by Jesse Jordan
Then the music started. It was . . . He couldn’t find words for it. Each note trembled, like every perfect note was made up of a chorus of a thousand others. As one note ended, it slid effortlessly into the next. For some reason, the music made James feel a warm sadness, as if the world were much larger than he’d ever imagined, yet he was not diminished by that feeling. The tempo increased and the music became louder in his head, and he remembered being a little boy and watching his mother cry after a fight with his father. They’d been arguing, and then Dad got louder and louder and Mom retreated, and finally Dad finished with a closing flourish, grabbed his coat, and was out the door. Then Mom sat on one of the kitchen chairs and started to cry in big, ugly spasms. He remembered seeing it—so low to the ground, how young must he have been? And it was as if this music was made for that moment, written for that memory, for the feeling of helplessly watching your mother cry—and then it changed again, and the music was hopeful and flitting, like questions, and the relief made James’s eyes wet, even as his body relaxed further, and he could swear he was drinking the music. It felt wonderful and optimistic, and it ended with a soft sigh like someone’s gentle breath against your lips.
And then he was back. James grabbed the arms of the chair, as if he’d just fallen into it, but he was as stationary as could be. The office looked different to him now, somehow fake or flimsy, like a movie set. But as he gathered himself, he saw that everything was as it should be: the mini fridge, the lighting, the kids out in the library, Ezra’s warm smile.
The air cooled James’s face, and he realized his cheeks were lined with tears. He looked away and wiped roughly with the back of his sleeve, embarrassed and bewildered all at once. But when he looked back at Ezra, the librarian waved it off; just another secret between old friends.
“That’s you,” he said as he opened James’s Coca-Cola for him and set it back down. “You’re a violin. You’ve just never learned how to play yourself. Think. You are that powerful. If what I say is true—and it is, believe me—then you will be a man all men will want to follow. So that means the effect you have on others—the power over them—must be extraordinarily strong, no? That’s what I mean when I say you’re a violin. When you’re in tune and playing well, you have an amazing influence over others—influence that will grow to heights you can’t believe. Not yet.
“But right now you’re not in tune, and you’re being played with clumsy directionless rips. Do you understand? You’re sad. You’re insecure. You’re unsure and petty and frightened. So others, when they come into contact with you—that’s what they feel. Haven’t you always wondered about this? You must have. ‘Why does everyone dislike me?’ Well, James, because you make them feel bad. When they are near you, they feel horrible—sad and scared and angry. Alone. Just like you feel, only more so. Some—the sensitive who are easily affected, easily led—the Jacques Louis Davids, as I call them—never mind, never mind—they experience it more strongly than others.”
James sensed a longing he was unable to define. An obsessive track within was grabbing hold of Ezra’s words because, as absolutely crazy as it all was, it somehow felt right. It could all be true. It could be.
Ezra finished his Coca-Cola and moved on to James’s. “You have to admit I’ve shown you some pretty good tricks. I know things no one could, I played you a violin concerto from 1849,18 and I explained the great mystery of your life. And all I ask in return is that you do one thing for me.”
James waited, but Ezra said nothing.
“What?”
“Try. That’s it. Just try. Try to be the man you really are. You can go now, James. I’ll leave you alone. But at some point today, I want you to walk up to someone and envision yourself as a great, strong man and see them as a follower. Do you hear me? A follower. Someone who loves you. Someone who adores you. I want you to see them as such and simply . . . talk to them. That’s it. Just once. Play yourself with confidence and joy and see what happens. If nothing changes, then I’m gone. I won’t be here tomorrow. You will never see me again. Deal?”
James was busy swimming upstream through the memories of every cross look, every angry barb and accidental slight. He saw his mom pulling away from a hug quickly, saw Dorian when she thanked him, saw Nick’s eyes alive with hate and disgust and fear—It was fear, wasn’t it?—and from below these heavy, deep waters, he said, “Deal.”
Deal.
