by David Beem
“Easily fixed—if we can borrow you to help us fix it.”
“Borrow me.” I shrug. “Sure. What do we do?”
Bruce Lee gets to his feet, so I get up also.
“Okay,” he says, clapping his hand on my shoulder and squeezing. “What you need to understand is that before we can fix the power grid, we must first compromise the network of bad guys responsible for attacking the power grid in the first place.”
“Network of bad guys?” My head comes back. “I thought this was all InstaTron Tron… Tron…”
Bruce Lee frowns. “InstaTron Tron used a network of bad guys to bring the power grid down. We must deal with them first. Otherwise, our work will be undone.”
“Makes sense. So, you know where these bad guys are hiding out right now?”
“Yes,” replies Bruce Lee. “But not just them—all their allies. Terrorist leaders.”
“Wait a minute. Are you telling me I can dream my way into some CIA guy’s brain and tell him where all the terrorists’ leaders are?”
“That would be one route. But you’re thinking too small, Edge. Why fight any wars?”
“Psh. Well of course we don’t want to fight any wars,” I say, trying to strike a tone that conveys confidence in his plan to Yoko Ono the human race. But judging by the flat-eyed stare he’s putting out, it’s not working.
“Terrorism is propaganda,” he says. “Propaganda can be beaten by better propaganda.”
“I thought we were talking about the power grid.”
Bruce Lee sighs, runs his fingers through his hair, and then clears his throat. “I think for the sake of expediency, you’re going to have to trust me on some things.”
“Trust you? Well, of course I trust you. You’re Bruce Lee. But it sounds like you’re telling me we can… I don’t know…go beat terrorism. Like, hey, let’s just go do that today. And maybe after, we’ll get some fish tacos. Yay!”
“Well, why not?” asks Bruce Lee. “You’re sleeping. It’s not like this is much of an imposition. There’s only the one human race, after all. It would suck to squander it by crashing planes into buildings and bickering forever on differing opinions. There are no politics here. So what do you say, Edge? Help a dead guy make the world a better place?”
I almost laugh in his face. “Hell yes, I’m gonna help Bruce Lee make the world a better place! Let’s do it.”
Chapter Nineteen
A gust of wind throws the bright lights in the sky down and into our faces. It swirls around us and then vanishes with a crack. The dream grows dark. The temperature drops.
“Get down!”
He grabs my hand, yanks, and we’re in cold sand, flat on our backs, side by side. There are stars in the sky—real stars. The soul-lights are gone.
“How did we—? Where did we—?”
He raises a finger to silence me. I hold my breath.
An icy wind blows in from the desert. It whooshes over our heads, carrying a blackened canvas, ridden with bullet holes and frayed at the edges. Flapping, curling, and dripping in blood, it dumps a severed head two feet from where we’re lying. Whump. Blood seeps outward into the sand. Bruce Lee grips my arm. The back of my throat is dry and hollowed-out. I’m shivering. The canvas unfurls above us, revealing a bullet-damaged crescent moon and star—and then it whip-cracks higher, twisting in the violent and invisible wind before vanishing completely.
I’m panting. My heart is thumping so hard I can’t speak. The severed head’s gaze is heavy in my peripheral vision. A nerve in my neck pinches from the strain of not looking.
“Bad guys,” whispers Bruce Lee.
I nod six or seven times superfast. “Obviously.”
“No,” says Bruce Lee. “I want you to listen, because this is important. Remember, bad guys are real. Earlier, you felt silly about calling them bad guys. I could feel it. But bad guys are real.”
“Obviously.”
“When I said earlier there are no politics here, I didn’t mean to imply it’s all peace and love in the Collective Unconscious. You are here to understand the nature of bad guys.” He makes eye contact with the severed head, then claps his hand on my shoulder and faces me. “But don’t worry. There are more of us than them.”
“Us?”
“Good guys, Edge. Good guys. And now we have the advantage.”
“We do?”
“Yes. You. Now, come on.”
