“I’m wearing more than you are,” Xavier said.
“Grunge-all, Uncle Xave!” The Mick cried. “You’re giving away your fucking secret identity!”
“Doesn’t the Zapotec have a language code?” Xavier asked the waitperson.
“That would violate the free-expression provisions of the Bill of Rights, sir.”
Xavier had peeled to his tinfoil long johns. Bari looked on in wonder. The vibes from her were positive. Xavier smiled. He found his protective Count Geiger slippers in an inside coat pocket and pulled them on over his navy-blue dress socks.
“These clothes,” he told the waitperson, rummaging in his pocket for the quilted indigo hood that completed the costume, “are one of the means by which I exercise my First Amendment rights.” He yanked the hood—an eerie aluminum-mesh burn mask—down over his skull and fiddled with it to get the mouth- and eyeholes lined up. Most of the Zapotec’s other patrons were openly gawking.
“You can’t wear that mask in here, sir.”
“It’s really just a hood. It goes with my costume.”
“A hood’s worse. Oconee’s Supreme Court ruled last May that no one may wear a hood, or any garment inspiring fear and/or concealing one’s identity, in public.”
“That was for Ku Klux Klansmen, wasn’t it? And I’m not concealing my identity. You already know who I am.”
“Mr. Thaxton, this isn’t Halloween.”
Xavier lifted his hooded eyebrows. “I’m aware, but it may be that you and your fellow waitpersons aren’t.”
“And, uh, you’re not wearing a tie,” the waitperson noted.
From his chair back, Xavier retrieved his tie, an old one with the ever-popular floating-amoeba design. As if fitting a noose, he pulled it on over his head. “There,” he said, adjusting the knot. “Please bring our food before I tell Management you’re wearing neither tie nor cumberbund nor cuff links.”
The waitperson retreated to the kitchen to fetch their burrito plates.
“Better?” Xavier asked. He knew that his eyes in their cutouts were a pair of gleaming marbles, while his mouth in its oval window was a wet, pink scar. He must look pretty grotesque.
“Better,” Bari said. She still might not love him as he loved her, but he’d won a measure of her respect.
*
After eating, a somewhat awkward task in his indigo cowl, Xavier folded his trousers and jacket into the old military backpack Mikhail had worn to the restaurant and paid the cashier with a credit card that The Mick also stowed in it. Then the three left the Zapotec, rode an elevator to the Bridgeboro Tower’s fourth floor, and strolled through a skybridge to the nearest EleRail station. The plan was for The Mick to ride on home alone while Xavier took Bari to her riverside atelier on another train. He hoped that this arrangement would prompt Bari to invite him in for a nightcap.
It was late. The skybridge was empty. The streets under it were not so pretty at this height. Bundled drunks slumped in doorways. Discarded paper helicoptered through alleys. Pokeweed junkies huddled on the landings of an ancient parking garage.
“Know what the Cellarites call these things?” The Mick said.
“What things?” Bari said.
The Mick stamped his foot. “These bridges over Salonika’s fucked-up waters.”
Xavier and Bari said they had no idea.
“Gerbil tubes,” The Mick said. “Yuppie tunnels.”
“Ah,” Xavier said. The have-nots’ sick revenge on the haves striding above them in hermetically sealed cages. So maybe the tubes were blatant architectural raspberries to the streets beneath. Those who could not use the bridges were nothing. Those who could were Übermensch, literally. Or gerbils. Übergerbils. The trio’s footsteps echoed in the skybridge, even the whispery schussing of Xavier’s slippers. Fifty or so yards from the EleRail court onto which their gerbil tube debouched, they heard a woman’s scream, a cry of complex terror with high-pitched versicles or parts. In the womb of the skybridge, Xavier perceived each part as a probing needle thrust.
“My God,” Bari said. “What’s going on?”
“Save her,” The Mick said. “Go on, Uncle Xave, help her!”
Help who? But Xavier instinctively responded. He broke into a trot. Then he was running. Then he was shooting toward the EleRail court as if drawn by a magnet. To Bari and The Mick, he was a hammered silver blur retreating from them at unguessable speed. They could still hear the unseen woman’s screams, but what they principally heard was the vacuuming whoooooosh! of Xavier’s takeoff and the extended thwuuuuup! of his lightninglike passage through the tube.
