by Harn, Darby
“Start talking, Kitsie.”
I squeeze her wrist, trying to pry her off the death grip she’s got on the zipper. “Just leave me alone.”
“There’s no fun in that, now is there? Listen. It’s simple. You can either have one hand on the wheel of this thing, or you can be in the backseat watching as I drive you through the front page of every newspaper in this country. Your call.”
The only story I want to give Frankie is what’s behind this zipper. All I have to do is let go of her wrist. She opens the jacket. Sees the light. Learns, like I did, what happens when you go playing with fire. I can’t tell her the truth; I can’t have her going on the news with stories about aliens wandering the streets of Break Pointe again. Whatever anonymity I have would be gone, and so would the space and opportunity to finish the sonic suit for Valene. My life would be gone, such as it is.
Latex snaps behind me. “Hey, Frankie,” Vidette says, tearing her medical gloves off. “I’ve got a minute if you want to come inside the van with me and get your hearing checked.”
Frankie lets go of the zipper and turns around, wary. “Dr. Rizzo. I’m just trying to impress on Kitsie here how important the strike is. I’d think you’d be sympathetic.”
“I don’t feel sorry for people. I go to work for them. So why don’t you give that a shot and go pick at some other scab.”
Frankie thumbs her cell over to record audio, and shoves it in Vidette’s face like a microphone. “Care to give a quote?”
“I’d love to,” Vidette says. The phone pulverizes to plastic powder in her fist. What’s left of it she throws toward the river, a good mile away. “Did you get that?”
Frankie smiles, undeterred. “I’ll keep asking around.”
“You do that. Though, friendly advice, I might be careful where you go poking around. From what I hear, you’re not very popular at the Blackwood Building these days.”
“Funny. I heard the same thing about you.”
They trade smiles, both razor sharp.
Vidette dusts her hands as the news van drives off. “Ok?”
I shrug. “I always feel like she’s editing me.”
“I had a boyfriend like that once. No matter what I thought, I always ended up saying what he wanted me to.”
“What happened?”
“I broke his pelvis.”
“Oh.”
“It was the sex. I didn’t know my own strength.”
I nod. “Makes sense.”
“So. You’re Kit.”
I sigh. “I’d like to be.”
“I’m Vi.”
“I know. I had you, when I was a kid. Your action figure.”
She smiles. “You did?”
I smile, too. “She was – you were – my favorite when I was a girl. There weren’t any other women action figures, back then anyways, and you were better because you were real. I could imagine being you, or at least being strong.”
Her smile freezes, like she doesn’t know what to say. “I thought girls played with dolls.”
The only doll I ever had – ostensibly – was a porcelain one Ma had from her childhood. Old, old thing from Ireland that her mother gave her back in the day. Ma gave it to me on my fifth birthday, but kept it for safekeeping. I never took to it, anyways. I loved assembling things, taking them apart and making something else of them. Changing clothes on a doll wasn’t enough for me; I had to change the face. The character. A lot of the toys came with sheets of stickers indicating allegiances. I discarded them, preferring to craft my own identities.
“Most people think it was just the twelve in the original line,” I say, “but you were actually the thirteenth, which was supposed to have been a mail-away but then the Doomsday Clock Alarm happened and they cancelled the line. So they dumped you in Europe. But I’ve relations back in Ireland and my aunts knew I was mental for you, so. People only found out about it here years later, and of course you’re the rarest and most expensive one of them all. I had you, though. Well. I did.”
“You did? What happened?”
“I kind of got into somebody else.”
Vidette’s brows arch. “Story of my life. So. Abi says you’re here to see me. Not that I mind, really, but don’t you have a pretty cush health care plan over there at GP?”
“Not all of my doctors are in network.”
“They get you coming and going. What can I help you with?”
Anxiety twists within me, along with a lot of other things I don’t want to think about. “Dr. Piller can’t know I’m here.”
“Frankie is right about one thing. I’m not exactly the community favorite over there. Besides. What would I tell him?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know anything. I don’t know if you can help me. I don’t think anyone can.”
Vidette sighs. “Yeah, I get that a lot. But if I believed it, I wouldn’t be doing this. There’s no price of admission here, Kit, but I do ask one thing. That you be honest.”
“Ok.”
“Are you in danger?”
The words form. Say them. “Yes.”
“Are people in danger here, right now? Because of you?”
“I won’t hurt anybody,” I say.
“Abi told me to keep my distance. Why’s that?”
“It’s better I show you. Without other people around.”
Vidette nods. “Let me work the line, and then we’ll work on you. Ok? Don’t worry about a thing. It’s going to be fine.”
Vidette blubbers her lips. “Oy.”
Birds drum against the outside of the mobile clinic as she examines the X-Ray she took of me. The machine here in the truck isn’t the test chamber back in the lab, but it does the trick.
I think.
Vidette holds the X-Ray up to the light. “There’s nothing,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m not showing any skeleton. Nervous system. Veins. There’s no you.”
“What?”
Vidette hands me the X-Ray. There’s nothing on it, except for the Myriad, a blue-gray smear of light. “Just this thing.”