Bruce Lee sets off toward where the flag disappeared, waving for me to follow. I comply, and what he’s told me begins to sink in. Bruce Lee wants to beat terrorists. Bruce Lee, a dead man, has an opinion. It comes as no shock to me he has a negative opinion on terrorism—but the fact that he seems to feel like death is some kind of cosmic penalty sidelining him from contributing to a larger human calling is weirdly humbling. Talk about a perspective check. How many other dead heroes are out there who feel the same way? Can the Collective Unconscious really harness all that?
“You said there’re more good people than bad,” I say.
Bruce Lee nods, raising his hand to halt our march. “Factor in the dead, and that ratio tips dramatically. The bad guys are overwhelmingly outnumbered.” His chin lifts. He sniffs the air and turns around slowly. “We’re here.” He tosses his head to get his bangs out of his eyes. “We’re in the heart of darkness. They can sense me. Their unconscious minds are resisting. But they will not be able to resist you.”
“Me? What good am I against the heart of darkness?” I ask, trying to imagine what I could possibly do when so many better people than me have tried and failed.
“Better people?”
“Well,” I reply, shrugging. “Yeah. I’m just a dork.”
“We are none of us ‘just’ anything. What we are is what we aspire to be. Can you think of nothing?”
I frown. Unfortunately, I can think of things. Horrible things. The things they do. If I’m being brutally honest with myself, I want to do worse to them.
My chest is tight. I close my eyes, press my fist into my sternum, and hope Bruce Lee didn’t hear that part. Does he have to listen to my every thought? I try to focus on Gran and Shep, or Fabio, or Star Wars—anything but terrorizing terrorists with nightmares like what they do. I don’t want to be like them. I don’t want to give up on the idea of there being a better way of fighting them than crawling down into the sewer with them. I open my eyes. Bruce Lee is peering into me. My cheeks burn.
“I don’t judge you.” His gaze is tense but steady. “I’ve thought the same thing. We’re part of the same family. We’re human. And just like everyone else, you have a choice. You can let others set the rules, or you can change the rules. It is how you fight that defines your nature. Make no mistake, what we do in life echoes in eternity. What you do here, tonight, will define you. Good guy, bad guy. Look at the stars, Edge. How bright will yours shine?”
His words release the tension I’m holding. And for a minute, all I can do is stare up at the stars and bask in the presence of Bruce Lee.
“Okay. Okay, I can do this. I can totally do this.”
Bruce Lee casts a sidelong glance at me before turning to peer back into the night sky where the bullet-ridden flag vanished.
I fold my arms and bite my bottom lip. Think, Edge, think. Make a new set of rules, he says. Propaganda can be beaten with better propaganda. But what is their propaganda? I guess the idea they’re effective at striking from anywhere?
“Okay, sure,” says Bruce Lee, coming up next to me and folding his arms and nodding like we’ve been having this conversation out loud.
“And so people who think like they do gravitate to the cause,” I say, preferring to keep the conversation out loud over having him in my head and listening to every dang thing.
“Sorry,” he says. “But you’ll get used to it.”
“Our propaganda needs to ruin the cause. So, I mean, how do they see themselves? As big strong hairy men?” A sudden image of a hairy-chested gay motorcyclist in a leather jacket and moustache pops i
nto my head.
Bruce Lee frowns. “You can’t turn someone gay.”
“No, no. Of course not. But what if we gayed up the cause just a little bit? Kill it with their own homophobia. Terrorize the terrorists with, I don’t know, the Village People.”
Bruce Lee closes his eyes. His head bobs slowly up and down as he works through the plan with me in my head. His eyes open. “You’ve got a sense of humor, Edge. Who knows? Maybe laughter will save the world.”
I grin. “What do people love? People love tastelessness. We need to make something that’ll crash the internet. We need to get them fabulously tasteless wardrobes, supplies for building floats, rainbow flags—and then invite the surrounding communities to witness everything in person, so they know it’s real, and not an internet hoax. We need to get them to drop what they’re doing and make them do all this now, this minute, like their lives depend on it. And then we’ll tell the CIA where all the bad guys are.” I wince and shake my head as the ridiculousness of my suggestions crashes in on me. The back of my neck must be glowing in the dark.
“No,” he says urgently. “We will try it. We can do all of that in minutes. There’s no reason not to try it.”
