by Seth Fried
OWEN lit up the entire counter with more fake flames and put them out with a fire extinguisher. He waved authoritatively for the guard and librarian to back away from the building, but the guard only squinted at him for a moment before banging on the door again and shouting for us to unlock it.
“Okay,” OWEN said, lowering his fire extinguisher. “Put the tie clip near a window and I’ll distract them. Just let me know when you have what you need.”
I pulled off the clip and headed toward the front windows, where I placed it on the sill. I was barely halfway back to the counter when my fireman disguise disappeared and I heard the guard and librarian begin to scream, the sound becoming gradually softer as whatever monster OWEN had conjured chased them toward the parking lot.
He had bought me some time, so I decided to see what else I could find on Laury in the library’s computer by searching the catalog for any of her student writing. Dozens of hits came up for her contributions to The Marigold, bound issues of which were kept in the periodical section on the second floor. There was also a listing in the library’s drama section for the play she had written.
My hangover was gaining on me and I was pouring boozy sweat by the time I made it upstairs to The Marigold’s archive. I pulled the most recent volumes off the shelf, then grabbed the bound manuscript of her play from the drama section.
From outside there was a loud roar and more screaming. I tucked the books under my arm and moved to the window at the end of the stacks to see how OWEN was doing. Given his performance at the museum, I was surprised that he had only turned himself into a bear. Granted, the appearance of a 1,500-pound Kodiak bear in the middle of a city campus was strange, but compared to a clown monster, the choice of bear attack was at least beginning to approach the outer realms of subtlety. OWEN had scared the librarian and guard up onto the roof of a Honda Civic. The two held each other and wept while OWEN paced around the car with his mouth foaming.
Across the parking lot I spotted a large dormitory and realized that, while comparatively understated, OWEN’s bear was most likely drawing too much attention. I rushed back down to the lobby, where I attempted to leap over the front counter to retrieve Laury’s borrowing history. Instead my shoe caught on one of the computer cables and I fell over the counter, pulling the old monitor and tower down onto the floor with me. My other foot winged a metal shelf filled with reserved books. It teetered precariously for a moment before falling back and knocking over another shelf behind it.
Once I’d gotten up and dusted myself off, I tore Laury’s record from the printer. I retrieved the tie clip on my way out the door and told OWEN it was time to go. He projected his voice into my ear, telling me to make my way to the front gate. Halfway there, OWEN’s roars died down and I saw that he was running alongside me. At the campus entrance, I entered the empty guard booth and opened the gates. Just then a truck from Metropolis Animal Control pulled up the main drive and OWEN waved it through. The driver slowed as he passed us and rolled down his window, asking us for directions to the school’s library. OWEN, wearing a guard uniform, told him where to go, then thanked him, letting him know he had showed up just in time.
* * *
We headed down toward Berkshire Square in the Lower North Side, where the air of forbidding privilege eventually gave way to a modicum of economic diversity. Boutique clothing stores stood next to barber shops and Dominican cafés. Banks and business-class hotels overlooked the stretch of sidewalk near the entrance of Berkshire Square Park where men and women sat next to folding tables, selling handmade jewelry and amateur oil paintings. Despite the sense of unease that hung over the city, plenty of citizens had chosen to go about their business. The young guardsman standing with a rifle next to the bluestone basin of the park’s massive, thudding fountain was an ominous sight, but it didn’t stop a young couple from having a loud argument near the benches on the park’s high terrace or the busker from playing the violin while balancing a leashed tabby cat on his head.
A few more blocks and we found a small diner, which seemed like a fine place to go over our haul. Inside, the air smelled savory and half-burned, every surface stained a warm sepia from decades of hash brown smoke. We took one of the cracked vinyl booths in back. A young woman who’d been watching the news on a small television behind the lunch counter appeared next to our table. She kept glancing back at the television and there was a heaviness in her voice when she asked for our order.
Her obvious grief over the attacks made our presence feel like an intrusion, and so I tried to sound apologetic when I asked for a cup of coffee and an omelet. She then looked to OWEN, who was absently smacking his lips as he looked over the laminated menu doubling as a place mat. Regardless of the fact that he was incapable of eating, he ordered himself two plates of onion rings, a stuffed pepper, and a Fresca. I tried to suggest that he and I could share my omelet, but the woman had already made off with our order.
OWEN turned to me, pleased.
“I’ve never ordered food before,” he said.
He was in a pleasant mood so this seemed like a good opportunity to provide him with some constructive criticism regarding his behavior at the library. I told him it was important to remember that we were both public servants and that no matter how desperate the situation we should do our best to proceed with a certain amount of professionalism and decency, especially since this was such a frightening time for the city.
“What are you talking about?”
“You screamed ‘fire’ at a librarian,” I said. “You made her think she was about to be mauled by a bear. And after all that, she’s going to find the place trashed.”
“Wait a minute,” OWEN said. “Who trashed the library?”
“Well, I mean, I did, because you—”
OWEN leaned over the table, his eyes huge with mock outrage.
“Henry, why did you do that?”
“You were drawing too much attention to us, so I was in a hurry. Some shelves got knocked over.”
