in his wall.
He places his fist inside of it – a perfect fit, naturally – and draws it slowly out again. He leaves the apartment and returns an hour later with a can of plaster, a spackling knife, two sheets of sandpaper and a piece of cheesecloth. If he’s meticulous enough, maybe it won’t be taken out of his security deposit.
(Assuming he ever leaves this place, that is. Which seems unlikely.)
Amidst the scrapes and scratches that follow, while he works, Ben hears another sound coming through the wall.
It’s a series of soft, busy taps, at about ear-level, sequenced into shorter and longer patterns. This is the wall dividing his apartment from Rey’s, Ben realizes – and the taps seem to be international Morse code. Dot-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot-dot, dot-dash, dash.
W-H-A-T, she spells out carefully, D-O-I-N-G?
Ben slips the spackling knife through his belt loop to respond, recalling those charts and cheat notes he’d studied so he could memorize this back during basic training. Where had she learned it, though? Her grandfather, possibly. The old British pilot named Ben.
F-I-X-I-N-G, he pauses to insert a proper stop, W-A-L-L.
There’s a silence. In the spirit of neighborly amiability, he adds, Y-O-U?
S-T-U-D-Y-I-N-G.
Oh. The noise was disturbing her, then. That would explain it.
S-O-R-R-Y.
Very faintly, through the wooden support beams and the crumbling plaster and the cheap insulation that separates them, he hears what might be a stifled laugh.
I-T-S, and another stop, O-K.
She flicks on her radio, after this. The tapping stops.
So Ben finishes patching the hole, rubbing the new plaster flat with the sandpaper and using the cheesecloth to clean up any remaining dust. Paint might look good too, he considers, although he doesn’t know what color he would like it to be.
Snoke knocks on the door, and of course he knows it is Snoke because there’s also cheerful, accompanying entreaty of “Ren! Ren, you priggish son-of-a-bitch, quit ignoring me,” but just then Rey dials up the volume on her radio so loud that it completely drowns him out.
Ben goes off to patch another hole in his bedroom wall, humming to himself while he does.
…
In April, he takes a spiral-bound notebook and a ballpoint pen and sits down to write out everything he can remember enjoying at some point in his life or another. This is eventually amended to become a more manageable list of everything he can remember doing because he wanted to do it, not because somebody else made him.
The page still remains blank for about an hour, although he reminds himself – there’s a post-it note about this on the cabinet, in fact, another on the refrigerator – to get up and make lunch. He settles on a grilled cheese sandwich between two heels of bread.
(He also stops to water those potted daffodils Rey has gifted him, along with some circuitous but cheerful explanation about belated housewarming presents, and shifts them between windowsills as the sun moves.
The pot features a smiling bee painted on its side, despite bees lacking the requisite facial muscles for such a task. Ben had wisely withheld this observation.)
After another excruciating thirty minutes, his list reads as follows: science (string theory?), building (wood/metal?), photography, track/field/running.
Ben reads this over twice, decides it is stupid – not to mention stupidly short, especially for someone his age, as though he hasn’t really changed since he was fifteen years old – and has it crumpled in his fist before he can stop himself.
(“…If you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up.”)
He spreads the paper flat and pins it to the wall with a thumbtack.
The one pair of sneakers Ben owns are fairly tattered, with laces he’s replaced, but the soles appear good enough following a quick inspection. At sunrise he wills himself through the act of putting on sweatpants, a t-shirt that he grabs without looking, and proceeds to run a loop through the neighborhood that is several blocks in length. He collapses onto a strip of grass by the parking lot when he gets back, puffing and gasping like a wind-broke horse. His nose drips.
He doesn’t even notice Rey until she’s standing directly above him, a scratched-up polycarbonate helmet on her head and big driving goggles over her eyes. She is framed all around by the color-streaked morning sky.
“Do you need a hand?”
“No.” Ben flings an arm across his face. “I need cardiopulmonary resuscitation.”
“You and the EMTs have fun with that, then. I hear they usually need to break a few ribs.” She cocks her head to one side, pulls down the goggles to squint at him. “Is that a band?”
“What?”
“Your shirt. Is that supposed to be a reference?”
Ben lifts himself upright as far as he can manage, which means he cranes his neck while grimacing in pain. His shirt reads, in bold red letters printed on black, ‘I FIND DARK ENERGY REPULSIVE.’
