by Declan Finn
“I am this University’s psychological counselor,” said the Mad Hatter.
“Right…well, there are some ideas of Freud present in the Hulk, but I suspect authenticity is the last thing on his mind, assuming he has anything on his mind other than 'smash.' As for getting in touch with his ‘authentic’ self, calling the Hulk authentic is the same as that director calling the Hulk the ‘real’ person. The Hulk as the ‘real’ person automatically dismisses that a human being is more than a bunch of emotions. Does the fact that the Hulk has only emotion but no intellect make him more authentic than the highly intelligent Dr. Banner? It doesn’t make him more human, but less, turning him into a very big animal. Second, in the comic books, it is revealed that the Hulk is only one of several personalities because Dr. Banner was abused as a child and developed multiple-personality disorder, of which the Hulk was only one. Do you generally diagnose that the initial personality is not the authentic person, but is instead a front for the authentic personality that might have just knifed someone? Sorry, but—”
“No,” another member interjected, “whenever he says ‘Hulk Smash!’ it’s obvious he’s a deconstructionist emotivist; he does whatever he wants because he feels like it, smashing through the false pretenses of ethics in modern day society!”
The philosopher sighed. “No, you just described almost every villain ever created, out for his own end instead of the common good. For example, Carnage, probably the most evil bastard in Marvel comics, spouted from his first appearance that he wanted things to be ‘authentic’—don’t show that cop getting an award, show him taking a bribe. Law, right, wrong, are all myths, etc. Very Sartrean. I mean, have you ever heard a good guy spout existentialist philosophy outside of Gabriel Marcel or Walker Percy? Usually it’s out of the mouth of Satan in The Devil’s Advocate and Angel Heart, and it’s always an excuse: I can’t be wrong, because there is no wrong. It’s the oldest excuse since before Milton has Satan say ‘Evil, be thou my good’.”
It became a little strained around that point, and it became even worse when the author suggested that “Spider-Man might be an Aristotelian, because he is ever working to become a better person and a better superhero, seeking the Golden Mean; trying to find the perfect balance between his life and his duty to save those around him.” It was counter-suggested that the “duty” made Spider-Man a Kantian like Superman, while others replied that Spider-Man had to be Augustinian because of all the guilt he was carrying around.
“It’s like Oskar Schindler at the end of Schindler’s List,” said the woman dressed as a nun, with a white tunic and a black cloak. “When he says ‘I could have saved more,’ this is exactly what Spider-Man goes through every issue.”
The Cylon next to her said, “Nice costume; from A Canticle for Leibowitz?”
She glared at him. “No, Sisters of St. Dominic.”
The lecture ended with a question of “What does the Punisher represent?”
He smiled. “Heavy artillery.”
***
Damn it! Those Orangemen blew everything. Weeks of investigating to find the Falls Road crack house, days to plan the assault on the drug lab.
It had all been her work, her ideas, her performance.
If this went straight to hell, she was going to get all of the blame.
The locals were even playing nice, for once, with the Belfast police department, because nice Catholic families hate drug dealers, even if they are Catholic.
And then the fooking Orangemen had to come marching down the Falls, thinking that the drug scheme was a Catholic plot to corrupt the Prods of Ulster. Fockmall.
Maureen braved the gunfire, running up to the front of the building. She grabbed the first gunman to stick his weapon too far out the window, and pulled, taking the gun and the idiot out the window, climbing into the building in search of the big man.
She stalked through the house, no one hearing her over the gunfire. She checked each room, starting at the front of the house on the first floor. She found another gunman, smiled, grabbed him by the collar and the belt and hurled him out the window.
She padded her way up the stairs as someone was coming down, nearly bowling her over. She sidestepped, grabbed the man’s neck, and broke it before he even noticed.
She flowed up the stairs, first checking the back of the house, looking for her target, and she found him. His blond hair. His horn-rimmed glasses.
Two bodyguards jumped her.
