If there was a version of the earth; the world in its entirety, made out of skin soft and close; he had mapped it, each hidden supple section and divot, each concealed line or sensitive notion that the nerves underlying the fleshy terrain concealed. He was the pioneer of this soft, incomplete science; of Arthur's body. Layed out before him, open and divine and agreeable, was a slow and easy physical understanding; the type acquired in an ersatz infinity of disarming, cloying knowledge. An effortlessly blank hypothesis; a blooming experimental cherry under nude. The tenseness inside it was a mystery to Eames, the way he was never quite able to detangle the strange knots and coils fretfully twisting underneath the surface of Arthur's bleary awareness. He was a mapmaker of the human condition; the mind itself was weak and full of cracks and imperfections to slip inside. Arthur was a consciousness of a different tenor; one slightly harder to read. One nearly impossible to subsume and infuriatingly unclear. Drowsy success, a rush to the tumble, the glorious high of sexual satisfaction, and the plunge over the edge into a twisted clockwork color wheel in sleep; a warped absurd sun in close-eyed wakefulness. A blindingly mortal experience. A deeply disconcerting responsibility to continue.
When they were together, it was in the strange slow motion of nearly bellicose sex; two men working towards a coarse, violently brilliant ambition. When they were apart their memories were nothing but a puerile macabre of twisting sheets and sweat and desire. But that same desire remains and controls: it conceives of itself an origin; the ugly pocket of its birth; buried deep inside either one of them.
Once, Eames cupped the side of Arthur's face, his thumb smoothing over the skin of his perfect dimples, a smile. They faced eachother and looked at eachother and fell into the loop of tentative emotion and fleshy love poems.
Once, Arthur told Eames he liked being called darling, and as they meshed with frightful momentum Eames whispered that name to him, and it became a promise more true than anything else, really.
Torpid beliefs. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
There is a quiet here, that takes away the sharp edges of the world. There is a soft tone that makes no melody, only buzzes serenely against Arthur's ear where he rests it on Eames chest. There is an easiness in the aroma of clean skin and warm beneath you and all around you in a thickly masking vapor of dreams. It is something to furl into deeply; to scream into muffled and alive; to hide from and in and to be so terrified you can barely breathe. There is a whoosh of air, unintelligible to the human ear, that leaves a person when they are poised faultlessly over a perfect void; and this is what leaves them now. When Arthur was born, Eames was willing to bet no one knew what would happen to him.
This history; this history defined by error, yields something good. Falling asleep together in a bed they always come back to. The television is on and quietly larks about nuclear explosions. Everybody is rushing today, everybody wants their space in this endless spiral. Through the hollow center they go; through to the bottom of the Earth and then further still; this complexity vivid in its cynical simple. This Earth, consigned to the language in which I describe.
Beautiful, Beautiful. Can there be another word for this?
Beauty Beauty Beauty.
Love Love Love.
Eames shifts his weight.
Arthur is damp and undone and alive forever.
Arthur closes his eyes.