“You don’t know comics!” the man shouted. “You don’t like them! You bring no objectivity to their criticism!”
Comics? thought Xavier, mouthing the word.
Lee Stamz karate-chopped the pistol from Big Mister Sinister’s hand, grabbed him, flung him down. “Call nine-one-one!” Stamz shouted at the dayroom.
On the floor, his face less than six feet from Xavier’s, Big Mister Sinister raged: “Go back to reviewing high-tone books whose artsy-fartsy last sentence always wraps around to their first one!”
Pardon, Xavier mouthed, hurt more by this verbal attack than by the shooting.
“Go back to wetting your pants every time Screen Dreams shows Citizen Kane!”
Xavier gaped sidelong at Big Mister Sinister.
“If you survive, hie yourself to Joyce’s grave and sit on it till your ass freezes!”
Stamz sat on Bowman to keep him from rising, urged Nakai, who’d just entered, to kick the smoking pistol farther out of Big Mister Sinister’s reach. She did, as if playing a desperate sort of shuffleboard.
“Agenbite of inwit!” Big Mister Sinister shouted red-faced at Xavier. “May it drive you bonkers!”
“Shut up!” Stamz shouted back. “Shut your fucking mouth!”
“Only if he dies. Then we’ll never have to pull on hip boots to wade through his holier-than-thou drivel again.”
“Who is that?” Xavier managed. By now, he should have passed out from shock, blood loss, his first wonky intimations of death. Why hadn’t he?
“It’s Bowman,” Stamz said. “The bastard who wouldn’t give me an interview when Finesse fired his ass.”
“He wrote the letter,” Xavier said. “Bowman . . . wrote it.”
“What letter?” Stamz said.
Urbanite employees had surrounded Xavier’s desk. They milled around like spectators at a car wreck. Someone had called 911. Someone—Donel Lassiter, bless his heart—struggled to loosen Xavier’s tie.
“Give Mr. Thaxton some air,” Donel said. “Stand back, you all, give him room.”
It was a relief to know—although he couldn’t say just why—The Mick had not written that letter. (If The Mick had written it, he might have been able to raise his grade in English.) A hostile letter to the editor was more public, and thus more shameful to its recipient, than a mugging. Whoa. What skewed logic. Good thing he hadn’t voiced that argument out loud. Sticks and stones and all that . . .
Xavier looked over at Bowman. “I like your costume,” he said. “Rakish . . . getup.”
A portion of Bowman’s hat’s brim was caught under his neck, but it was still recognizably a hat. Bowman was nonplussed. He stared bemusedly at Xavier.
“But it’s too much like the DeeJay’s,” Xavier said. “The Zoot Suit Look. The DeeJay’s a . . . stalwart. Big Mister Sinister’s a . . . cr-crime lord. That confuses . . . the k-kids.”
“Save your breath, Mr. Thaxton.” Donel’s smile was kindly.
“I prefer Count Geiger’s costume,” Xavier said. “It’s a . . . um, true classic.”
Bowman seemed confused. Was Xavier an enemy of the comic-book business, or an astute critic of its shortcomings and excesses and thus a variety of friend? Had Bowman walked into the Ralph McGill Building and unwittingly shot an ally?
At that moment, the police arrived. Stamz got off the gunman, and a cop much smaller than Stamz yanked Bowman up and handcuffed him. A female cop disinterestedly Mirandized him.
“If he just took three bullets,” the male cop said, pointing at Xavier, “why ain’t he dead?”
Xavier lifted his head off the floor. “Bulletproof vest,” he said. Donel was trying to unbutton his top shirt button. Xavier brushed Donel’s hand away. He didn’t want everyone to know that he was wearing tinfoil skivvies. Had his Count Geiger gear kept him from dying? So it seemed.
“Bulletproof vest?” the cop said. “That standard issue around here? Y’all that afraid of your readers?”
“He is,” Stamz said.
“An elementary precaution,” Xavier said, getting to his feet with no help from Donel and only a little from the edge of his desk. Two paramedics came rushing into the dayroom with bandages, drugs, resuscitation equipment, a canvas litter.
“Shit,” Bowman said, looking at Xavier. “You didn’t die.”
“Sorry,” Xavier said. (Actually, he wasn’t.)
The female cop led Bowman, hangdog and surly, away.
