April 1st, 2019 - 11:21 am
At last, a ray of sunshine seems to be emerging from the rain. Klaus left Granny's smelling of benzoin, and I stayed longer on her sofas. To converse a little longer, to question her about her life. She didn't understand why I kissed her when I finally left the apartment. But it did me a world of good to have done it.
On returning to pick up things, I found no one at Hargreeves Mansion except Luther, still by Allison's bedside. Klaus, Five and Diego are out. And now that I'm watching the coffee brew, I'm wondering how to spend my hours, too. Today is the day the world ends, and I'm supposed to be working this afternoon. Klaus has the store's phone number: one call and space-time won't even understand how I got through. I'm not afraid anymore, since this morning. At all. And from the black nectar, I fill an entire mug.
*Crack !*
This time, the tearing of the dining room air does not involve my own jump though space. I turn around, well aware of who has just arrived at the long table. Five seems to be back, a strange look on his face: really, I can't decipher him. His back is hunched, his expression both satisfied and shut, his movements restless. And I'm just watching him install on a chair the bald half-mannequin he's carrying around, dressed in a polka-dot blouse.
*Crack!
He teleports to the coffee machine, picks up two cups and fills them without further ado.
*Crack!
His hand grabs the sugar bowl on the middle shelf.
*Crack!
He returns to his mannequin, 'whom' he serves with a form of delicate attention. He sugars 'her' coffee, but not his own. Then he sits down, and finally deigns to look at me.
"Jenkins is dead," he suddenly tells me, far too suddenly for me not to fail to pour out my coffee.
I widen my eyes, standing on my feet. What did he just say?
"The midge? Really? Did you kill him?
"No," he huffs, "That's precisely my concern. And right when the Commission was trying to protect him."
Damn, that's an abrupt conversation for a late morning, but I'm trying to put the pieces of my thoughts together in my head. I walk over to the table and lean my mug against the back of the nearest chair, as if to steady it in case another surprise comes along and makes me flinch.
"You do know how I feel about such radical measures, but from your point of view... it should be good news, isn't that what you wanted?"
Five waddles back in his chair, his fingers playing on the handle of his mug.
"It wasn't expected that anyone but me would want to kill him."
Ah. I confess I'm feeling a little uncomfortable about those assassination speeches, but I see Five's desire for a well-done job, as well as his abhorrence of delegating anything. But in the end, this time, the result is just what he'd hoped for.
"Maybe he was killed by someone who also wanted to prevent the apocalypse".
As I speak these words, I realize their significance, and a stroke of sheer euphoria surges through me. Is the apocalypse really over? The coffee machine spits out a stream of steam, the lamp bulb buzzes, and the toaster blows non-existent toast into the void.
"Five! The apocalypse isn't happening, then? That's... That's..."
My voice is perhaps a little too ecstatic. I can't even find the words: I don't know if he realizes it, but I've been holding my breath for a week.
"Why... why aren't you happier than that?"
I don't understand his expression, those nervous tics he has, the way he gazes at his mannequin as if - she - understands him and I don't.
"Delores," he tells her. "I know you don't like my equations. But do you think we should explain to Rin what would happen if we killed the gnat... but ~right after~ it hit the horse's eye?"
I arch an eyebrow.
"What?"
"You'd get run over just the same, I'm sorry to tell you."
I think I'm getting fed up with bugs and nags. Tired of fateful dithering. Sick of the apocalypse, especially if the main factor has just been eliminated. Klaus is right, I've always had goddamn hopes and a form of optimism. I don't even know how Five made me forget about them. And this time, I'm determined to keep his negativity at bay.
"Yes," I say a little sarcastically, "what if there was a second midge, or even a whole swarm? Things could always be worse, couldn't they, Five".
"You're forgetting the horseman. Delores, remind her about the horseman".
I sigh. Really, he's had no horizon other than the end of the world for too long, and can't seem to get away from it.
"Five," I said more calmly, "you do realize this is a mannequin?"