A minute later, James was out in the hallway, his feet carrying him back to American history class. As he reached the end of the main hall, though, he didn’t turn left to return. He stopped. To the outside world at that moment, he looked only like a stoned kid contemplating the floor—eyes vacant, mouth just slightly open. Inside, he was spinning. The protocols which he’d been taught—both by parents and school, through curricula hidden and exposed—screamed that he needed to tell someone about all of this right now, but those protocols battled every natural impulse of his personal being.
The soft fip-fap of shoes on tile brought his gaze up. Jess Gerber walked toward him, her dishwater-blonde hair piled high and little ringlets falling and framing her face. He watched the way her breasts pressed against her red-and-white cheer sweater, watched her perfect golden legs from the short-short skirt to the impossibly white gym shoes, and realized—Oh no!—he was staring. Caught!
He looked down at his own feet, at the ground hiding there, hoping to avoid the meeting, but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop himself. As he heard her draw even, he snuck his gaze up.
“What’re you looking at?” The question made it apparent there was no correct response. The only right answer was to not be looking, to have the courtesy to not even exist. James dropped his gaze and mumbled a denial/apology.
But then, in that moment as she moved past him, James remembered what Ezra had said. He remembered the version of himself in the dream. He remembered that feeling of for once not being the mirror reflecting anxiety and shame again and again but of being complete and full and real.
“Hey, Jess.” James turned to face her. He pulled his shoulders back and felt his own weight, there, held by the earth.
Jess whirled around, her head whipping over her shoulder to lead the move like a spinning figure skater. When she saw him, though, her entire countenance changed. It was as if she’d expected to see dog shit, and there, instead, was the purebred itself. She looked confused. That deep, deep confusion that’s scary to get lost in. Her eyes widened, betraying a bit of her panic.
James said, “I just wanted to tell you that you look real good today. Hot, y’know? You look hot.”
And then it happened.
She giggled. There’s no other word for it, because that is exactly—to the very definition—what it was. Jess giggled, and her hands came together in front of her stomach and then apart, the left to her hip and the right through her hair. “Thanks,” she said, infusing the word itself with the giggle, and then she was off again. At the end of the hall, before she disappeared around the corner, she craned to see him and gave him a crooked little smile, as if he’d surprised her with an extravagant and naughty gift.
James didn’t move. He just stood there in the hallway of George Washington High School, his smile on pause. What’s happening?
15. Ms. Adderley was a student favorite. She was the kind of teacher who talked about things that weren’t in the textbook. She was one of only two black teachers at the school, and she was super pretty and athletic (she’d played volleyball at a D-II college in Wisconsin). Being young and funny helped too, but her lack of condescension was probably her best trait.
16. He’d learned this last year when Ileana Soto fought Rachel Kusamanoff out in the tennis courts. Rachel, having a good fifty pounds and five inches on Ileana, came into the fight pretty confident. That confidence (along with the orbital bone of her left eye) was shattered when Ileana faked a left hook and, with her right hand, swung a black tube sock with a combo lock in the toes. The crack sounded just like when a train runs ov
er a piece of wood on the tracks.
17. Michael J. Fox, George Burns, Michael Keaton
18. In 1849, the Hungarian violin prodigy Joseph Joachim (b.1831, d.1907) was eighteen years old and living in Weimar, Germany. He was already world-renowned for his virtuosity and, in fact, had been trained by Mendelssohn himself. One night, in late November of that year, Joseph met a man near a downtown hotel. The man recognized the violinist, and the two began talking music. Before long, they were having drinks. They drank and sang with a group of beer-hall regulars until late into the night. Then, at roughly two o’clock that morning, the stranger produced a violin and convinced Joseph to play. What followed—what James had just heard—was possibly the most beautiful violin performance ever. Joseph Joachim played the second movement of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto in a mostly empty beer hall in front of the owners, a local drunk named Dirk, two prostitutes, a Prussian officer, and the stranger.
51/2½. Interlude: Eliza & Erik
James Salley, unlike most sixteen-year-olds, knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Perhaps those ambitions would shift, but at the time of these incidents, he was wholly invested in the singular goal of one day writing and drawing his own comic book.