*
The paramedics wanted to examine Xavier. According to both Stamz’s testimony and the confession of Big Mister Sinister, he’d absorbed three bullets at close range. Smart people didn’t try to walk around with three slugs in their guts, a paramedic said. They asked to have the bullets removed and their wounds treated.
“Don’t touch me,” Xavier warned. “I don’t want you to remove the bullets. I don’t want you fiddling with me.”
He could see tomorrow’s headlines: FINE ARTS COLUMNIST XAVIER THAXTON SHOT BY VICTIM OF UC PURGE / Undergarments reveal Thaxton as secret admirer of his assailant’s work.
No way.
“What the hell’s the matter wi’ you?” Stamz said. “You want to get gangrene? You want to die?”
“I’ll be okay. Donel, help me to the restroom, please.”
Donel helped him to the restroom. Xavier refused to let Donel come inside with him, arguing that he wanted to put some cold water on his face, examine his wounds himself, and try to get emotionally centered.
“Mr. Thaxton—Xavier—you need medical attention. You’ve been shot.”
“All in a day’s work,” Xavier said. Knees wobbly, brow sweat-beaded, he went into the restroom, locked the door behind him, and draped his jacket on a hook in the central toilet stall. Off came every single conventional wardrobe item that he’d worn to the Ralph McGill Building that morning.
In front of the room’s long mirror, he observed that his Count Geiger costume had not deflected the slugs from Bowman’s pistol. Three craters pocked the foil, in a lopsided constellation across his abdomen. Ouch.
Standing there, he began to concentrate on the highest of the three slugs, the one under his left ribs. Using the hypochondriac muscles in that region (their scientific name, as he knew from the medical books he’d purchased soon after his first P.S. attacks), he managed to expel the slug. It emerged, dented and bloody, through the mesh of the Suit, dropping with a plink and a rattle into the washbasin. The mesh instantly sealed itself, as if he hadn’t been shot at all. Then Xavier worked on the other two bullets, rippling the muscles around his navel and in the epigastric region. These slugs soon popped out, too, as if flipped by a strong and accurate, if ghostly, index finger.
Plink, rattle. Plink, rattle.
The mesh around each miniature crater drew together. The torso of his Count Geiger costume was whole again. Well, that was his Suit. What about the wounds in his gut? Were they healing as fast as the rents in the Suit?
Xavier fingered his three wounds. With no external evidence to go by and no tender places under the unbroken mesh to offer a clue, he couldn’t even find the bullet holes.
This doesn’t have much to do with the Suit, Xavier thought. A little, only a little. How, then, had he found the power to pop out pistol slugs and effect a psychosomatic cure of his wounds? It scared him, the comic-book inspecificity of his trip to instant health. But why gripe? If he had to choose between being disabled by bullets and improving by means of a tacky supernaturalism, the choice was a no-brainer.
Hallelujah, I’m alive. Hallelujah, I’m not dead.
He put his everyday garb back on, even his bloody dress shirt, and deposited the slugs in a paper cup on the mirror ledge and returned to the dayroom with it.
“Go home, Xavier,” Walt Grantham said. “Get some rest. You’re entitled.”
The male cop, still questioning staffers, accepted the cup from Xavier and bagged the slugs for forensic analysis. “How’d you salvage these?”
“They got hung betwixt my bulle
tproof vest and my shirt. A snap, finding them.”
The cop asked Xavier if he were okay (“Fine,” Xavier said) and if he had any idea why Bowman had tried to kill him (“He thinks I hate the comics”). Then Xavier told Grantham that he still had work to do and felt just fine, thank you.
“Damn it,” Grantham growled. “I said, Go home!” Oddly, the boss had allies. Lee Stamz, Donel, Ivie, the cop—everyone in the dayroom—urged Xavier to beat it.
“I appreciate your concern, but you all’re blowing this incident out of proportion.”
“Look,” Grantham said. “I don’t make wounded employees punch a time clock.”
“If you like, I’ll sign a statement saying I stayed out of sheer muleheadedness.”
Everyone around Xavier’s desk looked incredulously at everybody else.
“He thinks he’s Superman,” said the cop with the slug-filled cup, heading for the elevator. “Thanks for cooperating, folks. Adios, Superman.”
