The Municipalists

by Seth Fried

  She stood over me, looking down with a purity in her gaze that made her seem both there and not there. A look of cosmic judgment. She turned to face the gathered crowd and addressed them in a powerful voice. “Saluton, miaj kolegoj.”

  She launched into a spirited oration, in which I supposed she was railing against the continuum of western culture. Without understanding a word, I could sense that she was filling that large space with a brilliant anger. It was also clear from the rigid attentiveness of the crowd that they wanted nothing more than to bring about by any means necessary the world of which she spoke. Even Kirklin was staring up at her in wonder from the front of the crowd.

  I tried to see if I could ruin her speech by throwing up again, but couldn’t make it happen. Breathing was an effort and the sad thought occurred to me that the only act of defiance still open to me would be to die before she had the chance to shoot me.

  Laury turned from the audience and addressed a few words to me in Esperanto. It was some booming, final condemnation and it sounded as if she expected a response. I pretended to give it some thought before responding with the only Esperanto I could recall from that morning, “Mi devas pisi.”

  She was unperturbed by my answer and took a step back, pointing the barrel of her rifle at my chest.

  I should say something, I thought. I wanted to say something real. Something without anger. Tell them why it was so important that they be stopped.

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

  She made no motion to lower the rifle, but before I could ask her again, I heard my own disembodied voice, amplified, echoing throughout the room.

  “Kirklin’s men are just a bunch of stupid townie goons.”

  My face was suddenly projected forty feet high onto the wall to the right of the platform.

  “And Kir—Ki—Excuse me,” my face said. “Kirklin is a big grumpy weirdo. If we see him tomorrow, I’m going to tell him that to his face.”

  “You should,” I heard OWEN’s voice say off camera.

  “I will,” my face said.

  My captors and I were watching footage of OWEN and me back in the Museum of History, drunk. While I had no idea how this was possible, I knew enough to dread what was coming next. My rant against Kirklin was even more insane and sexually depraved than I had remembered. I could scarcely follow the logic of it. One moment the Kirklin of my imagination was French-kissing an ostrich and the next he was working up the courage to press his butt up into the Liberty Bell.

  I wondered if Kirklin’s virus had allowed him to hack into OWEN’s memory banks and if he was now showing this video as a kind of accusation. But when I looked down at Kirklin, he seemed taken aback. Sarah Laury too was staring up at my image in stunned, rifle-drooped confusion.

  The silence of the crowd soon gave way to angry shouts and Kirklin began to issue orders to the agents in his vicinity, some of whom began to rush about in small groups looking for the source of the projection.

  To the remaining crowd Sarah Laury called out something in Esperanto and pointed her rifle back at me. Before she could take the shot, the recording of me ended and another loud voice echoed throughout the crowd, “FBI. NOBODY MOVE.”

  As FBI agents in SWAT gear appeared all around the room, the surprised roar of Kirklin’s agents was drowned out by a booming arrangement of the theme music from The Magnificent Seven. One agent popped up behind Laury and disarmed her. Others blocked the exit and secured the arsenal. The rest of the agents were soon joined by a large National Guard unit equipped for crowd control and, after some scattered fighting, Kirklin’s people were subdued.

  Laury attempted to run to Kirklin when he was discovered among the crowd and taken into custody, but was held back by two guardsmen, who were startled by her screams. Kirklin looked up at her with sadness and love as the FBI agents put his hands in restraints. He shouted something to her, but it was drowned out by her cries as well as the boisterous, triumphant music that had continued to swell from every direction. She kicked and bit at the guardsmen who were holding her back with such ferocity that several more men had to be called up to the platform in order to remove her from the building.

  The FBI began escorting prisoners out of the building ten and twenty at a time. Kirklin was at the head of the first line and his men began to scream what sounded like encouragements to him in Esperanto while he was marched out.

  As the mass arrests continued, OWEN appeared across from me on the platform. He chuckled at the sight of me tied to another office chair.