“That was a library, Henry. For students.”
“Cut it out.”
He held out his hands to show he was now being serious.
“All right,” he said, “so the takeaway is next time you shouldn’t rush. Running in an unfamiliar setting is dangerous. Speaking as your friend, I’m just glad you didn’t get hurt. But as far as my bear projection is concerned, I think you’re being a little narrow-minded. Those people should be thanking me for getting their minds off all the terrorism.”
Our drinks arrived and OWEN nodded his thanks to the waitress, who didn’t seem to notice that he was now wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat. She placed the coffee and Fresca on the table without comment and returned to the kitchen.
“That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about,” I said. “Completely unnecessary. If we’re going to stop Kirklin we need to focus.”
“I don’t think so,” OWEN said. “Kirklin has the market cornered on the kind of focus you’re talking about. If we act like well-behaved USMS agents, he’s going to get away with whatever it is he’s after. We need to be as ridiculous as possible.”
A stubborn silence settled between us. He adjusted the cowboy hat on his head, making a big show of the fact that his hands were now lobster claws.
“Okay,” I said. “Point taken.”
“Is it?”
OWEN tilted his head back and began pushing a mustache out of his upper lip. In a matter of seconds it was touching the table. He curled the ends of it with his claws.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “You win.”
He clunked his claws together in celebration and took on his normal shape just in time to receive his plates of onion rings from our waitress. My omelet came soon after, along with a wilted stuffed pepper. I finished my eggs quickly and OWEN looked pleased when I ate some of his onion rings. The sight of me eating seemed to amuse him and he insisted I try
some of his stuffed pepper before he would agree to help me examine Laury’s borrowing history. As it turned out, the pepper was stuffed with a foul-tasting mixture of cabbage and caraway seeds. OWEN delighted in the unhappy faces I made as I chewed. There was some discussion as to whether the bite I had taken was big enough before I pushed the plates aside and placed the printout from the library between us.
“Fine,” OWEN said, disappointed. “But if I find anything important in here, you have to eat more pepper.”
“If you tell me anything useful about Sarah Laury, I’ll finish the whole thing.”
In a flash OWEN had removed his blazer and was rolling up his shirtsleeves.
“You’re on.”
The list was in chronological order and the items toward the top were the sort of books one would expect any bright young woman to borrow: Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, To the Lighthouse. There were also books that had obviously been borrowed in response to a specific class or assignment: Campbell’s History of the French and Indian War, A Critical Companion to The House of Seven Gables. It wasn’t until halfway down the list that something caught my attention: The Anatomy of a City by Andre Denard.
“Oh, Denard!” I said to OWEN.
I only meant to tell him it was one of my favorite books, but OWEN assumed it was of importance and read a copy of it he found online. He nodded and said that a 1,500-page treatise on the infrastructure of modern cities seemed a little dense for an undergrad.
“Not really,” I said. “I loved that book when I was her age.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And you’re a giant weirdo.”
I was about to go on defending the book when I noticed the next titles on the list. I recognized them immediately as the work of fringe sociologists: Infrastructure and Institutionalized Oppression, Agents of Gentrification, Civil Revolutionaries, Radical Communities. These were texts written by the sort of riffraff who hadn’t been able to get into the National Engineering Academy and had studied anthropology at Brown while smoking marijuana and misquoting Foucault to one another at parties. But perhaps the most troubling book on the list was the last item, which had been checked out two weeks before Laury’s disappearance and had since accrued over $12.85 in late fees: A Beginner’s Guide to Esperanto. OWEN whistled.
“Well, whatever Kirklin’s got planned,” he said, “I’m guessing she’s into it.”
I pulled out the bound issues of The Marigold and began flipping through them in search of Laury’s contributions. Her monthly column was titled the Laury Perspective, a 1,200-word box in the upper-right-hand corner of the opinion page. The grainy black-and-white photo next to her byline showed her in a ponytail and a white polo. She looked like a normal college student, as opposed to the young celebrity whose face was usually reproduced on the heavy, glossy stock of popular magazines. The first few installments of the column were socially minded but restrained. I skimmed a few pieces on antibullying, the value of contributing one’s time to a charitable organization, and a charming piece on dining etiquette:
Though the American style of holding one’s fork is of course perfectly acceptable, allow me to enumerate what I feel are several distinct advantages to the Continental style.
A month after Laury had checked out The Anatomy of a City, the topics she covered had grown edgier. She wrote a slightly provocative piece on commuter attrition, “Parking Meter Rates Should Be Raised for Good of the City,” and soon she was penning heated accusations against her father’s administration, accusing members of his staff of negligence and even fraud.
There had been some mention in the mainstream press of Laury’s public criticisms of her father, but nothing that would have prepared me for the inflammatory statements she had published regularly in The Marigold. It seemed strange that her writing hadn’t caused more of a stir. I wondered aloud whether there may have been a deliberate cover-up and OWEN cut me off.
“Henry, it’s a column on local government in a college newspaper. I can’t believe we’re reading it.”