It used to be that his ambition manifested only in loose-leaf universes of sketches and scraps filled with ideas for stories which invariably failed to mature beyond that initial point. Then, a few weeks after his fifteenth birthday, he took the Metra to the Harold Washington Library downtown to see Ben Ishii, a young, Japanese-American, LA-based artist who was speaking. Ishii was one of the fastest-rising stars in comics, especially since his six-issue Lobo story arc—Blind, Deaf, Dumb World—and his own new title, Long-Dead Ladies.
James had never been so moved by anyone’s words before. Downstairs, in a small, dim auditorium with fifty or so other people, James listened as this slight man in bright-yellow-and-red-mod attire spoke in his delicate, worked English about the path to making comic books: “Do not talk about doing. Just do . . . Drawing and storytelling are muscles; you must work them, like athletes lift weights . . . Tell stories you want to read . . . What excites you? . . . Either work or quit.”
James left that day with his mind aflame. Immediately, he began to catalogue the story ideas he had; he began to draw with a purpose. He knew he wasn’t a great artist, and he doubted he’d ever be as good as the really special ones, but he thought he could be good enough. And while before he’d always been waiting until he was good enough, Ishii had convinced him the only way to ever be good enough was to start now.
Then, one night, while he was drawing a Mohawked girl with double-Ds strapped into a teeny-tiny bikini swinging a massive battle-axe, an idea—The Idea—popped into his head, pouring as if it were something fully formed that he was only catching. He worked from 9:42 that night until 3:14 in the morning—notes and sketches and scratched-out-rewritten details until the story started to move and breathe on its own—and then he wrote this down:
Eliza and Erik are U.S. soldiers (really good ones, like Green Berets or Navy SEALS or something). They’re both chosen—no, signed up (and chosen)—to be part of this super-soldier project, like some modern Captain America thing. So the day they sign up (they don’t know each other yet), they meet all the other great soldiers. Erik meets a guy named Sam White. (Eliza’s full name is Eliza Anne Sable and Erik’s is Erik Thomas Fuller). Erik and Sam become friends right away. They have the same sense of humor and initially are going through the phases of the program together.
The program is a mixture of drugs (steroids, human-growth hormones, new-age amphetamines for focus, and some other top-secret drug to increase brain function and strength and speed), along with nanotechnology (little computers and stuff inserted to increase blood flow, hearing, eyesight and decrease exhaustion and pain receptors).
Erik never talks to Eliza, but Sam falls in love with her at first sight. He keeps after her, even though she keeps rejecting him (but the rejections are getting warmer—she can’t help it. Sam is awesome—think Han Solo).
So eventually, as different people react to the program differently, they begin to be separated into subgroups. Eliza and Sam, who have reacted the best to everything, are sent off together with the doctors and trainers. Over the next few months, they work together and become superhuman together. Faster, stronger, smarter. She begins to see what kind of man he is, and so she begins to admire and respect him, and then she falls in love with him. They live, for a little bit, in a perfect sort of Utopia of their own, just training and spending time with each other and boning like crazy. They’re pushing each other as they advance to never-before-seen heights of human ability.
After a while, though, Sam starts getting distracted and distant. See, Eliza loves the new powers. She revels in them. But they worry Sam. He knows they’ve reached levels of strength, speed, and internal data computation that are just impossible for human beings. He wants to know more, so he starts to sneak out at night. It’s easy to get past THEIR security (to uncover THEIR secrets), because THEY made him specifically to be able to do things like that. He starts to find out things that bother him, references to “failed” subjects and stuff like that. Soldiers whose bodies “refused the treatment.” But he doesn’t know what happened to the “failed” soldiers. Did they just wash out? Get sent home or back to their regular assignments?
Then he finds Erik.
