“Ten questions,” he says, “with ten subheadings.”
“Do they get the special prize or do all the Brainiacs?” another Brainiac shouts.
He makes a quick decision. “You all do. Yukio and Cindy are playing for the whole team.”
The Brainiacs cross their arms, but they move away from the team table. Suddenly Yukio and Cindy are in the spotlight, and for the first time that night, they look nervous.
“Yukio and Cindy, are you ready?” Darren asks.
“Sure,” Yukio says, his bravado back.
Darren clears his throat, takes a deep breath, and asks, “Question One: What is the albedo of the earth, in aggregate?”
“I’ll take that.” Cindy grins at her brother. He shrugs. She presses her handheld buzzer, then says, “It’s zero-point-three.”
“Subquestion A,” Darren says, “How is the albedo calculated?”
“Oh, shit,” Cindy says without hitting the buzzer. “Who really cares?”
“I do,” Yukio says. He buzzes in. “If you have a spectoradiometer and you face it toward the sun…”
Darren listens but he doesn’t really hear. He pays just enough attention to know that they are getting each question and the following subquestions. And as he suspected, Yukio takes the math questions while Cindy handles all the rest.
She destroys the history section. And the literature section. Finally, Darren gets to his most esoteric question, the one he doubts even a collector or an antique dealer can answer.
“What is…” he asks slowly “…a Caron Derringer?”
Yukio hits the buzzer. “It’s a gun manufactured in—”
“It’s a perfume atomizer,” Cindy says over the top of him. Darren’s stomach does a flip-flop.
“Yukio buzzed in,” Darren says. “He has to give the complete answer.”
She turns to her brother, whispers to him.
Darren bangs a hand on the counter, making the mike reverberate. “Yukio has to answer on his own.”
“We’re playing as a team,” she says. “Team members can consult.”
Darren supposes he can challenge that. They’re playing as a truncated team. He can disqualify this question, and make sure they don’t work together again.
But he doesn’t want to defeat them by default. He wants the win to be fair and square, so that no one, particularly not Yukio, can say he cheated.
“Okay,” Darren says. “Yukio, give me the answer.”
“It’s a perfume atomizer marketed in 1963 under the Caron brand. It’s so small it can fit into a purse or a lipstick case. It doesn’t look like a derringer, but rather like a derringer’s bullet.”
Complete, accurate, and devastating. A question like that would demolish even the better-than-average player. Cindy isn’t better than average. She’s the best Darren’s seen. Her math weakness is her only flaw.
Darren’s hands continue to shake. He’s not sure he can keep up this game much longer. His head is throbbing and he feels slightly woozy. If she can answer the Caron Derringer question, she can answer almost anything. And his own math skills aren’t great enough to take on Yukio—at least not on the highest levels.
He hasn’t thought of any real world questions, not any he’s sure of the answers to. He doesn’t know much about plumbing or construction either.
But he does know biking. Only, if he asks a bicycle question, will Yukio realize that the Great Quizmo is really a lowly bike messenger?
Yukio is staring at him. So is the rest of the bar, waiting for the next question.
Either Yukio and Cindy defeat him here, defeat him now, or Yukio defeats him later—should he recognize Darren.
The risk is Darren’s.
And he takes it.
He says, “In cycling, what was Kryptonite’s kryptonite?”
The entire bar gasps. The Kryptonite lock, the best of all bike locks, supposedly undefeatable, impossible to break into, turned out to be easily opened with a ballpoint pen. Because Portland has such a large cycling community, the story made front page news in the Oregonian a few years ago. The company that makes Kryptonite fixed the flaw immediately and offered every cyclist who had purchased a Kryptonite lock a replacement.
Yukio is looking down. Cindy frowns. Around them, people squirm in their chairs. A few of the Brainiacs, sitting as far from the competitors’ tables as possible, whisper to each other, obviously shocked at their teammates silence.
The whole bar knows the answer.
“It was in the paper,” Yukio says without buzzing in. “I saw it.”
Cindy studies him as if she can will the answer out of him.
“Something picks that lock,” Yukio says.
Cindy remains quiet.
Yukio turns toward the bar, but Darren clears his throat into the microphone. No one says anything, even though a few people clearly want to.
Then Yukio looks at Cindy, who shrugs.
“Your first four minutes are nearly up,” Darren says. He wonders if he can live with himself if he sets the final minute timer at thirty seconds.
But he doesn’t have to cheat. Instead, Yukio buzzes in. “It’s a paperclip!”
The entire bar groans. Darren allows himself a small triumphant smile, then leans toward the mike. “You people want to tell him what he did wrong?”
In unison, the patrons shout, “A ballpoint pen!”
Yukio looks stunned, Cindy confused.
Darren’s heart is still pounding, but the pounding comes from an unfamiliar elation. He’s never felt like this — at least not in quizzing. Once or twice when he’s had to beat the clock messengering, he’s hit a biker’s high. That’s what this feels like. The quizmaster’s high.
“And that’s it for tonight’s game. If you losers are still feeling confident, come back for next week’s tournament, and see whose brain ends up bloody, battered, and exposed for the weak muscle that it is. Until then, this is Quizmo, reminding you all that my mind is greater than yours.”
Yukio cringes, but looks defeated. He doesn’t seem like a man who has recognized a bike messenger. He seems like a man whose brain has been exposed.
If Yukio was going to do anything, he would have done it the moment he lost the question.
But he didn’t.
Darren’s won. He wants to jump with his arms overhead like a football player who has just made a touchdown.
Instead, he settles for blaring Queen’s “We are the Champions” over the sound system.
Yukio’s teammates have surrounded his table, battering him with questions—How could he miss that? It was so easy. Darren smiles. Yukio looks lost, clearly wondering why one missed easy question destroys his entire reputation as a brainiac.
Because, Darren can tell him but won’t, the easy questions show the posturers for the real-life losers that they are.
“My brother thought he could beat you.” Cindy’s standing near the back of the mike stand. Darren looks for the cocktail waitress, the bouncer, someone in authority to tell Cindy to move out of the way, but they’re busy.
He’s alone.
“No one beats the amazing Quizmo,” Darren says, but there isn’t as much heart in the words as there was a few minutes ago.
She gives him a saucy grin. “I’d like to.”
It takes him a minute to realize she’s making a double entendre. Then it takes another minute to realize she’s serious. He blushes so deeply that the heat in his face actually hurts.
Her dark eyes meet his. He studies her for a moment. He’s beginning to get used to her exotic look and he’s starting to think she’s handsome in a way that only improves with age.
Her mind is compatible with his — right down to the level of trivial interests and her inability to go to higher levels in math. If he says yes, he could be with her for a very long time. They’d be perfect together — the kind of couple who would build a geeky life in this geeky town.
He’d quit quizzing and take a job at Intel or one of the other remai
ning high tech firms. She’d continue doing whatever it is that keeps her in beer and potato chips.
Together they’d have two scarily brilliant children, a few cats, and a house in the West Hills. Eventually, he’d gain weight because he can’t cycle any more, and he’d start frequenting bars like this one just once a week, coming for the “entertainment” and not for the escape, wondering what it would’ve been like if he’d continued in his quest for fame.
He would never know, but he would fantasize about it, like all of these people here, people who leave every week and go back to their average lives in their average houses with their average spouses.
He can’t believe he’s thinking of dating her. He can’t believe he’s thinking of sleeping with her.
For a moment — just a brief moment — he forgot he is the Amazing Quizmo, Master of All He Sees.
“Sorry,” he says to Cindy as he pushes past her, “but the only person who can beat me is myself.”
“The Amazing Quizmo” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, first published in The North American Review, May-August, 2009.
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