  “Who would have thought,” he said, lowering the volume of his own soundtrack so I could hear him. “Sarah Laury is one hell of a public speaker.”

  There was a drink in his hand.

  “What is it with bloodthirsty megalomaniacs and public speaking?” he said, sitting next to me in a chair that he pulled from nowhere. “Humans are weird.”

  Then he asked, “Is it true what she said in her speech? Did you blow up the arsenal on Clairmont?”

  I nodded and OWEN immediately burst out laughing.

  “Nice job, dummy,” he said. “Like twenty firemen died trying to put out that fire.”

  I slumped forward in my chair. I felt the life going out of me.

  “Is that true?”

  “No,” OWEN said. “But it could have been. I mean, a munitions fire? Are you out of your mind?”

  He pointed to a column of Kirklin’s men being marched out of the warehouse with their hands bound.

  “You see all this?” he said. “I helped the FBI track down Kirklin’s arms dealer and he gave us a couple of addresses. Our response was all very tactical, very clever, very unlike a raging munitions fire within city limits. So—”

  It was worth wondering how OWEN had managed to escape and strike up a working relationship with the FBI, but my body was failing and all I wanted was for OWEN to stop talking.

  “So, what?” I said.

  “So don’t ditch me next time. I’m your friend and I’m better at this than you are.”

  Nearby, one of Kirklin’s agents slipped out of his restraints and tried to take a swing at an FBI agent, but was quickly brought down by several guardsmen with stun sticks. OWEN watched the proceedings somewhat wistfully and said, “We could have made this happen together.”

  “OWEN,” I said, “I think I’m dying.”

  He looked at me, confused for a moment, and then snapped his fingers. “Oh, that’s right. I have my patch switched on in case I found you in a bad way. Let me turn it off and get a look at you.”

  “I’d stay seated.”

  OWEN almost flickered out when he saw the shape I was in. But instead of fainting, he told me to hold tight and stormed off into the crowd. Within a few minutes FBI agents were untying me and an air ambulance was called. A woman in FBI SWAT gear pulled OWEN’s tie clip from the strap of her helmet and placed it in my hand while we waited for the EMTs.

  “Keep him out of trouble,” she said.

  I don’t remember being loaded into the helicopter, but I must have held on to the tie clip because OWEN was with me the whole time, kneeling next to the stretcher with his hand projected onto mine as the EMTs grew more and more concerned over my vitals, my unsteady breath fogging my oxygen mask.

  It was nighttime and as we banked gently to the left I saw the bright lights of Center City shining below. OWEN followed my eyes and we stared out at the city together. It hurt to talk, but by slipping the tie clip under the mask I was able to make myself understood over the pounding of the rotors.

  “What was that?” OWEN asked without taking his eyes off Metropolis.

  “I said pour yourself a drink.”

  He laughed and then did so.

  13 As I was admitted to the ICU at Metropolis Medical Center, OWEN slipped in amid the confusion and disguised himself as a doctor. Based on his knowledge that I had been involved in an
explosion and whatever information he had been able to gather from the scan of my person he conducted on the flight over, he felt comfortable having the ICU staff start treatment for a condition he referred to as blast lung. He also told them to look for any internal bleeding or tertiary wounds. You can imagine my horror as I looked up in my semiconscious state and saw OWEN standing over me in a lab coat, shouting out orders to every health care professional in sight.

  Later my actual doctor seemed confused as to who had initiated the majority of my treatments, but she admitted that the speedy diagnosis had probably saved my life. OWEN was sitting behind her in the corner of my hospital room, working on a crossword puzzle of his own devising. At the mention of saving my life, he continued to work on his puzzle and waved his hand dismissively in my direction as if to say, “Don’t mention it.”

  She went on to inform me that I had a fracture in my left knee that would require extensive physical therapy. Even with a lot of hard work I would probably be walking with a cane for some time. As soon as she left, OWEN leapt up from his seat and began walking back and forth, experimenting with various styles of walking sticks.