*
Xavier propelled himself into an open space of stucco terraces and fountains fronting the EleRail platform. Stopping, he felt the ghostly afterimages of his own swift progress through the skybridge telescope into his back. He had a dreamy double consciousness, one belonging to the self in action, the other to the spectator self looking on in astonished approval. The feeling—if examined, a luxury discouraged by the crisis at hand—was the reverse of that prompted by adventure movies, superhero comics, pulp novels. With those you vicariously assumed the identity of the hero. Here, though, gripped by a demand nearly the opposite of make-believe, Xavier cast back to the safety of a spectator self wholly fictional. Who was he now? Where was he?
Another series of screams scattered his thoughts. He was here, not elsewhere. Just beyond the station’s ticketstiles, a woman in blue jeans and a trench coat held four black toughs at bay with an aerosol can. Chemical Mace, most likely. One man already lay writhing on the platform’s stippled concrete. Another, his arm up to shield his face, was yanking at the woman’s coat sleeve. Even as she screamed, she nimbly let the sleeve be pulled in stages from her arm. A third man, cursing, tap-danced behind the coat grabber. The fourth man on the platform caught sight of Xavier.
“What the fuh!” He pointed a finger. “C’mon, you dumb shih, c’mon ’n’ rumber.”
The third man stopped tap-dancing and turned aggressively toward Xavier.
Xavier subconsciously reviewed his options. The man who had just invited him to “rumber” radiated only bluster and uncertainty. If challenged, he’d run. The other man facing Xavier was for real. He’d fight, fully expecting to take out the Reynolds-Wrapped avenger, probably with a head slap and a knife swipe. Xavier dashed forward, hurdled the ticketstiles, simultaneously tripped and shoved in the back the man who wanted to “rumber,” and disarmed the self-confident tap-dancer. He used a wrist twist that swept upward into the tough’s Adam’s apple and knocked him backward into a support column. The man collapsed. After that, he easily dispensed with the only attacker still on his feet and the downed man whom the woman had Mace’d.
With her muggers down, the woman stopped screaming, collapsed on a bench, and began to sob. “Where the devil’s the station cop?” Xavier asked her. The woman couldn’t answer. Xavier turned back to the four men lying about the platform as if concussed by an IED blast. There was a utility closet, its door half-open, near the woman’s bench, and Xavier dragged an aluminum stepladder out of it. This EleRail platform featured several large, vandalism-proof chandeliers, each with four hooklike globe supports. Using the stepladder, Xavier hung each gang member five or six feet off the floor from a separate hook of the same fixture. The stainless-steel and polystyrene chandelier rocked back and forth under the men’s weight, creaking and coruscating. So disposed, the men looked a lot like gutted deer carcasses. The woman on the bench continued to sob, inconsolably. Xavier had no idea how to calm or reassure her. In a moment, though, Bari and The Mick arrived (along with the missing station cop, who, with truly bad timing, had been helping a traveler with a broken foot to a taxi stand), and Xavier retreated into the shadows to let the newcomers take care of things. It wouldn’t do, he realized, to come forward in his Count Geiger persona. . . .
*
It was after midnight when Xavier and Bari reached her atelier; stripped of garments, her second-floor studio was as bare and
cold as, well, as an EleRail platform. Bari stopped to light the space heater, and she and Xavier sat down among the throw cushions in front of it. Xavier hoped the space heater would warm Bari’s heart faster than it was working on the frigid air swirling through the loft.
“Please take off that hood.”
Xavier pulled it off with a yank, as if it were a gauze pad Velcro’d to a wound. Bari smoothed his hair back down, less from any tender impulse, it seemed, than from irritation with the way he looked. Under this touch, he shuddered.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“You think—I mean, you really think—you’re Superman.”
“Count Geiger.”
“Forget the brand name. You think you’re a bona fide stalwart. Don’t you?”
“Bari, I have . . . abilities. I didn’t ask for them, and I didn’t want them, but suddenly I have them. Three shots couldn’t kill me. Tonight—”
“You rescued a woman under attack. Fine. I can’t rebuke you for that.”
“For what, then?”
“For acting like a pulp goon on steroids after you’d disabled her muggers.”