An elbow snapped into the solar plexus, followed by a knee to the lowered forehead, pivot, and a snap kick to a different throat. McGrail whirled and chopped in a tornado of death.
Then the killing really started.
Maureen McGrail looked up, and saw she had come out of her meditation on time. The philosophy lecture was finally breaking up. She watched as Ryan walked out with his charge, his head always glancing from side to side, hanging close to Mira. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought they were involved, and she was just as certain that that had been the impression he wanted everyone to have…because people thought of celebrities as individuals, not couples.
Maureen cast her gaze about, searching for her targets. Come on, where are those idiots? How hard could their job be? They want Ryan for their cause; they have to follow Ryan; to do that, they have to follow her, which is easy enough through the schedule. After that…?
She followed them to another non-Mira event; the “Barney Nova movie previews,” which showed everything coming out this year, and discussed what was in production for the next two years to come, like, Psycho, The Musical; Jason and Freddie Get Married, Go to Hell and Stay There; Lightsaber 3, starring Mark Hamill as a mummy
Barney announced, “Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens novel is still stuck in development Hell, as is A Wrinkle in Time—Spider-Man was trapped there for 20 years, so don’t hold your breath… Also, George Lucas is planning…sigh…a Jar Jar Binks trilogy.”
From the back of the room, someone called “I’ll get you George Lucas, and your little Ewoks, too…precious!”
Sliding into the seat beside her was a man dressed as Spider-Man. “Tell me you know something about the guys who almost killed me last night.”
McGrail blinked at the familiar voice behind the mask. “Well, Mr. Ryan, I have to be honest with you, but I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I didn’t even know something had happened. I saw your little run in with Zorro and Robin Hood today, though. Very nice.”
“Thank you,” Sean answered. “Have you seen our boys yet?”
“Not yet. Why? You’re starting to feel lonely without them?”
“No, but my security people found a dead body today. It wasn’t either of them; but still, dead’s dead, and I’d hate to see the lads get themselves likewise.” A shrug. “I’m not exactly the sort of person who collects fans easily. I’d like one or two of them to stay alive.”
“Any idea on your murderer from this morning?”
“Fluffy the Demon Slayer?” Sean joked.
McGrail looked at his mask's eyepieces, realizing they had been taken from a set of mirrored sunglasses. “What’s with the mask?”
“Went with the suit. I figure the knifed-to-death look had been copyrighted by Janet Leigh, and I didn’t want to be sued—it’s an American pastime, you know.”
The next preview looked like it was of a movie filled with computer graphics, leather, and slow motion machine-gun fire. Made by people who envied the Matrix movies’ money, Moira thought.
Barney let the preview end and began, “Next up in the near future, discussions are being held over making the Matt Kovach novels into films. I’m not sure what the problem is; odds are the books aren’t bloody enough for Hollywood, and making a murder mystery movie went out of business unless you’re Peter Falk, and he's dead. There’s also talk the author is giving the studios trouble, citing things like plot, character, and continuity, insisting the films actually resemble the books. Word is producers are unable to deal with writers who hav
e a spine. Next?”
“What’s the Mad Russian up to nowadays?” someone called out.
Barney looked at his companion. “What do you think, six-four? Six-five?” He grinned. “Honestly, he’s stuck a lot with the comic books lately. He was offered a job on Heavens Above, but he doesn’t play well with others. Then again, he’s a writer, so of course he doesn’t.”
“Is there anything on the G5 movie?” someone shouted from the crowd.
“Spider-Man” turned his full attention to Nova as he replied, “Nothing yet. They’re still working out the deals on who’ll get what pay; supposedly, it’s not the actors making a big stink over the salaries, but the agents. Of course, Tom Boxer is going to be playing the Captain, or the President, depending on when the action takes place. The rest of the cast is up for grabs, which is mainly why the fights are so vicious; odds are the money is going to follow who’s in which number spot on the cast sheet. If Mira Nikolic gets on board, she’ll get more money than, say, Susan Christiani, whose acting career of late has been reduced to direct-to-cable movies. Trust me, the agents are working real hard for their 15% on this one…assuming it happens.”
