I tried to emulate the work of my favourite cartoonist, Jake Kurtz. His stuff exploded with energy. His panels were framed in odd, disorienting angles. He filled up his pages with intricate designs and vividly imagined settings of strange worlds. I desperately needed life to be as exciting and wondrous as his comics.
On my sixteenth birthday, Dad had a stroke that left his left side partially paralyzed. He needed me on the boat after that. There wasn’t enough money for any other option. The night before my first day out, I silently cried myself to sleep.
I’d been out with my dad often as a little kid, so I knew my way around the boat, more than I cared to admit. I didn’t expect to be good at it, much less to like it.
But I was surprised at how much I did end up enjoying it. Dad died of another stroke about six years later. During the intervening years we became friends, something I had never believed possible. I wish he could have been around for my wedding. He hated dressing up, and we would have shared a good laugh about it.
People in Singleton saw me as a traitor for selling my license. Back then I could tell that not only were the fish dying off but more and more of the catch was contaminated. I got out while the going was still good. I didn’t hurt anyone. The situation with the ocean was way past the point of no return. We were all responsible for the damage we’d done to the sea and to the fish. No use fighting a war that had already been lost. Still, I didn’t exactly have any friends around here anymore. Even ten years later — as if it was my fault that the fish died out and the ocean was a poisonous cesspool. Hell, humanity as a group was destroying the whole world, species by species, ecosystem by ecosystem. Selling my license didn’t precipitate that.
I tried to talk Janet into moving away, but she’d lived here her whole life and didn’t want to leave behind everyone and everything she knew.
I sat there for about an hour after the young woman disappeared into the ocean, numbed. I knew I’d done the right thing by not interfering, but it was a hell of a thing to witness. And seeing something so obviously intended to be a private moment felt dirty and invasive.
I got up. The sun hit my eyes. The cloudless summer sky was a bright, almost glowing blue. I made my way back home barely in time to fix breakfast before Janet had to leave for work. I didn’t mention the woman to Janet — because I didn’t really know what to say about it, but also because it would have impinged even more on that woman’s privacy. It was her death, not anyone else’s, and I didn’t have the right to take it away from her.
As we did every morning, Janet and I ate breakfast quietly. Janet isn’t really awake until she’s halfway through her second cup of coffee. Before that she doesn’t do much more than grunt. By the time she left, the skies weren’t so clear anymore. Dark grey clouds formed over Singleton, and the wind carried a hint of fierceness. Now that I was alone, the weird morning suddenly caught up with me. I was anxious, fidgety, filled with tumultuous emotions that mirrored the sudden storm.
I should have been doing housework, but I couldn’t focus. I sank into my reading chair, listening to the rush of the wind outside.
The doorbell rang a few minutes later. It was Donald Hodge, the UPS driver. He made a comment about the unexpected turn in the weather — there wasn’t even a speck of blue sky anymore, and the wind was gaining strength by the minute. I signed for my parcel: a box from The Golden Age comics shop. Even the barely concealed contempt that hid behind Donald’s superficial cordiality — that underlying disdain that too many people in Singleton held for me — couldn’t spoil my excitement. This treasure was what I needed to shake off the day’s unsettling oddness.
I opened the box, knowing already what was inside: Greatest Comics #3–13 — the never-reprinted complete run of Jake Kurtz’s “The Preservers,” before the strip graduated to a comic book of its own. Kurtz and Shrugging Atlas Comics never did work out their legal wrangles over those episodes: Kurtz owned the stories, but the publisher owned the characters. As a result, the original Preservers stories were never seen again.
I had copies of nearly everything else Kurtz had ever worked on, in addition to a complete set of the post-Kurtz version of The Preservers comic book. This run of Greatest Comics came out a few years before I started reading comic books, so I missed them the first time around and had never found copies I could afford. These were in poor condition, but at least I could finally read the stories.
For years Kurtz continued to work for smaller publishers, writing and drawing all his stories, until his death in 1994. His oeuvre encompassed every genre imaginable, westerns, romance, humour, superheroes, fantasy, war . . . and, what many consider his specialty, monster stories. His most admired work was a 250-page mythological epic called Destroyer of Worlds, from the mid-1970s. His comics were always praised by connoisseurs, but sales didn’t match the critical acclaim.
The Preservers were Stanley King, the patriarch of his family, a shapeshifter who called himself Professor Unknown; his wife, Suzanne, who could become intangible and who adopted the name Spectral; their daughter, Sandy, a.k.a. the Human Angel, who sprouted wings that gave her the ability to fly; and Stanley’s younger brother, Cliff, who was transformed into a superstrong ten-foot, blue-scaled giant called the Brute. They gained their powers when, after their private jet crashed in the Himalayas, they were rescued by the god Vishnu, the preserver, who granted them strange abilities “to preserve the world against the forces of destruction.”