With an almost instantaneous speed, he stares at me with his small blue eyes, as if they were about to transfix me. I'm aware that my question is very straightforward, almost blunt, and that certainly no one has dared to put it in that way since his arrival. But that's the way I am: all it takes is ten minutes with Granny to figure out from whom I got this 'sincerity'.
I can't tell whether he's sad or happy as he looks back at the one he twice named 'Delores'. And she's staring at him simply because she's been molded that way, in the same way that a broken clock gives the correct time, twice a day.
"Her name is Delores," he reiterates, as if this patronymic had the power to instill in her the life she doesn't have.
An ironic but touching affect from the guy who himself refused to be given a first name by his robot mother. I take a sip of coffee. Sometimes I think the Hargreeves will drive me crazy, which may already be the case.
"You're really attached to it, aren't you?"
"To her".
I slowly sit down on the opposite chair and drag my cup in front of me. From the way Five squints, I can tell he doesn't like talking about this. But above all, I sense that there's a lot more going on here than a young-old man's dubious fondness for a synthetic being. At first, he says nothing, looks into his coffee, then - through the form of trust he's come to place in me this week - finally concedes:
"Delores simply saved me."
I tilt my head, attentive, because I know he's going to explain.
"I picked her up from the rubble of the Gimbel Brothers department store. She never gave up on me, and yet thirty years have passed".
I frown. So, after the apocalypse, this mannequin was the only "humanoid face" Five had access to. I can only imagine what it was like. I can already see how lonely and suffering people can be, despite being apparently very "surrounded". I can't clearly imagine what it's like to be alone, in the purest and most terrible sense of the word: the last human amidst the ruins of a collapsed world. Five puts his hand on the Delores's cold, rigid shoulder.
"She always criticized the way I lost myself in the Argyle library's physics books, those that had been preserved. Because I spent too much time there. Too much time calculating. But she knew why I was doing it. She also disapproved of booze, but she always let me drink though.
I smile. Delores is the evidence that Five does have a consciousness, behind his thick layer of obsessiveness.
"You really love her, don't you?"
It's a weird question, which might seem to comfort him in his madness, but that's how it feels just from the way he's smoothing out the bullet-holed fabric of her blouse. This consequence of his loneliness seems to be a price he had to pay, but a beautiful and touching price, and ultimately a sign of his humanity. I smile at him. But against all odds, he gives me an answer quite far from what I expected.
"Yes, and I did it on purpose".
I stand dumbfounded for a moment over my coffee. My eyes locked on him, then on Delores, as if she could be the one to enlighten me.
"What do you mean?"
Five let out a sigh, as if what he was about to say would break some kind of spell he'd cast on himself. As if he were at the end of something. And he looks at Delores, this time in a more detached way.
"When I found myself alone... after burying you all..."
My eyebrows pinch. Each time, I find it harder to hear this.
"...I realized pretty quickly that I was going to go off the wall."
I remain silent. I can believe that Five realized what madness was awaiting him among the smoking rubble. How long can a single human mind last in such conditions? Does it take days, months or years? Alone, with only a stack of half-burned physics books to fall back on, and an unstable power with no guaranteed return to his former reality? He leans back in his chair, staring at me almost calmly now.
"I deliberately picked Dolores up from the Gimbel Brothers. I carried her around everywhere, I never stopped looking at her. I just knew. I knew I'd come to love her. I made it happen".
He almost sounds sad, putting it that way, but somehow satisfied too.
"Sometimes - you know - a manageable insanity can keep you going."
I open my eyes, painfully. So this is how he did it? Rather than sink into the demented depths of everlasting loneliness, Five chose a mild form of madness that he could control? It's what kept him functional, and finally allowed him to come back. I think I'm starting to like Delores too. Five is really not that different from Klaus in the way he handles things. The only distinction is that he seems to have earned three PhDs in order to justify his deliberate addictions.
"I understand," I say, because it's absolutely true.
"It must seem incredible to you, after all those years holding out, that the apocalypse has finally been halted."
I can immediately see him becoming nervous again, and adding sugar to the cup of his literal "other half".