I could see he had a point, but if anyone had paid attention to said college newspaper, they might have stumbled across a particularly interesting item in its Clubs and Activities section. That’s where I found a picture of Terrence Kirklin surrounded by a group of young people under a handmade banner identifying them as Newton’s Future Municipal Leaders. I recognized the club as one of Garrett’s school outreach programs. He had made participation mandatory for all of his admins. The week he made the announcement, Kirklin had flown down to Suitland just to slam a few doors and scream at Garrett for trying to turn him into a goddamned babysitter.
He seemed happy enough in the photograph, sitting front and center with half a dozen Newton students huddled around him. I had never seen Kirklin smiling before and if it weren’t for his eye patch I probably wouldn’t have recognized him. Laury was standing next to Kirklin’s chair, her hand resting on his shoulder. The article continued onto the next page, where there was a photograph of Kirklin with his arm around Laury at a pizza fund-raiser for the group. They were standing close, with Laury’s head almost resting on Kirklin’s chest. They had the contented look of newlyweds.
From there we moved on to Laury’s play, titled The Man in the Tower. While the tone of her later columns had been rather acerbic, her play was a surprisingly reflective story about a young woman who is driven mad by her many suitors and ends up fleeing her small village to live in the wilderness. I can no longer live with so many eyes fixed so maniacally in my direction, she proclaims as she flees into a dense wood. After wandering for some time and delivering a few monologues on the value of solitude and self-determination, she encounters a strange man named Majstro who lives in an ancient stone tower. He explains that he is a wizard responsible for maintaining the order of the universe and performs a few miracles for her benefit, moving the stars around the night sky, teaching her the language of trees, etc. The girl tells him about her troubles—I am loved by too many and have been robbed of all quiet—and he invites her to take refuge in his tower, where they conduct a series of philosophical dialogues regarding the baseness and corruption of humankind. Their discussions grow in intensity and eventually result in declarations of love between the two. From the tower they see that her suitors have followed her into the woods and Majstro offers to place the girl among the stars, where he can look after her and protect her from the relentlessness of those who are pursuing her. She happily accepts the offer and is turned into a constellation in the shape of a circle. The girl’s suitors then find the wizard’s tower and demand to know whether or not he has seen her. Without saying a word the wizard self-immolates and another circle appears in the sky, creating a figure eight.
OWEN was still frowning down at the last page when I asked him what he thought of it.
“You mean artistically?” he said, scrunching up his nose. “It’s a bunch of confessional, pseudosymbolic garbage.”
His hours of watching classic cinema with Klaus had clearly made him a bit of a snob when it came to narrative art.
“The whole thing is just a bunch of melodramatic whining dressed up in the laziest way possible. The suitors represent her fame. The forest, her burgeoning womanhood and corresponding confusion. The wizard, Kirklin. His control over the universe, Kirklin’s influence in Metropolis. And don’t get me started on that tower. She should have saved that imagery for her honeymoon, am I right?”
OWEN did have a point in that the one-to-one correspondence of the play’s various elements suggested it was the work of a literal thinker, with the exception of those stars forming a figure eight, which seemed uncharacteristically playful. Though if Majstro was Kirklin, and his control over the world represented his control over the city, it was possible that the end of the play meant he had hidden her somewhere in the city’s infrastructure.
“That’s good, Henry,” OWEN said when I shared my theory. “So he hid her somewhere in the larges
t city in the country. We didn’t need to read ninety pages of expressionist drivel to know that might be a possibility.”
“Check the city’s sewer system for any access tunnels shaped like figure eights.”
“Nothing.”
“What about the old subway lines?”
OWEN scratched his chin while he thought it over. “The old tracks were mostly straight lines running along avenues. And they were all abandoned twenty years before Kirklin came on as station chief. He only ever contributed algorithms for the current system.”
OWEN saw my face brighten when he mentioned Kirklin’s transit algorithms.
“No way,” he said, looking down sadly at the uneaten pepper. “That’s not possible.”
I put some money on the table and gathered up the library materials so I could dump them into the trash on my way to the exit. I knew where we would find Sarah Laury.
“I said it’s not possible,” OWEN called out across the diner. “Someone would have noticed.”
8 Most experts agree that when it comes to public transit in the twentieth century, the original subway system in Metropolis was among the worst in the world. Though, really it hadn’t even been a system in the proper sense of the word. Each line was built and maintained separately by independent operators who had set out to provide service for specific parts of the city. The implementation of a comprehensive citywide transit system was deemed too expensive, and so for decades the city’s subways were abandoned to the free market. Coverage was limited and required commuters to put up with circuitous travel routes; in order to get from Mark and Verdi in the South Side to Little India in the East Side, one would have to take the Express Intracity twenty minutes in the wrong direction, then walk to Murch to catch the Rapid East.
By 1961, there were over two hundred different train lines in the city, each with its own fare structure and unique token. A famous photo from the Metropolis Examiner shows commuters in raincoats standing in front of a subway entrance and sorting through handfuls of tokens to see if they have the right one for that particular line. In the mid-1960s the state legislature attempted to solve the issue by establishing the Metropolis Transit Authority, which began to buy up the old lines and manage them as a single public benefit corporation. But the individual lines were still so far apart and discontinuous that the MTA was unable to provide effective service.