At the next film preview, Maureen rolled her eyes. Yet another movie made from another comic book.
As the questions wound down to the sillier and more trivial, she had mentally relabeled Barney Nova and his three inept assistants as Salty Lox and the Three Stooges.
The next DVD Barney put in was obviously an accident—it was a porn video, with two people having sex in the camera’s direction.
Only it was a “porn video” starring one of the Three Stooges.
Then Barney yelled. “That’s my wife, you mother—”
She sighed, looked over her shoulder to speak again with Sean, only to find him gone. Oh well, time to get to work.
***
Inna Petraro sighed. “What has he been getting into lately?”
Matthew Kovach smiled slightly. “What makes you think anything’s happened to your toy stuntman?”
“Because he’s mine, and I know him well.”
Kovach grinned against his will; he had never willfully shown teeth in a smile because he was always insecure that they weren’t perfectly white. He glanced around the theater, trying to adjust to the acoustics for when his Q&A session came up in fifteen minutes. There were still pieces of glass someone had failed to retrieve from the bottle-throwing incident the day before.
“I’m not certain I should tell you, but odds are you’ll hear it anyway. You know about the dead body this morning, but… about ninety minutes ago, some guy tried to stab Mira, and someone else shot at her with an arrow. I, personally, would like to figure out exactly what’s going on, but I’m at a loss, at several points along the way.”
She sighed. She had noticed this pattern when she had read his first manuscript, almost always summing up the situation for the audience, as though they had only just come in the middle of the story. “And what would they be?”
“Well, it’s obvious someone’s after Mira, and given where she’s from, I can guess who. I figure Heavens Above makes for a great reminder of who she is before the bee-gees come to kill her— ”
She cocked her head. “Bee Gees? I did not think their music made them evil.”
He grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, whenever I note bad guys in my notebook, I always note them as BG, hence, Bee-gees are bad guys.”
“Ah.” He speaks in shorthand. He’s flakier than I thought.
“So we have people who came out to shoot her. Someone tampered with the salads last night—”
“I think it was Eielson,” Inna told him.
Kovach blinked. “Excuse me?”
“He scared half the kitchen staff away before the salads were spiked.”
He grumbled. “Fer the love of God…” and added a few choice expletives he believed she didn’t hear, and wouldn’t understand because they were in six different languages.
“Yes, he is.”
He blinked. “Eielson is God?”
“No, a mudak.”
Kovach shook his head. “I must remember you speak Russian. In any event, last night we also had that guy thinking he was the Hulk, not to mention Molotov last night… Bottles were the primary container for Molotov cocktails in World War II… we can assume the Hulk was just a highly drugged bystander…by the way, I wasn’t here the other day, how tall was Molotov?”
“About Sean’s height.”
Matthew’s eyes lit up like twin galaxies. “So was Zorro this morning. I have this odd feeling we’ve been played with.”
“The one from last night—Molotov—shouted something about Trek.”
“And you believe everything some nut job says?” Kovach inquired.
Inna nodded. “I believe everything Sean says.”
He chuckled. “In which case, I’m sure he’s also thought Molotov shouted so he wouldn’t be looked on with suspicion. Sean let him go after that, didn’t he? But then there’re two anomalies: the dead body this morning and the attack last night. Molotov, Zorro, and the antabuse salads all look like possible assassination attempts, or attempts at harassment; even the Hulk looks like a possible test of Sean’s abilities. But the rappellers, and the corpse? Something doesn't fit with the simple, straightforward, BGs are coming. If the Serbs waited this long to murder her in front of cameras, why bother with the hit in the hotel room?”
Inna thought about it a moment. A solution drifted before her, but she couldn’t grasp it. The pieces fell into place, but the fit wasn’t as apparent as she knew it had to be.