37
Mikhail Menaker for the Defense
Even at staid Ephebus Academy, The Mick had his sources. Before his last class was over, he heard from his friend Truitt Gustavson, who’d heard from Juliana Coniglio, who’d caught the story from a report on WPNK Rok Radio, that Tim Bowman, former editor in chief of Uncommon Comics, had seriously wounded Urbanite critic Xavier Thaxton in an early-morning shooting incident.
“Holy fuck!” cried The Mick in his sixth-period physical-science lab, at a work station with a wide array of electronic equipment.
“Mikhail,” Mr. Hulet said. “Show some restraint, some respect for—”
“Stuff that, Mr. Hulet! Gotta go!” He grabbed the radiation-detection device that he’d assembled under Mr. Hulet’s supervision and bolted: down the tiled hall, out the glass doors, along West Azalea Avenue, dodging pedestrians, to the condo on Franklin Court. Tim Bowman had shot Uncle Xave? That was like, well, learning that your best friend has just run over the fucking family dog. On purpose.
Lugging his Geiger counter, The Mick burst into the apartment to find Uncle Xave sitting in his bathrobe in front of—this was a real boggler—an episode of For Love Designed. He had taped it, no doubt. He was alive, no jive.
“You’re home early.” Uncle Xave checked his watch and used the remote to click off both the TV and the VCR. “Caught me, didn’t you?”
“Bowman shot you?”
“Three times.”
“Why?” The Mick was confused, about two unrelated matters. “Why” —nodding at the TV— “were you scanning that? You hate laundry dramas.”
“I tape them for Bari, Mikhail. Sometimes I watch a couple just to, I don’t know, reestablish contact.”
The Mick sat. What if Uncle Xave had been dead or critically wounded? In either case, the flat would have been empty after The Mick’s panicky dash from Ephebus. Why, he wondered, hadn’t he peeped Uncle Xave’s condition before rushing home?
“Why aren’t you worm waffles, unc?”
“My assailant’s bullets took a coffee break an inch away from my intestines. They couldn’t go the distance.”
Setting his Geiger counter down, The Mick paced. “Why?” He shook both fists like maracas. “Why?”
“Why couldn’t they go the distance?”
“Why’d Timmy Bowman try to desoul you? How’d you manage to rip his cord?”
“The same views that chased you into Salonika’s stews”—guiltily examining his hands—“displeased Mr. Bowman. His response to them, as I’d expressed them in ‘Thus Saith Xavier Thaxton,’ had a longer lead time, though.”
The Mick considered. His uncle’s column on the “cynicism” inherent in the monthly presentation of UC’s stalwarts—particularly such newcomers as the DeeJay, Gator Maid, and Count Geiger—had been about the snootiest criticism The Mick’d ever had the thrashed-out luck to fume over. No wonder the great but bugfuck T. B. had shot his uncle Xave. On the other hand, that had been weeks ago. Months.
“It was Finesse who canned Bowman,” The Mick said with as much diplomacy as he could muster. “Why didn’t T. B. shoot that stingy codge?”
“No offense, kid, but some of Mr. Bowman’s logic circuits aren’t reliably wired.”
“Maybe. But if I’d’ve been near when your sappy head-dreck ’bout UC’s brand-new stalwarts came out, I’d’ve shot you. No gas.”
“Good thing for me you’d already run off.”
“Bet on it.” Almost spent, The Mick sat down again. “Where’s Bowman now? What’d they do to him?”
“The Salonika city hoosegow. DA plans to indict him for attempted murder.”
“You’re not pressing charges, are you? I mean, he didn’t desoul you. His head’s on cattywampus from all the stress.”
“I don’t have to press charges. The shooting had a cloud of witnesses. Murder, even attempted murder, is a crime against the state. It’s almost always prosecuted. The fact that I didn’t die—no thanks to your zoot-suited pal—along with the fact of his agitation when he came gunning for me, could help him around sentencing time. Maybe.”
“You going to testify against him?”
“If called to the stand, I’ll answer truthfully all questions put to me.”
The Mick thought hard. “The Suit! The Suit saved your life!” He stood and paced again, like a hotshot TV defense attorney stricken with a wonderful courtroom ploy. “It wasn’t attempted murder, Uncle Xave! I mean, you were wearing the Count Geiger costume, and T.B.—this is what trucks it—designed that costume! Shooting you was his way to act out, really vividly, just how p.o.’d your fucking column’d made him. It wasn’t really attempted murder because he’d already slipped you one raver of an antidote for the gunshots. I mean, the Suit’s the key to—”
“Mikhail.”