Erik’s file tells the story of a new reaction to the drugs. “Exponential growth/new side effects.” His strength and speed grew crazy fast, way faster than the others’, but he had weird side effects. “Headaches, blurred vision, hearing problems.” Also, the brain drugs didn’t seem to be increasing him, just sort of keeping everything level. THEY upped the dosage. “Cognitive problems, blindness, petit mal seizures.” But the muscles, the flesh—it was something unheard of. His muscles grew huge and flexible. His skin became hard as leather (then harder), and his features seemed to flatten out. MRIs of his brain showed decreased activity. The same day he ran a 100-yard dash in eight seconds, he also bench-pressed 850 pounds. He reverted. His brain grew dim. THEY fit him with nano-implants to replace his eyes and ears, which were useless by this point, and THEY kept feeding him the stuff.
By the time Sam finds him, he’s no longer the joking, red-haired soldier he became friends with just a year ago. He’s a monster. He has the mind of a child, but he remembers his friend Sam. He has robot eyes and ears and he’s the strongest, fastest man to ever live on planet Earth. Sam looks at his friend and starts to cry. THEY tortured him—killed him, really—and Sam decides then and there that he’s done. He goes back and tells Eliza all of it. He tells her he loves her more than anything and wants her to come with him—it would kill him to leave her—but he’s done. He has to go and has to take Erik with him. Eliza kisses him and says, “Yes, of course, yes.”
Apparently, though, THEY have more eyes and ears than even Eliza and Sam know, because THEY have found out about their prize weapons’ plan to escape. The night before the scheduled breakout, THEY come for them. Eliza and Sam and Erik will all be taken and split up, probably at underground bases on different sides of the country, and brainwashed (wiped?) so that they’ll just do their duty and shut up.
Sam breaks free and attacks the soldiers. He calls to Eliza to get Erik, which she runs and does, herself killing and disabling a few soldiers as she goes. She gets Erik, and the two of them fight their way back to Sam, but Sam has been overtaken. As they get there, they see an unconscious Sam being loaded onto a helicopter and taken away. They scream and try to stop it, but it’s gone, and then the rest of the soldiers attack.
But they’re no match, not for Eliza’s skill and blind rage, nor for Erik’s otherworldly abilities. They fight through them, destroying the base in the process, and find themselves alone in the woods of the Northwest on a cold, gray, rainy morning.
So begins the story of Eliza and Erik, rogue government experiments obsessed with finding out who did this to the
m while they fight to elude detection and capture. Most of all, though, they want to find Sam. Where is Sam?
He called the comic Fearless. Not The Fearless Duo or The Fearless Team or Fearless Force or anything else. Just Fearless. It’d come to him while he was riding home from a doctor’s appointment with Mom, sitting in the passenger seat looking out the window at an afternoon sky, a storm coming in, turning the gold sky a dark iridescent violet. The sun outlined the dark clouds moving in, and James thought . . . Fearless . . . and within those two syllables was a gut-and-nuts feeling of a whole way of life, a philosophy as clear as a slap. Some people are fearless. Eliza is fearless because of her pride in her own abilities and because of her rage. Her need for revenge barely covers up her own unconscious death wish, that if she can’t be with Sam, then she doesn’t want to live. Erik, on the other hand, is fearless because of his love for his friends—the only good thing left in his world. He would do anything for them.
James fantasized inside and outside of the comic. He longed to live in the simplicity of Erik, to have a clear reason for being, a comrade, or sometimes just to touch Eliza. The lines of her breasts, her legs; he loved them differently every time he drew them. (Though he was still completely unable to draw Eliza’s face. He kept trying, and while some sketches seemed okay, none really felt like Eliza. He tried to just let it go, but he couldn’t ignore what a lie it was to get her wrong. So he kept trying.)
What’s it like to not be afraid all the time? What’s it like to be sure?
But that was it. Just fantasies. He was stuck. He had the origin, had the look and the characters, but he needed that first story. Ishii had said (emphatically) that so many first-time writers make the same mistake: no story. Comic books are so much about origin—so much about prelude—that writers got lost in it. They submit backstory, just like James had, all ready for the story to begin and . . . nothing. James knew he needed a story—a great story—to start with, and from there, within that story, he’d weave their origin.
