Mayhem and Madness

by J. A. Dauber

  The armor.

  * * *

  Everyone knows about Mayhem, of course. It’s impossible not to know: those pictures of a big mechanical monster landing in front of a bank, crashing through the wall, and tearing off a safe door with its bare hands (well, bare gauntlets, I guess) spread as fast as the Internet would allow back then, before I was born.

  And with every robbery he pulled off over the years, the theories got crazier. He was some sort of supersoldier and the robberies were government black-ops tests before they unleashed a squadron of the things on America’s enemies. He was a terrorist, trying to trash the American financial system. He was an anarchist who didn’t even care about the money—a few large anonymous deposits into various orphanages’ bank accounts went a long way toward supporting that theory.

  The name “Mayhem” came from one of the first eyewitnesses. He said something to a reporter about how the guy was creating mayhem all over downtown, and the name made its way onto one of those CNN crawls, and it stuck. Mayhem never spoke, so who knew what he thought of it. During recess you used to be able to see kids pretending to play Cops and Mayhem. You could tell who got to be Mayhem—they always had something stuck on their head and they always got away in the end.

  Nobody had seen or heard from Mayhem in years, which, of course, led to new theories about what had happened to him. I didn’t have much of an opinion. There was enough crime and terrorism and corporate destruction of the environment. In the scheme of things, what was the big deal about one nut who’d managed to put a few iPhones together and make a robot suit? It felt like comic-book stuff.

  That said, it became a much bigger deal when the nut in question was your father. Obviously.

  I’d never seen my dad do anything more complicated than change the batteries in the smoke alarm. Even working for the big chain store whose name I’m not going to mention, he wasn’t one of the guys who built or installed the electronic equipment. He just did paperwork. But given what I saw scattered around the workbenches that lined the room behind the steel door, he’d clearly been taking advantage of the employee discount.

  Or—now that I’m thinking about it, trying to put the whole story together, not just live it in the moment—maybe he hadn’t. I mean, if he robbed banks, he probably wasn’t too worried about taking some stuff home from work without paying, right?

  The room was crammed with tools I didn’t even recognize, much less know how to use, and the walls had shelves packed with bottles of nasty-looking fluids and boxes heaped with rusty gears and sharp blades.

  But it was the armor that was terrifying.

  Not its size. Hanging there, from the hooks, it actually didn’t look so imposing. More like wet laundry hung up to dry.

  But its presence. And its…implications.

  One supervillain on the planet. Turns out it was my dad.

  NOW. FRIDAY. 8:12 P.M.

  It’s getting warm in here.

  The armor’s working overtime to keep the shield functioning, so the internal controls aren’t running the way they should.

  But a little sweat is the least of my worries.

  Maybe getting arrested won’t be so bad. I am a minor, and a citizen. So maybe they won’t send me to Guantanamo right away.

  That’s assuming no one else gets to me first.

  I can hear the soldiers shouting at one another: the receptors in the Mayhem armor pick up everything. No one has made visual contact yet—I guess my cloaking device is still working—but they’re monitoring energy usage, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they black out the neighborhood just to find me. They’re out for blood, after all.

  I’m going to have to make a move soon, or else just sit here and wait for them. And maybe I’ll have a convenient accident as I get taken in…. I’m sure nobody’ll shed any tears.

  Not after Clapham Junction. At least, not after the way the news will cover it.

  Such cynicism in one so young, I can hear Mr. Jones saying. Well, it’s his fault, isn’t it? But I’m getting ahead of my story.

  THREE MONTHS AGO

  I couldn’t spend very long down there.

  Mom was at work, yeah, but I had visions of her coming back to the house for something, and—of course—I’d forgotten to close the trapdoor behind me. I just looked around long enough to notice another door and a computer workstation, glowing invitingly. On my way out, I saw a Styrofoam coffee cup, the kind you get at the gas station. I looked inside and grimaced. Judging from the mold, no one had been near it for years.

  Which would make sense, of course.

  I climbed back up, headed straight to my bedroom, and thought about it. A lot. My dad: Mayhem. It just didn’t compute—like when you see old movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger and wonder how that bodybuilder with the oily muscles and the loincloth went on to be the governor of California. I mean, I don’t think I’d ever heard my dad raise his voice, and I know I’d never seen him raise a fist. Meanwhile he’d been ripping open safes and brawling with cops? And winning?

  But where had he gone?

  According to the Internet, there hadn’t been any Mayhem sightings for years. Most of the remaining online fan communities—my dad had fans—were going with the usual theories that he was dead, or he’d been caught, or whatever. There was one commenter who suggested that he’d retired, gotten out while the getting was good, and was sitting on a beach somewhere counting his money. Nope, I thought at first, and then, Who knows? I mean, if my dad really was Mayhem, who’s to say he wouldn’t abandon us to sit in a cabana with some new young girlfriend? That didn’t seem like him at all…but then again, neither did using super-advanced technology to create a suit of armor and live a life of crime.

  One thing I did know. School was going to be tough to handle the next day. Especially since Caroline was going to want to know exactly what was going on, and I hadn’t the vaguest clue of what I was going to tell her.