  “A cane?” he said. “You lucky son of a bitch.”

  OWEN had never used foul language in my company before, but after being embedded with an FBI SWAT team he was now swearing fairly regularly.

  In his hand appeared a beech wood walking stick with a chrome eagle head for a handle. A brass jaguar on a shaft of blue ash. He cycled through diamond knob handles and gold lion heads. Shafts of walnut and padauk. Canes with swords in them and knotted shillelaghs.

  “I’m going to get one too,” he said. “Though, we can’t both walk around with canes. We’d look like assholes. We can divide up the week. I’ll take Monday, Wednesday, Friday and we’ll alternate on weekends.”

  He twirled a cane whose handle featured a large pewter mermaid.

  This was another in a series of remarks OWEN had made that suggested he anticipated working closely alongside me once we returned to Suitland. I had deflected these comments until now and I thought it would be best to address this most recent one at face value.

  “I’ll actually need a cane. You won’t.”

  OWEN looked down at me from the foot of the bed and clutched his cane to his chest. “That’s a horrible thing to say to somebody.”

  I was admitted for three weeks and OWEN seemed to enjoy our time in the hospital, ordering me a set of clothes online for my journey home, projecting old movies onto the wall of my room, and occasionally offering to order me pizzas or put in a good word for me with some of the attractive young women on the hospital staff.

  I’d been avoiding what I assumed would be an awkward conversation, and so it wasn’t until our plane ride back to Suitland that I asked OWEN how he had managed to escape and collaborate with the FBI. He seemed surprised that I mentioned his confinement to the tower so casually and I knew he was expecting an apology. But he had too much pride in his ingenuity to keep the story to himself.

  Using his own database, OWEN had made a series of late-night calls to higher-ups at the Port Authority, pretending to be someone from the governor’s office. It took several tries before he found someone who could send a maintenance worker to recover what he described over the phone as an important piece of monitoring equipment. OWEN gave detailed instructions as to where he was to be found and the maintenance worker recovered him within the hour. Unfortunately, his rescuer was apparently annoyed at having been called in so late over something so seemingly unimportant. Instead of dropping the tie clip off at the nearest police station as OWEN had ordered over the phone, the man called his supervisor and reported that he hadn’t found anything. He then chucked the tie clip from the driver’s-side window of his van on his way home.

  The clip landed in an alley, where it was eventually discovered by a seventy-year-old woman named Malvina who had come outside to give her leftovers to the stray cats who lived around her building’s dumpster. OWEN impressed her with a few illusions, then convinced her to take him to the police in exchange for three wishes. She asked for a washing machine and a dryer. When OWEN asked her what her third wish was, she said she wanted the washer and dryer to be new.

  “Don’t worry,” OWEN interrupted his story to add. “I’ve already made the arrangements and the agency has sent her the best washer and dryer on the market. I also sent her a few thousand dollars just to be nice.”

  “How many is a few?”

  OWEN shrugged and resumed his story, which now had him arriving at a quiet police station in the East Side, where he pretended to be an automated message caught on a loop, identifying the clip as property of the FBI and demanding that it be returned to the Metropolis field office immediately. According to the officers on duty at the Seventy-Third Precinct, “immediately” meant 10:00 A.M. the next day. Once he reached the FBI, he managed to convince everyone there that he was special tech on loan from FBI headquarters in Washington. Combining what he knew about Kirklin’s operation with FBI resources, OWEN had been able to find Kirklin’s arms dealer in a matter of minutes. He was a nineteen-year-old boy named Anthony Boxler who lived in the basement of his parents’ split-level in a nearby suburb. Widely known on anarchist message boards all over the Deep Web as proxy_moxy, the boy had brokered the sale of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons online and coordinated with Kirklin’s agents embedded throughout Metropolis’s maritime freight infrastructure to sneak two cargo vessels loaded with arms into the city. Boxler told the FBI everything he knew and from there it was only a matter of organizing the raids with the National Guard on Kirklin’s remaining facilities. By the time they were ready, I had already blown up the building on Clairmont and the only people left in the Wilmington Avenue high-rise were the agents who were piloting drones over what were believed to be Kirklin’s next intended targets. On the way to Kirklin’s third and final base, a refurbished marine construction facility along the Lawrence River, OWEN confided in a Special Agent Boyle, the person in charge of leading the raids, that after Kirklin was apprehended the tie clip needed to be returned to a Henry Thompson at the USMS.