“What? What?”
“Unless one or both of you betrayed my secret, the only people who know I wear the Suit are you and Bari.”
The Mick shook his head. “No, sir, Uncle Xave. Griff Sienko knows too. And it’s like an upper degree of probability that he tracked that news on to T. B. So Bowman’d know too. Which means the only—”
“Mikhail, I complimented Mr. Bowman on his Big Mister Sinister getup even after he’d shot me. And he looked at me and said, ‘Shit. You didn’t die.’ ”
That halted The Mick. Uncle Xave occasionally talked like a Thomas Fuckington Macaulay essay, but, so far as The Mick knew, he didn’t lie. . . . “Part of the show,” The Mick hazarded. “To make his dummy hit look dirt-dead googol-real.”
“He could have used blanks, but he tried real hard to perforate my abdomen. If he’d aimed at my face, I wouldn’t be here. Sometimes, even our most beloved stalwarts fail us. This is known as Real Life. People who face up to it and go on anyway are called adults.”
“Or BOFs,” The Mick said.
“BOFs?”
“Boring Old Farts.” He sat down again with his hands hanging between his knees and studied Uncle Xave: the V of skin visible at the throat of his robe, the paleness of his legs, which he’d propped on an ottoman and crossed at the ankles. “The Suit?” The Mick said. “Where is it? Is it full of holes? Can you still wear it?”
“It’s hanging in the shower. I sprayed some of Griff’s Stay-Brite on it. It’s—”
The Mick ran to the bathroom, yanked back the shower curtain, and grabbed the Suit. It looked . . . what? It looked immaculate, slick and unpocked as a brand-new robot. No, there was one subtle puckering in the mesh. And a second. And a final one. Three in all. These irregularities reminded him of sweater snags repaired by hooking the yarn-snag back through the garment’s face. You’d’ve never guessed that three bullets had lodged in the costume’s midriff. The Mick returned to the living room. Uncle Xave sat in another chair, the radiation detector in his lap.
“Your Geiger counter,” he said. “You’ve brought it home. Is it finished, then? Does it work?”
The Mick took a jagged piece of low-grade uranium out of his pocket and placed it on the coffe
e table. He picked the Geiger counter out of Uncle Xave’s lap, lugged it to the table, and tested the uranium specimen. A series of clicks, hesitant telegraphy, rattled faintly from the homemade contraption, certifying the uranium sample’s feeble pedigree. The Mick raised and lowered the counter to demonstrate its method of operation and its performance at varying distances.
“It works,” Uncle Xave said. “May I try?”
The Mick carried the device to him, leaving it on to show that it could also record harmless background radiation. It failed to click, though, until he set it on Uncle Xave’s knees, at which time it started energetically rattling again. The Mick and Uncle Xave exchanged looks. The Mick raised the device to Uncle Xave’s midsection, from his stomach to his chest, and from his chest to the crown of his head. The counter’s alarmist sputtering got faster and louder each time but the last. Only when The Mick stepped away from Uncle Xave did its chaotic telegraphy dwindle into a lovesick cricket’s song.
“You’re radioactive, Uncle Xave.”
“Maybe a little. Not that much.”
“Mr. Hulet and I field-tested the clicker yesterday afternoon, and I did some fine-tuning today before coming home.” Puzzlingly, the counter went crazy a half inch from Uncle Xave, but registered only ordinary background radiation at every other remove. No doubt about it, though: Uncle Xave was “hot.” The Mick said so. Uncle Xave agreed and asked the boy to turn off the device.
“A holdover from when Plant VanMeter had its relief-valve failure.”
“Or a jump from your most recent trip up there. You should see a doctor.”
“I’ve done that, Mikhail, and I feel better—today’s unpleasantness in the dayroom aside—than I have in months.” Uncle Xave stood. “Did you happen to notice if the fixative on my Suit had dried?”
“Yeah. It had. Totally.”
Uncle Xave checked his watch and said that he’d best get into it again, to prevent any chance of a “relapse into my old P. S. mode.” He came back from the bathroom wearing the Suit, with a ratty jogging outfit that more or less disguised it. The Mick gave Uncle Xave an unannounced Geiger-counter exam, and his device, to their mutual surprise, emitted not a single click. Xavier surmised that the Suit had absorbed and locked in the radiation from Hazelton’s spring.
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