  Luckily, the fight made that irrelevant.

  * * *

  No, not some sort of supervillain fight. Not yet, at least.

  That Tuesday I was still just a kid with a massive secret, like half the other kids at school—although theirs are generally about having an abusive uncle or how they’re sniffing glue or whatever.

  The thing was, I knew Caroline was waiting for me in our usual spot, near the back door to the library, and I hadn’t figured out what to say to her, and so I went another way, a different way, and if it hadn’t been for that—

  Getting ahead of myself again. I have to talk about Caroline first.

  I’m not sure what to say about her. But I have to say something. Right? For anyone who hears this? Eventually?

  She’d kill me if she heard me waffle like this. Just spit it out, Bailey, she’d say.

  All right. I will. But I’d better backtrack a minute.

  I’m sure you’ve read those books where the kid with a personal tragedy—say, a missing dad—becomes an outcast and walks around school with a deep sense of resentment that eventually morphs into violence against himself or others. That’s not what happened to me. The kids in my town were, by and large, a decent group. So when my dad disappeared I got plenty of sympathy.

  Which sounds nice, but it stuck to me over the years, like a bad smell. Who wants to hang out with the kid who misses his dad all the time? Mom thought high school would give me the chance to start again, find a new crowd. Right. Everyone on social media knows that starting over is impossible. The only people who think otherwise are grown-ups. Kids know better. Things were pretty much the same as in junior high, only with slightly better desks and lockers on account of the extra money the football team boosters brought in. I wasn’t a loner, exactly, but not quite finding my place, either. Nothing really clicked. No one really got me.

  Except Caroline. There was always Caroline.

  We met back in fifth grade, when we were b
oth miserable orphans.

  Not like that—although her parents were divorced and she lived with her mom, and my situation was…well, I guess it was more complicated than I thought at the time. I mean we were both playing miserable orphans. In a community children’s theater production of Annie.

  It had been Mom’s idea. It’d be fun, she said. I’d be onstage and she’d be behind the scenes, helping with sets or something. I don’t have a scrap of musical talent, but it was community theater and they didn’t like to turn kids away, I guess. They invented a role for me in the chorus. The only boy.

  Caroline was in the chorus, too. I recognized her from school: we were in the same grade, but different classes, so we didn’t know each other well. But there were these long rehearsals where we didn’t have much to do—and it turned out that Mom and I hardly saw each other, she was always backstage or running errands or something—and so somewhere between “It’s the Hard Knock Life” and “You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile,” Caroline and I became friends.

  Good friends. Best friends, if either of us ever used that kind of phrase. Though that implies that I have lots of other friends, which is not true. At least not friends who talk to each other about everything, or everything that doesn’t include your dad being public enemy number one. Apparently.

  But it wasn’t just that we had some family stuff sort of in common, the poor sad kids finding each other or anything like that. She had the coolest takes on pop culture. We once spent two weeks watching unboxing videos and she asked me, “Why aren’t boxing videos a big thing? Is it because everyone will think they’re sports stuff and not click on them?” I mean…maybe? But who else thinks like that, right?

  She played, like, three instruments, and although her singing voice wasn’t anything special—part of the reason she’d ended up in the chorus—she had this musical understanding of tone, if you know what I mean, which made her an incredible impersonator. Once she imitated our principal, Mrs. Wentworth, so well it made me snort cherry Diet Pepsi through my nose. Which was both incredibly painful and awesome at the same time.

  We talked about serious stuff, too. Whether she should spend Christmas with her dad this year after three years in a row with her mom, and what that might do to her relationship with both parents. How I felt about my mom, how angry I got, sometimes, because she was always at work, and how guilty I felt because I knew those double shifts were what paid for my new sneakers. Whether Caroline should learn the French horn just to put it on her college résumé. (No, we decided.) We even speculated about what we called the TGT, “The Grand Theory,” meaning whatever we’d come up with as the newest possible reason for my dad’s disappearance.

  And she was basically cool with me going on and on about Rebecca until any normal human being would be clawing their eyes out with boredom.

  I guess I should say something about Rebecca at this point, too. Rebecca. Who I’d been thinking about obsessively since the first time she showed up to school freshman year with that charm bracelet around her ankle, and I was just…well, just gone.

  Rebecca was funny. Or at least I assumed so, since her girlfriends laughed at things she said. I was rarely close enough to hear what they were talking about. She was a talker in class, which I liked—she was smart, and not afraid to show it. Definitely a girly girl, the kind of girl you’d expect to be a cheerleader. But she wasn’t. She spent all her time producing our school podcast, interviewing the latest student movers and shakers. Grown-ups, too: she had the local state assemblyman on for a long interview about no-bid recycling contracts. But those were less popular, obviously. In fact, judging from the numbers, I might have been the only kid who listened to that one.

  Yes, I listened. To every episode, sometimes more than once. It was the only time I got to hear her voice: warm, smooth, charming. I remember reading the phrase dead sexy in some book, and I thought of Rebecca’s voice right away. Being the focus, the direct target of that voice, that attention—it would be enough to strike you dead. Me, anyway.