“Oh.” He slumps. Mown grass sticks to his disheveled hair. “No. It’s a very dumb joke.”
“Can I hear it?”
(Briefly, Ben envisions a picture Snoke once made for him. It was drawn on a paper napkin, in red pen, and showed two different arrows – one pointed up, while the other pointed down.
“This one represents that specific brand of nerdy talk you get yourself worked up into,” Snoke had said, pointing to the upwards arrow, and then his finger had shifted to the downwards arrow sketched beside it. “And this one represents your chances of ever getting laid by a woman in this lifetime. What’s the mathematical relationship here, Ren?”
“Inverse,” he’d answered.
“Exactly.”)
But she’s still staring at him, so Ben swallows to wet his dry throat.
“It’s physics,” Ben says. He raises his hands in gesticulation. Snoke says this makes him look like a lunatic swatting bees, but it makes thinking easier and oftentimes he can’t help himself. “Einstein theorized that empty space possesses its own energy, because of this thing called a cosmological constant, so if space expands then it means more energy can actually be created instead of just re-distributed. Then that energy makes up this dynamic, fluid field, which, uh – it’s related to what we know about how the universe is expanding, essentially. We think dark energy might be what makes it do that.”
“So, you mean dark energy is literally –?”
Rey draws both hands close against her chest, flings them outward in a spreading gesture. Ben mimics her so that they’ve both got their arms opened wide.
“– Repulsive,” he finishes. “Yes.”
She snorts, slapping a hand over her mouth to disguise the unflattering sound.
“Wow. That really is dumb.”
Ben steeples his own hands atop his chest. He should sit up, since the dew has begun to soak through his clothes: but he likes this deep pressure of the ground beneath his back, and he likes the view it affords him of the lightening sky, and he especially likes the combined, gathering-in effect that these two things have on him together.
“I warned you.”
“But, you know, it kind of makes sense.” Rey takes off the helmet to scratch an itch above her ear. “That could be what people are actually feeling, when they talk about the human energy field. I mean, it’s the whole idea behind shiatsu and nuat thai, and back in the seventies Dolores Krieger studied how you need to –”
She stops herself mid-thought and jams the helmet back on.
“—But I don’t want to be accused of dithering, naturally.”
“No, no.” Now Ben really does get up, swinging himself somewhat unsteadily onto his feet. “It probably makes more sense than whatever I just told you.”
“Probably.” She checks her watch, a clunky digital thing meant to be worn by a man. “Well. Back to the daily grind. Bye.”
Ben waves.
She crosses the parking lot and disappears around a corner. His legs are beginning to cramp, but he still takes the stairs, and takes them down again when he leaves for another run the next morning. It’s excruciating, it burns his lungs like a lit sparkler and winds his muscles up into shortened steel cables, but it leaves him with more or less that same washed-out, emptied-clean feeling he gets from breaking the lightbulbs and cracking his fists through the walls.
Except it’s less expensive, of course. It won’t require repairs afterwards. It’s somewhat less likely that he’ll actually succeed in hurting himself.
The next week, Ben makes it down to the bay and halfway back again before he gets a blister. He bandages it and runs the next day, as well, and the next and the next and the next. It burns less after some practice, so he adds in sprints to make up for it.
He also marshals the energy to wash his bedsheets, scrub the shower, mop the floor, replace the missing lightbulbs and throw away his accumulated junk mail, although he keeps a stack of the business envelopes and ties these together with string.
They are all addressed to him in the same tidy handwriting, and they are all unopened.
…
In May, he uses a computer at the city library to fill out thirty online job applications.
There’s a thesaurus at his elbow the whole time, because he quickly finds himself in dire need of euphemisms and periphrases to rationalize the fact that he’s held nothing but sporadic minimum-wage jobs over the past four years. He also needs to spend fifteen minutes or so in an empty upstairs restroom, shredding blank copy paper from the printer into confetti-sized pieces before flushing everything down the toilet.
(“…If you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up.”)
“Ben Solo,” one interviewer reads. “Are you related to Leia Solo? The senator from California?”
“Yes. She’s my mother.”
“Oh. So all that media coverage, in –”
“Yes.”
He leaves this interview early. They never call him back.
And he receives an inbox full of rejection e-mails, afterwards, which he repeatedly tells himself he shouldn’t read but always does. His thirty-first application goes to a small radio broadcasting station, outside the city, a part-time position –a radar technician, their profile calls it – with no benefits but semi-respectable pay.
