The Lavender Menace

by Tom Cardamone

He looked up into a mask of imperial white, into eyes like water, colourless and bottomless. Snow’s hand on him was his only anchor, and Snow’s voice sparked like fireworks in his head.

  You could be my agent. My scalpel in this sick world, cutting away the rot. You could be my hero.

  And when your work is done, you could come home to me.

  He blinked away the blur. He felt his heart beating, under Snow’s insistent fingers. “Do I have a choice?”

  Snow laughed. He discarded his mask, and bent down to press a hard, lipless kiss on Edward’s mouth. A benediction.

  Always.

  Scorned

  Jeffrey Ricker

  Jeffrey Ricker’s first novel, Detours, was published in 2011 by Bold Strokes Books. His writing has appeared in the anthologies Paws and Reflect, Fool for Love: New Gay Fiction, Blood Sacraments, Men of the Mean Streets, Speaking Out, Riding the Rails, and others. He is currently finishing his second novel and pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. When class is out, he lives in St. Louis with his partner, Michael, and two dogs. Follow his blog at jeffreyricker.wordpress.com.

  “You’re new.”

  Marcus Harris had never seen the woman standing in the visitor’s vestibule adjacent to his cell, but her white coat, worn over a charcoal business suit, blared “psychologist.” She wore glasses and kept her curly blonde hair shoulder length. Sitting in the plastic chair reserved for visitors (who never came), she crossed her legs and settled a clipboard over her knees. When she smiled at him, it was completely unconvincing.

  “I’m Dr. Emily Wheeling,” she said. “The warden asked me to come see you this morning and ask you a few questions.”

  “Oh, is it morning?” Marcus asked, sarcasm edging into his voice. “It’s so hard to tell in here since I don’t have ready access to a clock. Or sunlight. Where’s Dr. Mathis?”

  Dr. Wheeling looked down at her clipboard. “He had an unfortunate encounter with a homemade knife in one of the other wings, but I’m told he’ll make a nearly complete recovery.”

  “That’s a pity. So why does the warden want you to speak with me?” Marcus asked, even though he knew the answer.

  Dr. Wheeling tilted her head so she was looking over her glasses. “I think we can both say we know why, so let’s not start off like that, shall we?”

  Marcus smiled. He liked her directness. “Please convey my apologies about his badge.”

  “He was a bit more displeased with the second-degree burns to his chest.”

  “I know he was attached to that badge, though.”

  “Well, fortunately the surgeons were able to remove it successfully.”

  Marcus said nothing in response. She was tapping her pen against the clipboard, whether out of nervousness or boredom, he couldn’t be sure. It was a felt-tip pen, of course. They were taking no chances with him now, it seemed. It also seemed like she wasn’t going to speak again unless he did first. He held out as long as he could stand the silence, which wasn’t long.

  “So,” Marcus said, painfully aware that she had succeeded in waiting him out, “aren’t you supposed to ask me questions?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “How are you?”

  “How do you think I am?” he asked, not even bothering to mask his anger with sarcasm.

  She leaned forward, clasping her hands on top of the clipboard. “Not well, Mr. Harris.”

  For some reason, hearing her say his name—his regular name, not Megawatt, his alter ego—sent him over the edge. He launched himself at the barrier and slammed his palms against it. From past experience, he’d learned that open palms made much more noise than fists.

  “What the hell do you expect?” he shouted.

  To her credit, Dr. Wheeling didn’t flinch beyond a raised eyebrow. She made a note on her clipboard and said, “I expect you’ll want to have a seat now.”

  His chair had fallen over. When Marcus reached to pick it up, he noticed the tiny arcs of electricity on his fingertips. Jaw clenched, he silently willed the charge to remain—a pointless effort, since it always faded no matter what he did. They made sure of that in this place.

  He slumped in the chair—he wasn’t particularly interested in making a good impression with correct posture—and stared at Dr. Wheeling. All he wanted at the moment was for her to go away—odd, since the solitude of his cell was often unbearable.

  “I don’t really feel like talking right now,” he mumbled.

  “That’s fine. I can come back later.”

  After she got up and walked toward the door, he said, “I still won’t feel like talking then.”

  Without turning around, she replied, “Everyone feels like talking eventually, Mr. Harris. I’ve got time.”

  Marcus didn’t have visitors. He was allowed to, but no one ever came. The only one who’d made the effort was Alan—and lord knew that hadn’t gone well. His family, never close, hadn’t tried to contact him in years, and after he tried to destroy (even inadvertently) the largest city in America, he certainly couldn’t blame them. What he did blame them for were the interviews they gave to the press after he was arrested, when his real identity was revealed.

  Couldn’t they have just kept their mouths shut?

  He probably shouldn’t have tried to electrocute his father over the phone line, though. That was how he’d lost his calling privileges.

  And then, not long before his trial, when he’d blown up the common room television in an uncontrolled fit of rage, the prison staff realized they had a problem on their hands as long as Marcus was within range of an electrical current. He soon found himself in solitary confinement.

  The TV had been an accident though. He hadn’t meant to do it, but it had been shortly after his arrest and the news was still all over the cable networks, and he’d let his temper get the better of him.