Not wanting to, Xavier smiled. A mistake. Bari scooted back and kicked him in the leg with the side of her foot. The kick didn’t hurt. What hurt was the reproachful glint in her eyes
“Funny, eh? You think hanging those guys up like bananas was clever?”
“It impressed The Mick.”
“A sixteen-year-old kid with a retropunk sensibility.”
“And the station cop was grateful.”
“You saved his ass from a neglect-of-duty indictment and a lawsuit. And he’ll get credit for arresting those jerks. Of course he’s grateful.”
“What’s wrong, then?”
“That hang-’em-high gambit. Idiot grandstanding. Pure comic-book cliché. A by-the-numbers brutality that you think was original and cute.”
“Sorry,” Xavier said. “But Salonika’s finest got them down in respectable shape, all things considered. ’S far as I could see, anyway.”
“Tell me this: Is that kind of cheap showboating what you’re going to pull every time you warp-shift into superhero mode? If it is, count me out, Count Geiger. I’m not into teen power trips that take off from funny clothes and self-aggrandizing violence.”
“Nope. Funny clothes alone do it for you.” He could be as reckless in his speech as she seemed to think he had just been in his actions.
Bari only stared at him.
“You want me to go?”
“Please. The danger of stalwartly abilities, Xave, the curse if you like” —finally sounding almost tender— “is that you’ll come to depend on and use them, even when they’re not called for. Fillips like that chandelier trick are despicable. I liked you better when a beautiful tone poem by Debussy gave you the gout.”
“It still might,” Xavier said. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I haven’t been myself for nearly two years.”
“Good night.” Bari scooted forward and kissed his temple. “Don’t be seduced into shabby exhibitionism by a God-given talent, even if it’s a new one.”
*
Going home, hooded again (more to hide his real identity than to strut as Count Geiger), Xavier thought that Bari’s warning—“Don’t be seduced into shabby exhibitionism by a God-given talent”—had a broader application than she knew. It could apply to Bari herself. Who was more prone to what she’d warned him against than a fashion designer? Especially one with a complicated creative and profit-sharing agreement with a powerhouse comic-book company?
Then, as if from a disregarded nook of his subconscious, up surged a Nietzschean apothegm: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
The problem wasn’t Bari’s: the problem was his.
It dismayed Xavier, once home, to find that The Mick had waited up. Smite Them Hip & Thigh was on the CD player. The cut programmed to play and replay was “Count Geiger’s Blues.” Its beat, melody, and lyrics pounded Xavier like a brutal aural surf. He begged The Mick to turn the player off and go to bed. The Mick did both, reluctantly.
Alone again, Xavier sedated himself with a stiff drink.
I have become Count Geiger, he thought. I have become Count Geiger. I HAVE BECOME COUNT GEIGER. . . .
41
“Go Thou and Do Likewise”
At The Mick’s urging, Bari, Howie Littleton, Xavier, and he met one morning at Salonika’s main police station to visit Tim Bowman, a prisoner in a basement holding cell of the fortresslike station, a sprawling structure decades old and architecturally at odds with the metal-and-mirror towers raised on the recent past’s wrecking-ball ruins. In the station’s echoey lobby, Xavier felt that he had stumbled under the portcullis of a medieval keep. It always surprised him that the cops here spoke Suthren-styled English rather than Breton, Gaelic, or Norman French.
“Y’all can’t go in to see him,” the desk sergeant told them. “One or two at a time’s the reg.”
Xavier had a painful ambivalence—his gut ached, his hands were cold—about visiting Bowman. It didn’t reassure him to have to forfeit the moral support of two other visitors or to send Bari in to talk to Bowman without him. At a computer as unsuited to this vaulted lobby as a halftrack would have been on a Putt-Putt fairway, the sergeant tapped in their names and waited for them to make up their minds.
“The Mick and I’ll go together,” Xavier said.
“’Kay,” the sergeant said. “Who’s first? Each set of visitors gets twenty minutes.”
“You and Mikhail go,” Bari said. “Howie and I have some business to discuss.”