  “I didn’t expect us to run into you there,” he said. “So you can’t say you risked your life for nothing. Agent Boyle’s time is valuable and you saved her a trip to the post office.”

  I had come to understand that OWEN’s needling was his way of expressing a certain kind of affection. I had a large cast on my left leg and from the expression of discomfort on my face in the cabin of that small agency plane, he had most likely decided that the moment called for a bit of good-natured ribbing. I suppose I was relieved that OWEN was in high spirits as we returned to Suitland even though I was sure he had to know that it would be the end of our working together. After all, as long as OWEN existed in his present form, at least one aspect of Kirklin’s plan was still at work. His virus.

  Garrett had kept my presence in Metropolis under wraps, so OWEN and I were welcomed back to headquarters quietly. We met with Garrett and Klaus in a secure meeting room in the admin sector in order to debrief them without fear of being overheard by any of our colleagues or, worse, the oversight committee members who were still lingering around the agency in search of improprieties.

  I was slow entering the room, still awkward on my crutches. OWEN marched in ahead of me, airily embracing Klaus, both of them laughing and exchanging pleasantries in German. Garrett placed a hand on my shoulder and said he was glad to have me back.

  I thanked him and remained standing while the three of them sat around the room’s small conference table. I told Klaus that his new interface had unlimited potential and that OWEN had single-handedly saved Metropolis. Here OWEN raised a finger to signal an interruption and announced to the room, “I also kept his tie straight.”

  I told OWEN to give Garrett and Klaus access to our memory partition and encouraged both of them to go through OWEN’s memory banks. I then put the clip on th
e table and told them what else they would see if they watched the footage, explaining that while the end result had been desirable, OWEN’s current configuration was erratic and still contaminated by Kirklin’s virus. I told them that OWEN himself had admitted the only way to remedy this was a complete memory wipe and a reinstallation of the interface.

  I didn’t have much to add to that recommendation, so I thanked them for their time and excused myself.

  Given OWEN’s powers of display, I had been expecting a scene. But as I left the room, he was looking down at the table without saying a word.

  If he’d asked me why I did it, I would have told him that I’d already had my world disappear once, when the Lake Shore Limited left the tracks. I wasn’t going to put the first home I’d known since then at risk by keeping around a vestige of Kirklin’s madness.

  I told myself that OWEN’s friendship had been nothing but an illusion, a quirk of damaged software.

  I walked back to my office, which was exactly as I’d left it. There was a stuffiness in the air that had probably always been there but that I’d never been away long enough to notice. I lowered myself into my chair and adjusted the model train on my desk before sorting through the file folders and papers I’d left in neat stacks. In Metropolis, I had been frightened and out of my depth. But here everything seemed so much less complicated. The reassuring orderliness of this place I had long since learned to call home was already welcoming me back and I suffered no doubt that I had done the right thing with regard to OWEN. I was in my element.

  * * *

  With Kirklin in custody and the agency’s woes all attributable to him, the oversight committee eventually withdrew their request for Garrett’s resignation. Soon the agency was back to normal and I was in the field doing what I loved. Right away I went out to South Bend to renovate the city’s central bus station. When the work was finished, I stood leaning on my cane in the station’s empty lobby and admired where the scuffed drywall had been replaced with handsome stone tile and where the water-damaged ceilings had been ripped out. Now there were high windows flooding the place with sunlight, endowing the very idea of bus travel with an air of nostalgic adventure.