  That had always been Marcus’s problem. Alan told him as much during his one and only visit.

  “You never could exercise restraint,” he said.

  Marcus laughed. He was wearing the electrical dampening harness at the time, his wrists secured with zip ties. “I seem to be doing pretty well with restraint now,” Marcus quipped. “Mind you, I’m getting a little help with that.”

  Alan shook his head. He was wearing his Altitude costume, his mask concealing most of his face. He dwarfed the plastic chair with his bulk, but to Marcus now, it seemed like he was overcompensating, trying to look the part of the superhero. As if being able to fly weren’t enough and he needed that cartoon-character physique.

  “I wish you’d take this seriously–”

  “Take what seriously?” Marcus snapped. “My crimes or the fact that I’m never getting out of here alive? Or do you mean being betrayed by you? Because I take that extremely seriously.”

  “I did not betray you,” Alan said, jumping to his feet. In his own anger, he inadvertently flexed, and for a moment his feet hovered a couple inches off the floor. “It just didn’t work out with us, that’s all.”

  “Was that before or after you started screwing Billy?”

  Billy Lightspeed was a young speed demon from somewhere out in the Midwest—Kansas?—who was short but blond and buff with an aw-shucks attitude that made Marcus cringe a little. Alan, on the other hand, fell for it. When Billy joined the National Heroes Union, he sought Alan’s advice on almost everything, from whether he should keep his alias (his real name was Gerald Matthews—Alan said Billy Lightspeed was just fine) to whether his costume was okay. (The design motif: lots of thunderbolts.)

  Marcus chalked up Billy’s personality to youthful exuberance and didn’t notice the growing attraction between him and Alan until it was too late.

  “You know that’s not how it happened,” Alan said.

  “Oh, please. He’s not even old enough to
drink. Do you have to get him home before curfew on school nights?”

  “Stop it. You’re being so unreasonable–”

  “Unreasonable?”

  Fifty feet above them, there was a pop, followed by a dimming of the light and a gentle rain of thin glass. They both looked up at the socket where the light bulb had been. Marcus shouldn’t have been able to do that with the dampening harness on.

  He looked back at Alan with a wolf-like grin. “So much for restraint.”

  Marcus’s life had contracted to a ten-by-twelve-foot cell made entirely of concrete save for the Plexiglas barrier. The bed was wood, with a memory foam mattress—no springs. The chair was plastic, as was the small table where he kept a clutch of books, magazines (staples removed), some paper, and a felt-tip pen. The ceiling, now seventy-five feet above him since they raised the roof, only made the room seem that much narrower. It was like living at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

  There wasn’t an ounce of metal in sight.

  Every other day a guard brought in the dampening harness. It was all fiber optics, plastic buckles, and nylon straps, and when he wore it, he couldn’t even hear his own body’s electrical current.

  Once suited up, he was led to a small exercise yard, which was really another pit-like room but, instead of a ceiling, it had a skylight. At least he could see a patch of blue along with the occasional cloud. And, one time, a bird.

  After he was transferred to these chambers, he never saw any other prisoners. Sometimes, he could hear them, the low buzz of many conversations happening at once. He wasn’t allowed to interact with the general population—too dangerous, the warden said.

  Still, he heard their voices sometimes. The background crowd buzz was kind of like listening to the hum of current, which he missed even more than people.

  The guard who brought him his meals and shuffled him to and from the exercise room was named Barry. He was a little older, a little chubbier than Marcus, who’d never been in the best of shape, even when he’d been in the National Heroes Union. Even so, Barry looked physically more imposing, with his veined arms and rough, meaty hands. He didn’t like to spend any more time in Marcus’s presence than absolutely necessary, and never any closer than required. When Marcus mentioned this to him, Barry said, “I seen what you done to that kid.”

  “‘Saw what you did.’”

  “Huh?”

  “‘I saw what you did to that kid,’” Marcus clarified. He knew he sounded like a prissy substitute teacher, but the hell with it. “And he wasn’t a kid. He was a murderer and had every bit of it coming.”

  “Don’t make it right,” Barry said. “Besides, he threw that bus in front of you and you was the one who blew up all them people.”

  “‘You were,’ not ‘you was.’ For God’s sake, did you even finish high school?”

  After that, Barry cut short the exercise period and herded Marcus back to his cell.

  Dr. Wheeling returned the next day. If Marcus didn’t know better, he’d have sworn she was wearing the same suit as the day before.

  “So, Barry doesn’t seem too keen on you,” she said without preamble.

  Marcus stared at the ceiling. He’d been lying on his bed when she came in, and he didn’t feel like getting up for her benefit.

  “No, he’s not exactly a member of the fan club,” Marcus said.

  “Oh, that’s right. There actually was a fan club, wasn’t there?” She smiled, more in mockery than mirth, and Marcus felt the overwhelming urge to burn her flesh off. Not that he could, not in this place, at least. And anyway, burning off someone’s skin had been the start of the downhill slide that had landed him in prison.

  He kept his eyes on the ceiling and tried to ignore how close the walls were. This must have been how trapped miners felt.