I’ll bet you do, Xavier thought. The pair sat down on a railway bench near the front desk, then turned toward each other with rapt looks and animated hands. The Mick tugged Xavier’s sleeve, pointing him down a long hall toward a visitors’ reception area. A young black policewoman led them. The hall stank of floor wax, bleach, and cigarette butts in sand-filled canisters.
“In you go,” the woman said, admitting them and locking the door behind them.
Unlike in the movies, no upright glass shield divided prisoners from visitors at the powwow table. Nor would they have to use telephone receivers to talk to Bowman, who entered under guard through a rear door. He wore powder-blue jailhouse garb and cheap low-cut sneakers. (No cape, no Big Mister Sinister costume.) His carroty hair had been shaved to burr length, but the barber had left him a boyish forelock, which drooped greasily. He didn’t look much like a comic-book hood anymore, more like somebody’s neglected or abused redheaded stepchild.
“So. You’re still still alive,” Bowman said, sitting down and frowning at Xavier. “ ’Bout my damned luck.”
“One review,” Xavier said. “It didn’t get you fired. Trying to kill me was stupid, as close to self-destructively irrational as an act could be.”
“Experts shrink me,” Bowman said. “So spare me your amateur repetitions of the obvious.”
The Mick began to unbutton his shirt. The guard behind Bowman, a tall black man with oddly greenish eyes and a name tag reading lively, rapped his knuckles on the table. “Whoa, son, what you doing?”
Xavier was as curious as Officer Lively. It wasn’t hot in the visitation room, and surely The Mick hadn’t tried to smuggle in a metal file or a snub-nosed revolver for his hero. The Mick had that much sense. Surely . . .
“Only a comic.” The Mick pulled from his shirt a pristine copy of Count Geiger, issue one, in a clear plastic bag with a white backing board.
“He cain’t have no comic,” Lively said.
“I didn’t bring it to leave,” The Mick said. “I want him to sign it for me.”
“That ain’t authorized either. He cain’t have a pen ’cept for letter writing and legal documents. And when he’s done, he got to give it right back.”
The Mick pushed the unbagged comic across to Bowman. He gestured
at Officer Lively’s shirt pocket, which held a dime-store ballpoint in a pocket protector. Lopsidedly smiling, Bowman began riffling the mint-condition copy of Count Geiger. “Let him use your pen,” The Mick said. “It’ll only be for letter writing?”
“You said a signature,” Lively said. “Not no letter writing.”
“Yeah,” The Mick conceded. “But a signature’s letter writing. You know, the letters of a name.”
Lively chuckled wanly. Then he reached over Bowman’s shoulder and liberated the comic from him. Keeping an eye on Bowman and The Mick, he examined the comic. Eventually, he held the comic up by its stapled spine and gave it a careful shake. When nothing dropped or fluttered out—no check, no escape instructions, no map—he returned it to Bowman and grudgingly yielded his ballpoint.
“Sign it for the kid,” he said. “And then give me back my pen. In this push-paper place, a guy got to have his pen.”
Surprise: Bowman opened the comic and autographed it neatly on the premier issue’s premier story’s title page. This act, Xavier realized, automatically increased the issue’s resale value at least tenfold. (What sentimental value did it have for The Mick? Xavier was less sure about that.) Bowman returned the pen to the guard and shoved the comic back to The Mick, who opened it to study the autograph.
Lively folded his arms and stepped back against the wall in a game attempt to erase himself from the room as thoroughly as would a eunuch in a seraglio. But Xavier had no doubt that if anything else about this meeting struck Lively as fishy, he would step in again. The Mick had no similar hunch. He put a hand on Xavier’s arm and leaned toward the man.
“Hey, Tim, my uncle’s noodlebrain review came out months ago. He don’t even feel that way now.”
“‘Doesn’t,’ ” Xavier said. To Bowman he added, “And I don’t.”
“Forgive me, kid,” Bowman said, ignoring Xavier. “But who the fuck are you, and why should I care?”
For once in his fitful career as a human imposter, The Mick was taken aback. Bowman had challenged him. Why? He was a fan, congenitally nool, an ally with the artist against society’s bloats, boxes, and zombies. He might not be Officer Lively’s blood kin, but he was obviously Bowman’s bro. Was he going to have to spell that out? Didn’t his comic-book smuggling and his smart-ass enchantment of Officer Lively bespeak his noolness?
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