  Not that she was all hearts and flowers as an interviewer. She was tough. If she didn’t like something or someone, she was not afraid to let them know it. But that didn’t bother me. I fantasized about getting the chance to talk to her, one-on-one. I mean, other than my undying feelings for her, what did I have to hide?

  Before. I mean before.

  At first talking about Rebecca with Caroline had been a little awkward. There had been this one time, early on, sixth grade, maybe, when I guess you could say there was a…moment. Once. At Caroline’s place. In her mom’s den, when her mom went out to the store…something could have happened.

  But it didn’t. That was the thing. We could’ve kissed, but we didn’t. We just stood there in the middle of the room and ignored the conversational pause, and that was that.

  I never forgot it, though, so I was wary of mentioning girls until one day when Caroline told me about this guy in band she thought was Byronic. Which I had to look up. But once I did, and realized what she was talking about, and that there was no possible world in which the word Byronic could apply to me, I felt totally comfortable unloading my Rebecca stuff on her.

  Sometimes I think she regretted ever mentioning that guy. Turns out he was a senior so she never saw him again. But she got to hear about Rebecca all the time.

  Her opinion on the subject of Rebecca and me—after lots and lots of discussion—boiled down to this text message: ?

  Which was, I pointed out to her, not a complete sentence.

  She pointed out, in turn, that it was the name of a classic-rock band, and thus a proper noun, and I should know better than to challenge her. I checked and she was right: ? and the Mysterians.

  It was a fair point: ? After all, Rebecca and I might not have had anything in common. I had no idea. She didn’t know I existed, at least not in any meaningful way. But, as Shakespeare or somebody said, to true love there are no impediments.

  Well, maybe one impediment.

  I should explain about Logan. He is, as you have already guessed, Rebecca’s boyfriend. It’s a total cliché that he’s the captain of the football team, but in both their defenses, that’s because (a) it would be very hard for anyone, even Logan, to be immune to Rebecca’s charms and (b) who wouldn’t want Logan? He is by all accounts a great guy, and he seems to be a good boyfriend. As far as I know he doesn’t hook up with anyone behind her back, despite having plenty of opportunities, and he’s always looking out for her, giving her little gifts, carrying her books, and he’s not afraid to look mushy doing it.

  Of course, that could be because no one would dare make fun of him, since he’d pound them into the ground. I’m not big into football, but even I know a linebacker’s not generally the team captain. I heard the quarterback was afraid to take him on for the position.

  Part of his good boyfriending is being protective of Rebecca from things he thinks would bother her, which includes any person other than him showing any sign of romantic interest. It’s not like he’s heavy-handed about it or anything. But when you’re his size, you don’t need to be.

  Everyone else has declared her off-limits as a result and they basically slink around cautious and frightened in her presence. That’s just not possible for me. Much as I worship at the altar of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, I have to disagree with them: Love isn’t all you need. But it’s pretty much all I’ve got.

  And so sometimes, on particularly depressing days, I felt the need to be around Rebecca. To just…soak in the beauty of her presence. I know I sound pathetic. It wasn’t much different from the huffers out by the bleachers, except that I called it love.

  Maybe you can see where this is heading.

  Usually, I was subtle about it. Super-subtle. So subtle I was pretty sure that neither Logan nor Rebecca noticed my existence. But this time, to avoid Caroline and her inevitable questions, I’d taken an alternate route to Rebec
ca’s locker, where I figured she’d be. Meaning I was approaching Rebecca’s locker from a different direction than usual. Around a sharp corner rather than down a long hallway. And when I turned the corner and was suddenly full-on facing her and Logan in the middle of a hot-and-heavy kiss, I hadn’t had any time to prepare myself. I didn’t—couldn’t—look away. I wasn’t even jealous. It was more that I was almost…awestruck. Lost.

  Of course, from Logan’s perspective, I was a little perv staring at a private moment between him and his girlfriend.

  And something had to be done about that.

  NOW. FRIDAY. 8:23 P.M.

  I’m sure most of you have tasted your own blood at one time or another. What’s surprising to me—and I’ve had more opportunity than I’d like to sample it recently—is that it doesn’t taste terrible.

  You’d think evolution would have gotten on that, to make absolutely sure you don’t want any of it on the outside for a quick lick or whatever. On the other hand, I guess it figured the pain would take care of that, so why bother.

  Right now I’m tasting it because of that last wave of bullets. The armor stopped them, but something sproinged inside because of the impact and I got a gash across my cheek. Maybe I’ll have a sexy scar for Rebecca to Instagram to all her friends. Assuming she ever sees me again.

  Assuming anyone does.

  THREE MONTHS AGO

  To be fair to Logan, I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt me that badly. At least not consciously. Especially given what happened later, I want to be clear about this: I don’t think he’s the kind of guy who beats on people. At all. I think he was a little annoyed, and a little embarrassed, and he just wanted to give me a push, like, Nothing to see here, move along, stop making this weird.

  But he doesn’t know his own strength, and I’m a lot lighter than most of the football players he moves around in practice. Maybe I was light-headed and off-balance from the kiss by proxy. What I definitely was, was unlucky.