  “You miss it, don’t you?” she asked.

  Marcus looked over at her. He hadn’t expected her to say something insightful. Nor had he expected to be unable to tell her no.

  “Do I miss being appreciated, being thanked for helping make the world a safer place? Yeah, I miss that.”

  She had not written anything on her clipboard. Marcus wondered what, if anything, was in her case file on him. He looked back toward the ceiling.

  “Sometimes I don’t know if I ever deserved it,” he admitted.

  “Probably because you didn’t,” she said.

  “I—excuse me?”

  She set her clipboard on the floor and stood up. “Come now, Mr. Harris, a fan club? T-shirts with your face on them?” She walked toward the barrier. “That name you went by, Megawatt? The costume? It was all a bit too pop star, wasn’t it?”

  Marcus swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood. “It was ridiculous, but it wasn’t my idea.”

  “You went along with it, though, didn’t you?”

  “Look, what’s your point here?”

  “You were being worshipped—if that’s not too strong a word—for something you were, not something you did. It was a gift of fate, or God, or whatever you care to call it. I can imagine it must have been a seductive experience, given how much discrimination you likely experienced prior to that. But, viewed a certain way, that adulation was just as discriminatory. And when you didn’t live up to their prejudices, they turned against you.”

  “Who’s this monolithic ‘they’ you’re referring to? Society?”

  She tilted her head, the equivalent of a shrug. “Your fans. Your family. The Union. Altitude.”

  At the mention of Alan’s alter ego, Marcus crossed his arms and looked at the floor. “I’d really rather not discuss him, if you don’t mind.”

  “Eventually, I think we have to,” she said matter-of-factly. “We might as well start now.”

  Marcus went to his desk and picked up a magazine there, a month-old New Yorker. “And why is that?” he asked, trying to be casual as he flipped through the pages without actually reading anything. With no staples to hold them together, the slick pages slid against one another and fell out of his hands.

  “Don’t even try to read anything into this,” he said as he gathered up the pages.

  “Of course not.”

  Once he’d returned the magazine to the desk (the pages were out of order, but who cared), Dr. Wheeling returned to her seat and picked up the clipboard. Apparently, her insights were over for the moment. She flipped through her papers.

  “What I still find odd,” she said, “is that your parents didn’t know about your abilities until you were arrested.”

  “Well, I wasn’t about to tell them until I had to. What good’s a secret identity if you tell someone? I knew that if I told my parents, they would tell the rest of the family, and the Harrises are a gossipy lot.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant,” she said. “My point is that they must have been exceptionally oblivious not to have noticed.”

  “The other thing we’re big on is denial.”

  Thinking of the awkward teenager he’d been could still make Marcus cringe and want to curl inward. It was bad enough that he’d always been chubby no matter how hard he tried not to be, but the first time someone called him “fatty faggot” in seventh grade, the nickname stuck until he was halfway through high school and his growth spurt, late in arriving, finally took his pudgy body and stretched the weight out vertically. After that, they were more likely to call him plain old faggot.

  Sophomore year of high school was also when Marcus discovered that, at moments of high stress, he tended to blow every fuse in the house. Studying for a biology midterm and realizing he was destined to fail spectacularly, he’d touched a light switch and plunged the entire house into darkness. When he did it a second time—at school, in the middle of the test—he started to think something might be wrong.

  The first time he really used the po
wer, he hadn’t intended to. He was fifteen, and it was the year Scout died for the first time.

  The dog was in the backyard when Marcus came home from school, and as he poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher his mom always kept in the kitchen, she called downstairs asking him to let Scout back in.

  Scout was down at the back of the yard, and when he called her name, the German Shepherd bounded up the lawn. All he could think at the time, when her front legs folded under her, was that it looked like she was trying to do a somersault. She planted her face in the grass, and when she tried to stand up again, she gave a confused whimper and keeled over.

  “Scout!” It seemed to Marcus that he was down the stairs and at her side before he heard his water glass shatter on the floor behind him. He lifted her head into his lap. She looked up and panted, her eyes unable to focus. And then it all stopped.

  “No,” he said, the tears starting to catch in his throat. “Please, no.” He said the word over and over as he rocked her in his arms. Scout was the one thing he felt he could count on. The thought of not coming home to her was more than he could take.

  At the time, he thought he heard thunder even though the day had been cloudless. When he opened his eyes, he noticed first the nimbus of electricity still around his hands; second, that Scout was licking his face.

  “How touching,” Dr. Wheeling said once he’d finished the story.

  God, you’re a bitch, Marcus thought, and again wished he could melt her face.

  “After all that, they still had no clue at all?” she asked.

  “I got in trouble for breaking the glass, and Scout got to live for a few more months before finally passing away in her sleep. I figured it was a fair trade.”

  “It must be such a strange experience for you now, then,” she said, “not having any power.”

  “You could say that. After twenty-five years, it’s a bit odd to be so–” he searched for the right word “—mundane.”

  Dr. Wheeling tapped her pen on her clipboard. “Well, you do still have some power over the Union, at least. You know all their identities, I assume, not just Altitude and Billy Lightspeed.”