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[She has made a veritable life's practice of noninterference, of letting people do what they do as long as they leave her out of it unless she wants in, of making so few demands and investments that it is odd to have one fail to make a return--not because of blithe expectation but merely because of logic, because of cause leading to effect, because of weight applied to precision points operating as any fulcrum does. She doesn't see much of Ford--less than she does of most people, really. She didn't have any right to expect an answer to her question, automatic and instinctive regurgitation of truth when prompted--but she did. She knew it was absurd, so she refused to dwell on it or pursue it or be angered by it--and so it festered, circled around in her head like a dog unable to find just the right spot on his favorite old blanket, drove Eames vaguely mad with its sideways insinuations into every little thing, drove her even more mad with its refusal to give up and die away into the gray blankness she had liked to imagine her aura being, once upon a time years ago when she was sixteen and barefoot, sprawled on a trailer floor and listening to lady talk (more like watching her mouth move, but technicalities) about what all the colors meant while they passed a hand-rolled cigarette back and forth.
That runaway collection of absurdity, that weird blend of nostalgia and disgust and weird bruised anger, was why Lex was already en route to working her way through a bottle of Southern Comfort at 2:30 on a Monday. Her kitchen table was covered with paper--lazy drawlings, Eames' scrawl and her neater handwriting intermixing amongst the half-intoxicated piecemeal artwork of two minds rendered up by one set of neat, quick fingers. She was drunk enough not to notice when she pulled the wrong notebook closer and flipped it open, drunk enough to start scrawling a picture of a woman she'd seen but not met last time they went through Eames' door, a forge that he had offered up as a laughing example in response to one or another of her vaguely, politely off-color queries. Eames drew things out of her that the Southern Comfort didn't: proper grammar and laughter, as she let him take the left hand and kept working with the right. It was a weird slice of nothing that they sketched out, pencils jarring the paper oddly with both hands occupied, nothing but the bottle to hold it steady. No, she scrawled indignantly when he dared to sketch an illustration of the very metaphor she'd snorted at herself for making, a dog scratching restlessly at fleas, motion writ in every line of his unmoving form. Sly innocence: nooooo? No. The full stop hard and decided, as if she'd dug the pencil in violently enough to bruise the paper.]
That runaway collection of absurdity, that weird blend of nostalgia and disgust and weird bruised anger, was why Lex was already en route to working her way through a bottle of Southern Comfort at 2:30 on a Monday. Her kitchen table was covered with paper--lazy drawlings, Eames' scrawl and her neater handwriting intermixing amongst the half-intoxicated piecemeal artwork of two minds rendered up by one set of neat, quick fingers. She was drunk enough not to notice when she pulled the wrong notebook closer and flipped it open, drunk enough to start scrawling a picture of a woman she'd seen but not met last time they went through Eames' door, a forge that he had offered up as a laughing example in response to one or another of her vaguely, politely off-color queries. Eames drew things out of her that the Southern Comfort didn't: proper grammar and laughter, as she let him take the left hand and kept working with the right. It was a weird slice of nothing that they sketched out, pencils jarring the paper oddly with both hands occupied, nothing but the bottle to hold it steady. No, she scrawled indignantly when he dared to sketch an illustration of the very metaphor she'd snorted at herself for making, a dog scratching restlessly at fleas, motion writ in every line of his unmoving form. Sly innocence: nooooo? No. The full stop hard and decided, as if she'd dug the pencil in violently enough to bruise the paper.]