"Klaus told me to let go, but I can't convince myself it's over."
I laugh softly. Klaus told him that? Then I'll have to insist too.
"I'm sure you can relax now. What would help you loosen up and stop thinking about it?"
He ponders it, without pretending, then sips coffee.
"Having an ultimate backup solution in case we still get blindsided. If I had that, then maybe I could think about something else. Maybe."
I chuckle gently. It's probably not what Klaus was hoping for, but it's so much like Five. He needs some kind of safety belt, so he can drive peacefully.
"What kind of backup?"
He thinks deeply, saying nothing, looking at me, and suddenly, as if my face had just given him the answer, I see the cogs in his brain start to turn again. He takes a deep breath, his nose raised just like whenever he has a brilliant idea.
"Together, we can relocate the whole family. It's the only way to create a sufficiently massive bend in space-time."
My hand slides down my cup, and remains motionless on the wood of the table. Together? Like when we moved Allison to the car? But through space-time?
"I... Five, you know that..."
"I know, I know how you feel about time travel, but - Rin - faced with the apocalypse? Isn't it the only viable option?"
My mouth remains half-open, because he's actually right. I'd have nothing to lose. Just like Klaus when he picked up that briefcase again, and came back from Vietnam, no matter when or where it would take him. As a last resort... yes. Yes, I would do it.
"Together... isn't it even riskier?"
Five is pondering it all as he speaks, and I can tell my question is relevant.
"You're right, doing it the two of us would increase the risk of getting scattered. But I simply have no chance of taking us all on my own: we have to compromise."
I'm almost trembling, but Five is determined to prove to me that this would be the way out.
"Remember how you described our jumps when we first met: 'lock and trigger'. I'd lock the destination and we'd trigger together. We would have to make sure everyone is in contact, as we did at the lake cabin for moving Allison and Diego".
We've done it before. It's just the time factor that would change dramatically. And I sigh.
"How would you set the arrival date? It's so unpredictable, you said so yourself... especially to the past."
Five rests his finger on his chin, his eyes reflexively shut.
"I don't think I could choose it," he whispers. "I'd need at least a week to calculate the parameters. But that's not so important: it would just have to be... before we were born, otherwise a paradox will happen."
He opens his eyes again, seemingly aware of something more.
"I sense that space-time will have retained an imprint of the last period in which I existed, and that it will attempt to reinject me around this time."
"What year?"
"It was 1963."
"Wow."
I nod, my eyes growing eloquent. The sixties. Kennedy. The first man on the moon. The fight for civil rights. Vietnam, oh God, ~again~. Woodstock. The nuclear age and the goddamn Beatles... And I repeat:
"Wow. I really hope the apocalypse is over".
I don't think any era in the history of the world is worse than another. But at least, I'd had a chance to get used to the present time. I try to regain my composure, and remind myself that this is just a backup plan, designed to contain his anxiety.
"Okay. This is a last resort plan, right? So you can loosen up a little. We agreed."
He gazes at me steadily, and I add before he can object:
"Now, find another way to really let go. Come on. I want real ideas".
He shakes his head, as if surrendering at last.
"Indulge in an hour of quantum stochastic calculus, and make my bed with hospital corners."
I sigh.
"Hell, please, Five, something to make you stop thinking! Something to really put this apocalypse behind you!"
He finishes off his coffee in one go, as if he'd just made up his mind, then stands up straight in his uniform, as if he'd just come back once more.
"Drink a few margaritas, even if Dolores will disapprove..."
He looks at her, then at me.
"And maybe set her free, in the place where she belongs."
Notes:
I wanted to give you my opinion on what Delores really is for Five. It seems simplistic to me that he'd passively lose his mind in loneliness. Knowing Five, it seems very likely to me that he could have calculated it.
In any case, I wanted this chapter to give us a better understanding of the moment when Five takes Delores back to the department store, in this episode.
We all know how this season will end, and it's both a pleasure and a tragedy to watch things unfold inexorably. We know that this "Plan B" will happen. Rin better get a taste for the sixties.
Any comment will make my day!