The heavy radiograph warps in my hands. “But I’m me…”
Abi rests her hand on my shoulder. “So… if she’s the alien, if she’s just energy or whatever, why does she look like Kit?”
“I am Kit,” I say.
Vidette unzips my jacket. She nudges my chin up as she looks me over. “What do you feel?”
I don’t feel much of anything, except a tingling numbness in my entire body. Is this my body? Where is my body, if this isn’t it? This warmth burns in my chest, like a laptop that’s been running too long, pulsing, throbbing, swelling, surfacing toward my skin and I drown the light trying to get out of me.
“A lot,” I say.
Vidette’s eyes track the filaments slithering through my chest, sinking into the Myriad and then springing back up. All my focus goes into keeping them inside, and not making that quick connection from my heart to hers. Abi’s. The world’s.
“You’re controlling this?” Vidette says. “How?”
“It’s a bit like not eating that last cookie.”
Abi shakes her head. “That’s real restraint.”
Vidette holds up her hand. She waves it across my chest, and a tendril of light tracks it from beneath my skin. “I’d have to agree. I’m not the expert on the alien. That’s Professor Blackwood. But if I have to guess, you and the alien got mixed up somehow. Your consciousness seems intact, but this isn’t your body. This is a sustained magnetic field, which is trapping the radiation and energy of the Myriad into a shape that’s human.”
“How do I fix it?” I say.
She smiles and frowns at the same time. “Again, not an expert. But I don’t know, honey. Hand to God. We know next to nothing about the Ever. You have to know more. Do you? I mean, do you have any more insight into this thing than before?”
All the knowledge of the Ever is mine. All its lives. Every moment exists in real time, no interruptions, no gaps, no misrememb
ering but if I think of them, I become them, the way I did the police officer. The warrior from Destos. The alien.
We must continue, the voice says, like a thunderbolt in my head. That tug lurches me off the exam table. I stumble forward, north, toward the wall. The ship. We must resume the work.
“I’m trying not to,” I say, sitting down again.
Vidette leans over, staring right into the Myriad like its a fishbowl. “You said the Myriad was damaged?”
“It was cracked. Why?”
“Maybe it’s on the fritz. So it didn’t acquire you completely. The Professor said the alien shut down with the ship back ’68. Maybe it got reverted to the factory settings.”
“Maybe the Ever is using her like a software patch, trying to repair the damage from 1968,” Abi says.
“I’m me,” I say, for what it’s worth.
She puts her hand on my arm again. “But you’re like a good patch. You’re like an update. New and improved.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“In any case, we have to be careful,” Vidette says. “Number one, this thing is putting out more radiation than the X-Ray machine. You should probably step back, Abi. Actually, honey, maybe you should step outside. Head down the block.”
Abi stays put. “I’m staying if you are.”
Vidette keeps drawing the attention of the hunger within me. “I’m made of pretty strong stuff. Skin’s like titanium. My bones. They couldn’t even take my tonsils out when I was a kid. You’re going to start getting a headache here. And a tumor.”
Abi takes her hand off my arm. “I’ll just, ok.”
“And two, regardless of the handle you’ve got on this thing, Kit, the reality is the alien is back. So is its power. I know you don’t want to involve GP and I can’t blame you, but – “
“You promised,” I say.
“We need to be practical here. We need to do the right thing for you, and for the city. So, let’s – “
A bolt of lightning lasers through my blouse right into Vidette. She catches it in her hand. Light writhes in her locked fist, millions of tendrils of energy branching off the cord, trying to acquire her, but they can’t. Jesus. The energy of the Myriad can’t penetrate Vidette’s skin. It can’t acquire her.
“Is this the alien?” she says, holding the crackling filament at bay. “Or is this you?”
“I really don’t know,” I say, and the filament evaporates in the haze of my shame and confusion. I zip up my jacket again, but I don’t know what good that does. I don’t know what real control I have over this. The alien fears being discovered or caged as much I do. Worse comes to worse, I’m just a passenger. Who am I kidding. I’ve always been a passenger. Bystander. A cardboard cutout, meant to stand in for someone real.
“Abi,” Vidette says.
“I know it’s you.” Abi grips the end of my sleeve. “You’re going to figure this out. We are.”
My arms want to spring around her, the same as the filaments in my chest do, but I keep it all belted down. There isn’t any way of expressing my gratitude, or the pain of not being able to show her. She steps out of the clinic, teary. Even with her gone, she’s still there, out on the walk. I see her, clean through the metal of the mobile clinic. Her presence entangles my magnetic field as the birds do, as everything generating any electrical power does and the world is less the division now of flesh, blood, glass, plastic and wood than it is the webs and weaves of energy twisted into shape by life.
Twenty-seven years I’ve been a square plug for a round hole. Now I’m a lightning rod and still I don’t work. Still I’m wrong. I don’t know how to be right. I don’t know how to be.
“You’ve got one thing going for you,” Vidette says.
“What’s that?”
“You have Abi in your corner.”
“I’m very lucky,” I say, but I don’t think it sounds anywhere near as sardonic as I think it does.