“If there’s something you’d like to share, let me know, won’t you?” Kovach asked. He smiled at her confused look. “Welcome to my world. Having fun?”
Petraro smiled and touched his arm gently. She knew he had been through Hell in his teenage years and, thankfully, he had a loving family and girlfriend to keep him mildly sane. He had killed people, and he was remarkably calm about the entire ordeal that was his life. He had similar troubles with his college years. Thankfully, he was graduating in May.
It should be interesting to think what his fiction would look like.
Inna had managed to twist Janowitz’s arm hard enough to let Matthew into the conference. There had been just enough room in the schedule to slip him in, and his novels were wildly popular, so much so there had been talk of making a movie; however, no one in Hollywood wanted to work with a writer, unless said writer was properly cowed and browbeaten into submission (Kovach had also made a comment involving a 2x4 and a branding iron that put the film negotiations on hold indefinitely).
Kovach looked down at Inna’s hand on his arm. She was so terribly sweet he felt a little dismayed she was more of an agent than a friend, though she was also that. Her schedule made his undergraduate career look dull by comparison.
Then the lecture hall started to fill, and the two of them sneaked off to the side before anyone approached him with questions too soon.
“So,” he began offstage, “what do you think is going on? You’re more familiar with this world than I am: what do you think of our friends with weaponry?”
Inna smiled bashfully. “I am not sure. There are too many things that do not fit; too much to make any sense, if we are only dealing with Serbs trying to kill Mira.”
Kovach beamed. “You mean someone else might want to?”
She shrugged. “I do not know. I suppose so, but no one I know of.”
“Exactly…could someone be after Sean?”
There was a hint of a smile crossing Petraro’s small mouth. “Someone is always after Sean. But there’s nothing to indicate that now; he was sleeping in what was officially Mira’s room, and no one knew.”
Kovach bunched his lips together and stared hard off to the right, locking onto a small imperfection in the floorboards. For some reason, whenever he slipped into such intense concentration, she always swore she could smell cordite burning.
“Where is Moira?” she asked.
He snapped out of his flammable thoughts and smiled. “She’s at Erin Green’s tai chi lessons.” He sighed. “Oh well, I have to get out there—my audience awaits.”
Chapter 8: The Terrier of G5
The panel Mira had to attend was with several other members of the G5 crew, including the villainous “Little Bird of the Galaxy”/“The Great Falsha” Eielson, and the warped David Peters. Also there was a woman Sean knew well—Caitlin Brown, former actress, writer, and currently an agent. At least two of her clients had tried to kill him in the past. Outside, in the corridor guests began to file through the back door.
Ryan smiled, lifted his mask, and bounced up a little to kiss Brown on the cheek. He leaned against the door immediately to the right of the table they were supposed to be stationed at in a few minutes. “Hey, Caitlin, I hope you don’t have any clients here today. I have enough trouble to deal with.”
The 5’11” brunette smiled, her dark brown eyes smiling as well. “I have several, but don’t worry. I’ve acted with them before, and they’re pretty sane.”
“Well, I’m not,” Peters chuckled.
“You’re Inna’s client,” Sean replied. “It’s Caitlin’s turn to have one her clients stab at me.”
“That wouldn’t stop me,” Eielson cackled like some sort of cartoon villain.
“Yes, well, I suspect nothing would stop you aside from a stake through the heart, and be careful, friend, I know people who could arrange that…I suggest you save your BS for the audience. I mean, they afforded this panel two hours figuring it would take at least an hour for you to stop introducing yourself, especially after you took over last year’s panel on SF in Hollywood and turned it into your own, self-centered therapy session, talking about the responsibility of the author in what some psycho does with the content of a book—your books in particular. Little stool pigeons…” Ryan glanced at Peters. “Or in some cases, not so little, told me how you talked for an hour and a half, and you were only allowed an hour. In fact, some of the G5 cast said they still have your ankle bites on them; however, I merely want you to not be rude.”