He gets the job.
“Really? Which station?” Rey asks, when they encounter each other down in the mailroom. Ben is in the midst of opening a letter that contains his blank W-4 and related paperwork. “We listen to a radio at the junkyard. I get to be the designated DJ between 3:30 and 4:30.”
She is wearing sandals, so Ben can see she paints her toenails the same vibrant green color as her fingers. The pots on her balcony have become populated with sprouting snap peas, cherry tomatoes, baby carrots, red geraniums and purple verbena and one imperially-minded ivy that seems to grow and spread whenever nobody’s looking.
Ben, meanwhile, has gotten a haircut. It’s just long enough to brush over his ears.
“91.5,” he answers. “It’s classical, though. Your coworkers might not enjoy it.”
“My grandfather’s a big fan of Gershwin.” She taps him on the right shoulder with her stack of mail, and then on the left shoulder in a vaguely chivalric gesture. “So I’ll like it, at least. Everybody else can go bend themselves over backwards and swallow their own butts. Like that Greek symbol, with the snake? I can’t remember what it’s called. ”
“A ouroboros?”
“Yes, that's it. Thank you. Like a ouroboros.”
“You’re wasted on physiotherapy, you know. Poetry is clearly your true calling.”
Their afternoon radio host is a blonde British woman named Philomena Samuels, although on air she uses the pseudonym ‘Phasma.’ She rides a motorcycle made of polished silver chrome and could probably bench-press a horse if the desire ever struck her. Feelings toward her among the station personnel range from terror to infatuation.
The manager is a man about Ben’s age named Huxley, like the dystopian novelist, although he goes only by ‘Hux’ or ‘Sir’ to whatever plebeians he stoops to converse with at all. He has defiantly red hair, a sarcastic tone so flat it could smother a fire, and a practiced expression of discreet but unvarying disgust.
Ben arrives at the station fifteen minutes early, four days a week, wearing his cleanest jeans and a black button-down shirt. He keeps their RF system’s equipment in sensible working order and says between ten and twenty words to everyone, collectively, so he’s rather surprised when he gets invited to play cards one Friday night.
“Oh, no, the invitation is simply a front,” Hux drawls, likely in response to Ben’s suspicious expression. “You’ve discovered us. We’re really conspiring to steal one of your kidneys and leave you in a bath of ice water.”
“Matt moved after he switched jobs,” Phasma says, yanking Hux into a playful chokehold that he does not appear to find playful in the slightest. He flails noiselessly while she speaks. “He’s the one who used to come. You need at least three people to have a game worth bothering over. Everyone else we’ve asked is busy – unless you have other plans?”
Ben, in fact, does not.
Hux lives in a Victorian-era duplex house further out along the bay, its rooms occupied by military history books and replica swords and flintlock pistols and a cat named Millicent who is almost as orange and irascible as her owner. Ben arrives holding a bottle of red wine.
“Delas Côtes du Ventoux?” Hux keeps it at arm’s length, gripped by the long neck as though it is a goose he’s been asked to strangle. “I’ve never heard of this particular brand.”
“It’s supposed to be aged in stainless steel.” Ben points to the label. “The clerk said that’s what gives it the plum flavor.”
“Lovely.”
Hux uncorks the wine bottle, strides to the sink, and empties everything down the drain in one indulgent, festive pour. Phasma goes on arranging chairs and cards as though she hasn’t noticed.
“That cost me fifteen dollars,” Ben says.
“My apologies.” Hux drops the empty bottle into his recycling bin. “You’ll be compensated for your loss.”
Ben has come expecting poker, or blackjack, both of which he was taught to play – to cheat at, really – when he was a child, but then Phasma lays out the deck she’s been shuffling and Ben realizes that they’ve invited him for a game of Cards Against Humanity: and that those champagne flutes on the table are actually filled with sparkling apple cider.
Ah.
“Welcome to the final stage of your employment process,” Hux explains, perching himself on a chair. Millicent leaps into his lap. “It will allow us to conclusively determine whether you’re an insipid and uncreative fool or a psychopath.”
“You’ll have to excuse Hux, I’m afraid. The proctologists haven’t quite been able to dislodge whatever sharp object he’s gotten stuck up his arse.” Phasma offers them each a stack of ten white cards. “I’ll start off as the Czar, if you don’t mind. Are you familiar with this game?”