“Bullshit,” I say, laughing as his sincerity surges through our psychic connection. “So how does this work? We just plant the ideas into their brains and let them do the rest?”
“I cannot. But you…yes, I think that would work just fine for you.”
“Well then, what are we waiting for? Let’s get to work,” I say, laughing. “And after that, power grid.”
Bruce Lee grins back at me. “And then we have got to get some fish tacos. I know this great place in San Francisco.”
Chapter Twenty
“Edger! Edger!”
I know that voice.
Mike Dame.
My teeth are chattering. Someone’s hand is on my shoulder, shaking me. My eyelids flutter open. The world is bright and loud. I close my eyes. My head rocks back and forth. My inner ear is a wreck. Pangs of nausea sour my stomach.
“Edger!”
“Uh-nn…”
“Edger! Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“Are you…did it…work?”
I swallow to work the moisture back into my mouth, then nod. “…fixed it. The grid…”
“The power grid is fixed?” Mikey asks. “But that’s not possible. We haven’t even bonded you to the suit yet.”
“Fixed,” I say again.
“Tablet!” yells Mikey. Feet scuff. A chair scoots back. Next thing, Mikey’s sitting at my side, fingers tapping on a tablet. “CNN breaking news: power restored,” he reads aloud. The room erupts in whoops of joy—which split my brain in half like an ax to a watermelon. Someone raises a chorus of “We Are the Champions.” My already halved watermelon brain feels like it’s being churned into syrup.
“Holy shit, Edge!” exclaims Mikey. “Holy shit. How is this possible?”
“I think—”
“Give him room,” says Mikey. “Back up! Give him room to breathe.”
“I think…you should check out YouTube.”
I swallow back the nausea and try to hold on to the dream. I’ve never been good at holding on to dreams, but this time, it’s stuck. A jihadist recruitment video set to the tune of “YMCA.” Digital footprints and firsthand accounts proving its authenticity. Subliminal suggestions for a very specific YouTube search in the minds of fifteen million people at once. CIA heads making frantic phone calls to overseas operatives. On the other side of the world, angry, homophobic would-be radicals are waking up and logging on to watch half-naked Arabs dressed like the Village People dance atop brightly colored parade floats. With machine guns strapped to their backs, they’re cheering in Arabic and throwing limp-wristed fistfuls of glitter into the confused crowd. Rainbow flags on every float.
One hundred million views in two hours.
I hope it will work. I hope enough would-be bad guys see it to where the association of murder-martyrdom is fixed in their minds to the rainbow flag. I hope their homophobia will scare them away from becoming terrorists. And I hope everyone else’s politics will settle down long enough to see my intentions for what they are: the rainbow flag—a symbol of love—conquering hate.
Chapter Twenty-One
Wang’s unprovoked attack clobbers Debbie Three Holes, sending her flying from the dining room table. She caroms off the refrigerator, slams into the kitchen floor, collides with Mr. Mxyzptlk’s water dish, and sloshes hairy water all over the first of Debbie’s three holes. Hearing the commotion, the dog pops his furry head up from the sofa, where he’s been sleeping all morning. Any noise from the kitchen, whether it be an opening can of beer, or Shmuel’s toenails being clipped on the countertop, always held promise. Mr. Mxyzptlk leaps down from the sofa and trots happily off to investigate. Finding a now-bearded Debbie Three Holes at his water dish in the kitchen, he sniffs around hole number three for a moment, grabs the blowup doll by the ankle, and drags her around the corner to disappear down the hallway leading to Shmuel’s bedroom.
“Feel better?” asks Shmuel, rounding on Wang, who is flexing and closing his fingers like Debbie Three Holes’s jaw was harder and more solid than he’d expected. “Violence is rarely the answer?”
“Ah, this is our fault,” replies Wang, slumping into his chair.
Shmuel sighs and peers into the empty carton on the table in front of him at his finished breakfast, leftover takeout from the Happy Cock down the street. He chucks his chopsticks into the carton.
“What?” asks Wang.
“Still hungry.”
“Hungry? How can you think of food at a time like this?”
Shmuel shrugs. “You know I get hungry for the Dong Long Pork when I’m hungover. Hey.” He points to the laptop screen next to the takeout carton. “You see this thing with the gay terrorists? Watch this guy belly dance to ‘YMCA.’ He’s pretty good.”