Vidette smiles, anyway. “You have no idea.”
“You going to turn me in?”
“I think I need to think about it,” she says. “Which I don’t want to do out in public, so we’ll go back to my place, and hash out some options over a bottle of wine. Or two. Ok?”
My mood lifts, a little. “Wine?”
Vidette’s voice carries in from her bedroom. “Doing ok?”
A glass of moscato Abi would love becomes energy that becomes information that becomes a quasi-hallucinogenic excursion through the history of the grapes that make up the wine from their mashed ends to their vined births. Leather plush cushions my descent through time, not exactly a dimension, but a field of energy beyond human perception and bleeding Jesus.
Vidette peeks out of the bedroom. “I know it’s in one of these boxes. I always say I’m going to have a garage sale.”
“Ok.”
My hand buzzes. Words burn in my hand. A text from Abi.
U ok???
I text back. Tripping balls.
K bc I was worried
About me?
Bracelets jangle around Vidette’s wrists every time she moves. “Hey. Val told me about you guys. I’m sorry.”
Abi texts back. About her!
???
“Val told me about you and this experimental suit of yours. How you wouldn’t ever take no for an answer.”
Another text buzzes in. Is she being extra nice?
It’s like wine and cheese. She’s looking for clothes.
YEAH RIGHT she’s got u over to ‘talk’ and when u drunk she’s going to reach in your chest and CRUSH that thing!!!
You’re being dramatic.
I’m sure Frankie’s cell phone thought so.
“Shit,” I say.
GET OUT WHILE U CAN AND STUFF!!!
I leave the couch, the south of France still swirling inside me, and the television clicks on. The news plays on mute, rolling footage of burning vacants somewhere in The Derelicts as a counter in the corner of the screen tracks the strike. Voiceless citizens call for help. For common sense. Their silent pleas pull on me, as fiercely as the ship does across the river.
Vidette leans out of the bedroom door. “Going somewhere?”
“No…”
“Good, because I found it.”
I take a step back, not knowing what to expect and she sets an old, brown paper department store sack on the kitchen table. At the bottom rests a folded up uniform with a jarring, totally 80s electric styled V slashing across the tunic.
“This was your uniform in The Vanguard…”
She smiles. “Horrifying, right?”
“I don’t know. I kind of like it.”
“Thought you might, with the action figure and all. First couple scrapes I got into, I didn’t get any scratches, but the suit I wore did.” Vidette sits on the counter. “So Blackwood being Blackwood, he synthesized this here suit out of my cells.”
The lightweight Lycra fabric crushes in my hands; I let go and the suit pops out all its dents.
“Absolutely nothing will go through that suit, honey. Knives. Bullets. Lightning.”
I peel off the glove off my right hand. Energy arcs from my fingers into the fabric; the arcs deform and then fade away.
“It’s immune to the power… just like you.”
“Kit, I want you to have this.”
I imagined being Stamina as a child, playing with her action figure. I imagined being invulnerable to pain. Impossibly strong, able to carry any burden. I pretended to be, even long after I had lost the figure, and forgotten Vidette.
“I couldn’t…”
“Try it on.”
I’ve loved my jacket from the moment I found it in the thrift store years ago. All the zippers. The stiffness of the leather. The restriction. I’ve been wearing it pretty much ever since, but I slip it off. Vidette’s suit stretches across my shape, and the Myriad illuminates the icon of the K, transforming it into a stylized lightning bolt. Tendrils of energy bristle against the impenetrable sheath
of the suit.
“You don’t ever have to worry about hurting anybody in this, honey. You won’t have to go in a cell or a cage or anywhere you don’t. All you have to do is keep this on.”
What do I say. I don’t know what to say. “Vi, I…”
“What?”
“This is yours.”
I shake my head. “This is a hero’s.”
“Fits, doesn’t it?”
“I’m no hero.”
“I don’t know about that,” she says. “Whatever happened to you, it happened because you were trying to help Valene. That rates pretty high in my book. I couldn’t help Val, and it tore me to shreds. But I can help you. I’m going to help you.”
“Thank you, Vi,” I say, feeling for the first time in a long, long time that not everything is a disaster.
Eleven
Vidette comes back from the kitchen with another bottle. I don’t know how many this is now. France and Italy and California all expand in the universe between my ears, become confused, sloshed around into some apocryphal country. Every time Vidette leaves the couch, I stumble around on the deck of my consciousness, just off shore, the tide bleeding out in moscato waves over the edge of a world drifting through a glass sky.
“What?”
She smiles. “Didn’t say anything.”
“Oh.” I try and focus. “What made you leave GP?”
“Got all day?”
“My schedule is clear.”
Vidette pours us both another glass. I don’t think this will contribute to me keeping my focus. “I wore out my welcome. I was always asking why we weren’t doing anything, and Blackwood would always say, ‘The law, the law, the law.’ He put up with it until Valene started asking. And then San Francisco happened. There were hearings. Investigations. Technically, she broke the law. What she really broke was the idea that this is how we have to do it. There for a second, I thought it would all change.”
She smiles, and takes a long drink.