Ben isn’t, but he wins the very first play with a sentence about masturbating to a dead relative’s ashes.
“Disgusting,” Hux appraises, over the rim of his glass. “Clearly a psychopath.”
Phasma nods in agreement. Ben swirls his cider.
“Should I take that to mean I’m hired, then?”
Phasma and Hux glance at each other before answering, together, “Yes.”
Hux, as it turns out, has been sober for three years – he never developed a taste for beer, though, good lord, he’s not some vulgar Anglo-Saxon peasant. Phasma made money throughout her adolescence and into her early twenties by betting on herself in illegal street fights – why not, if men were making jokes about her anyway? – but had this less-than-illustrious career cut short when someone shattered her clavicle with an aluminum baseball bat. She recovered while serving an eighteen-month prison sentence.
They relate all of this to him in dry, unequivocal tones, arranging their cards on the table, and Ben contemplates making some joke about being the new lowest common denominator – yes, their lives might also require some rearrangement, but at least they can feel secure in the knowledge that they’ll never be him – but decides this would sound very uncharitable.
So he nods, and listens, and asks questions wherever it seems prudent. Occasionally he makes them laugh, or contributes something useful.
“That helmet,” Ben asks Hux, pointing to a case on the high shelf. “Is that an Air Force HGU-15/P? From Vietnam?”
“No.” Hux doesn’t turn around. There is a painstaking order to the way everything in this home is arranged, so he no doubt has the place mapped out in his memory. “The Air Force only made sixteen of those.”
“And then four of those sixteen were modified to have a specialized toxic gas mask, right?”
“Yes.” Hux’s fingers twitch, as does his left eye. “Have you ever seen one?”
“I own one.” Ben tries to tell himself how this is yet another ridiculous thing to be proud about, because he had nothing to do with it, but the self-sabotage doesn’t work quickly enough. “It was my grandfather’s.”
Hux raises his eyebrows.
“Oh dear,” Phasma admonishes. Millicent has migrated to her lap for additional stroking. “Now you’ll never shut him up.”
This is the most sustained conversation he’s gotten in half a year, so Ben has to excuse himself early because it leaves his mind slack and stretched-out like an old rubber band. A long drive home through the fragrant spring night, as lights appear in all the passing house windows, seems to give him back some elasticity.
He sits in the parking lot for a while to think.
And one Tuesday afternoon, he convinces Phasma to play the major works of George Gershwin between about 3:15 and 4:05. The hour ends on “Rhapsody in Blue.” He never learns whether Rey heard this or not, since he never asks her about it, but he decides this is all right.
That’s not why he wanted to do it.
…
In June their apartment’s elevator breaks – to the surprise of nobody, by the way – and so Ben finds himself recruited to help Rey wrestle a second-hand desk up seven flights of stairs.
“Can you believe it was just sitting on the curb?” Ben hears her shout from the steps above him. He hopes she can’t see how much he’s sweating with this effort, and decides he should also invest in a pair of dumbbells. “So I thought, wow, what a waste! Right now I do my homework on the floor, but this has great pigeon holes for everything. The finish is bad, in a few places, but I can just scrape that off – and you’ll never guess what I found in the bottom drawer.”
“A shrunken human head,” Ben offers. “Or twenty dollars. Which would be more noteworthy, do you think?”
“Twenty dollars. But it was actually this cool old fountain pen – I’m going to write my grandfather a letter with it, if I can buy the ink.” They stop to rest on the fifth-floor landing. Rey fixes her hair, coming loose in waves around her shoulders. “How do they make shrunken heads, anyway?”
“Easy.” By now, Ben has learned that Rey actually expects an answer to all of the questions she asks him. He’s typically willing to oblige. “They start with a small incision in the back of the head –”
“So they can take out the skull, right? I’ve always thought you’d need to do that first.”
“So they can take out the skull, yes. And then they –”
It requires some innovation, and Rey must remind him several times to lift with his knees rather than his back so he won’t give himself a hernia, but they finally slide the desk through her propped-open apartment door. She doesn’t seem to mind Ben coming in.
He keeps his arms tucked down against his sides to avoid touching anything.