“Dude!” yells Wang. “Your ‘sweet’ and ‘innocent’ moo-beast attacked the Eastern Seaboard, and all you can do is stare at that fat, hairy belly?”
“It’s not that fat.” Shmuel closes the laptop and sucks in his gut.
“Don’t you take that tone with me, Mr. I Love Dong Long Pork in the Morning. Let’s go through it again, since all you can do is watch Gay ISIS instead of focusing on the problem at hand: Tron-Tron. Now. Check it out. Cow-incidences abound. Tron-Tron opened his Twitter account about an hour after we got back from the porn store. Then I tweeted that thing about him getting the world domination, and Tron-Tron starts in with all those weirdo tweets about green grass and utterly hurting his udders and slaughterhouses and shit. Now… I don’t know how it happened… I don’t know why it happened, but…clearly the frog man with the dart gun in the porn store shot Chicowgo in the butt with a Tron-Tron.”
“Whoa.”
“Shmuel, my friend, Chicowgo is gone. There is only Zuul.”
“Zuul?”
“Fucking Ghostbusters, okay? Now. Pay attention. You and I are the only ones who know the truth.”
“About Zuul? And is this girl Ghostbusters or boy Ghostbusters? Because I kinda liked the girl one.”
“Fucking—shit—mother of— Fuck! No! No! Tron-Tron, dude! Tron-Tron! We’re the only ones who know the truth about Tron-Tron!” Wang slaps the takeout carton, and Shmuel’s chopsticks go flying.
“Okay, okay,” Shmuel replies, standing and pretending to pick out a wedgie, but really, covering for a quick itch back there. “It’s just it’s kinda hard to picture sweet Chicowgo being capable of such…you know…such Hey Ness-crimes and other a-sundry sundries?”
“Wait-wait-wait!”
“What?”
“Did you just say, Hey Ness-crimes?”
“Yeah.” Shmuel shrugs, then narrows his eyes conspiratorially. “You know. The kind of crimes they can electrocute you for. The really serious ones. Hey Ness-crimes.”
Wang slouches like a drooping marionette
. He buries his face in his hands, and, after a second, his shoulders begin bobbing up and down.
“Aw, dude,” says Shmuel. “Don’t cry.” Scooting back his chair, he rounds the table, goes down on one knee, and wraps his arms around Wang’s waist.
“Fuck!” Wang shoves him. “Get your butthole-itching hands off me!”
“You’re not crying?”
“No, I’m not crying! I’m laughing, you stupid fuck. It’s heinous crimes, dumbass!”
“That’s what I said. Jeez.”
Wang shoots to his feet and cups his hands around his mouth. “Hey!” he yells. “Ness-crimes! Yoo-hoo! Ness-crimes! Hey! Hey!”
“Moving on?” Shmuel shrugs and takes his seat on the other side of the table. Wang giggles, picks up a takeout carton, and peers inside.
“Nope. No Ness-crimes in there.”
“You’re being rude? All I’m saying is, why would poor old Chicowgo shut down the power on the Eastern Seaboard? He’s never shown any criminal tendonitis before?”
“Why?” cries Wang. “Because it’s what we fucking told it to do!” Wang pulls his long bangs back in apparent frustration, and, for a fleeting moment, his eyes are visible. Shmuel smiles, and all irritation at being so mercilessly teased vanishes.
“You have pretty eyes.”
“Would you shut up about my pretty eyes? This is serious!”
“I’m just saying. I don’t see your eyes that often.”
“Shmuel. The world needs us. This is a job for the A-Team.”
Shmuel sighs and gathers his takeout boxes. He brings them into the kitchen and drops them in the trash. Mr. Mxyzptlk comes trotting around the corner and sniffs the air hopefully. Shmuel leans down and scratches behind his ear.
“Won’t the Feds come after us?”
“No, dude,” replies Wang, opening his laptop. His eyes widen. “Fuck. Those are some seriously gay terrorists.” Shaking his head, he clicks the target pad, opening a new window. “We’re gonna fix this, Shmuel, before the Feds know what hit ’em. You and me.”