The space is bright and organized and colorful, as he knew it would be. There are even more plants in here than on the balcony, fishbowl terrariums filled with violets and a row of tiny succulents growing inside old bottle corks and another ivy that she’s trained onto a chicken-wire trellis, while the kitchen table is made from several pieces of reclaimed wood she’s nailed together and varnished.
On the wall are two photographs, hung side-by-side.
The first one shows Rey, perhaps fifteen years old, paler and shorter and alarmingly underweight. She sits with her knees together on the stone steps to a large, aged building. She aims a placid expression at the camera. Close beside her is a petite, skinny black woman, wearing a nun’s habit and a rosary and a huge pair of orange-framed glasses that make her eyes resemble those of an owl. The woman has a sly, calculated expression, which informs the world – on no uncertain terms – that she knows exactly what it’s up to.
“That’s Sister Maz,” Rey points out, following his gaze. “I told you about her, didn’t I?”
“Yes. Your innovative linguistic mentor.”
“Yeah, that’s her. She ran the children’s home that took me in after I left my last foster family. She’s the one who helped me find my grandfather when I was sixteen. He’d been living pretty far off the grid, out in Arizona, so he didn’t even know I existed until she got in touch with him – this is him, right here.”
Then Rey turns Ben’s attention towards the second, larger photo, set inside a hand-painted wooden frame. It shows her standing in front of the Grand Canyon, wearing a gaudy sunhat and a red layer of sunburn across her bare shoulders. She is smiling. An older man, trim-waisted and gray-bearded and with deep creases in his face, holds an arm tightly around her and smiles as well.
“You said his name was Ben, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. Ben Kenobi.”
“What was he doing out in Arizona?”
“He needed the dry weather, mostly. He’d had to leave the Air Force because he got hurt in a really bad smash-up, so rain and snow always made his joints hurt. I think he wanted the quiet, too.” She rubs imaginary dust off the frame. “We’d drive into Flagstaff once a month so he could visit a physical therapist, though. Her name was Sabé – I remember liking a lot of the things she’d tell him.”
Ben can see his face reflected in the photograph’s glass where he stands behind her, scar and all, so he moves slightly to the left.
“Such as?”
“She said – well. She said everybody has these, um, these knots, inside themselves. Places where they’d gotten wound up around their pain, whether that was in their muscles or their heads. You can’t see this stuff with your eyes, she’d say, but you can feel it.” Rey does a rather odd thing here, folding her arms so that each hand pulls hard on its opposite shoulder, as though she’s keeping the pieces of something together. The gesture seems unconscious. “Or you can talk to them, and you learn things that way instead – so I think healing is just about how you decide to untangle the knots.”
Now Rey turns toward him and holds out her hands, open-palmed.
“I guess that’s pretty dithering too, huh?”
He wants to look away, but in another moment decides against it.
“Not at all.”
They deliberate for a while and at last decide Rey’s old-new desk should sit beneath a eastward-facing window, which she has left open for an early summer breeze to float through, and Ben dutifully admires the fountain pen she’s discovered. Its steel is carved all over in repoussé etchings, shaped to resemble flowers and vines that will press into the web of her thumb whenever she uses it. She walks him to his front door.
That night, Ben sits with his phone in hand.
He must pause a long time between pushing each button, so he has to stop and start over again six times in a row. A wave of nausea rolls through him.
(“…If you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up.”)
“Screw off,” Ben says aloud. “I didn’t ask for your opinion.”
On the seventh attempt, he dials quickly without looking down – instead he keeps his eyes on that plastered-over hole in the wall, which Ben must remind himself he has patched and smoothed and made to look like new again. The phone rings ten times before going to voicemail, and plays an answering message that Ben knows by heart because he is the one who first helped record it.
There is a loud, prompting beep at the end.
(“…So I think healing is just about how you decide to untangle the knots.”)
He closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose, and clears his throat.
“Hi, Mom. It’s, uh.” He purses his lips to stop them from trembling. “It’s Ben. I know it’s late. I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier but, ah – I’ll try again tomorrow.”
He hangs up.
But three minutes later, possibly less, the phone rings.
His hands are shaking so badly that he almost drops the damn thing, but he manages to tighten his grip and press it against his ear by the eighth or ninth ring. There is a suspended, pressurized silence. And then, hesitantly, coming to him through three thousand miles of telephone wire, he hears his mother ask:
“Ben?”
He starts to cry, and it is several minutes before he can get enough air to speak again.
…