Something hard thudded against the house, and that jarred me out of Kurtz’s universe. I looked out the window. Although it was only around noon, it was as dark as dusk. Trees were bending dangerously against the wind. The rain was still sparse, but it was obvious it would soon be torrential.
I switched on the TV. The weather channel was issuing a severe storm warning, urging everyone to stay indoors. The announcer emphasized that winds were now expected to reach hurricane strength.
I was concerned about Janet. I wanted to be sure she wouldn’t try to leave work in the middle of this mess. Best that she stay there until it was all over. I tried to call her, but the phone was dead. I needed to hear her voice, to reassure myself. I calmed down by reminding myself that Janet was much too reasonable to do something as careless as going outside in this kind of weather.
Through the window, I saw the wind uproot the tree on the Irvings’ lawn across the road. I grabbed my pile of Greatest Comics and ran to the cellar.
Even down there, I heard the storm rage. Stuck in the cellar, I eagerly plunged into my new, long sought-after acquisitions — but the electricity went out. In the dark, I fumbled around for the shelf where we kept emergency supplies. I found the flashlight, and I also lit some candles.
Willing myself to be oblivious to the sounds of the destructive weather, I returned to the welcome escape of Kurtz’s imagination.
“The Preservers,” as originally conceived by Jake Kurtz, was different in tone and content than the version later published by Shrugging Atlas Comics. Kurtz’s characters weren’t so much superheroes, as they became under other hands, but explorers. The mythological nature of their origins and powers was played up more heavily, and the stories concerned themselves with hidden societies, old gods, and magical artefacts rather than supervillains and the like. Themes and ideas later explored in Destroyer of Worlds — such as humans being pawns in complex games and conflicts between the gods of various pantheons — were first hinted at in these stories.
The most shocking episode of Kurtz’s “The Preservers” was the last one: “The Mysterious Suicide.” Professor Unknown sees a sobbing woman on a secluded beach walk into the ocean. Despite his efforts, he fails to prevent it, and her body vanishes under the water. Soon after the suicide — while King is still trying to locate the body — a savage storm erupts. It hits the nearby town. The Preservers use their powers to protect the townspeople from the storm. As the weather calms, Professor Unknown spots the woman from the beach driving away. Alive.
The story ended there,
the final panel being a blurb for the never-published follow-up episode: “Next! The Hunter Strikes!”
When silence fell, its starkness was almost deafening.
I had by then reread “The Mysterious Suicide” several times, trying in vain to make sense of its similarity to my own experiences.
What I found when I emerged from the cellar helped me focus on something other than a comics story written and drawn half a century ago.
All our house’s windows had been shattered. Stupid old man. Too focused on my comics, I’d forgotten the storm shutters; I should have gone out and secured them as soon as the weather showed signs of turning foul. There were shards of glass, rocks of various sizes, and all kinds of debris littering the floor and the furniture. The pictures that had hung on the walls — all of them Janet’s: family photos, works by local artists, a painting of her as a baby by her long-dead father — had fallen, the frames broken. It was going to take a lot of work and expense to fix all this.
I tried calling Janet again, but the phone lines were still down.
I should have stayed and cleaned up the damage. But it was too much, too extensive. I couldn’t face it. I left the house, rushing to join Janet at the bank. To make sure she was okay.
Singleton looked like a war zone.
Oily blotches, presumably from the ocean, splattered all over. Cars smashed up and turned upside down. Debris, shattered to unidentifiable fragments, strewn everywhere. Dead birds and squirrels on the ground, limbs and heads ripped off. Even some fish and seaweed lying here and there. House walls wrecked by uprooted trees. Our home hadn’t fared that badly, all things considered.
The closer I got to Main Street, the more panicked and wounded people I encountered. Ambulances, police cars, and military trucks were already on the scene, with personnel doing what they could to help. The enormity of the destruction was too much to grasp.
On our way back from the bank, Janet and I kept stopping to talk to townsfolk: old man Steinberg from the post office, the Bradfords (who both used to work for me back in the day), Taylor from the hardware store . . . They were all unusually friendly, as if we were good neighbours, as if the last decade had never happened. Part of me wanted to stay resentful, but I let it go.
Everywhere people chatted, helping each other out, and making plans to work together to rebuild the town. Amidst all this destruction, Singleton felt like a community again. Like a community I was a part of. I wasn’t naive enough to believe that people liked me again, but, in the wake of the storm, disliking me stopped being so important. It was a start.
As we walked home, Janet held my hand with a firmness I hadn’t felt since the first months of our marriage.
Next to me, Janet slept. I kissed her shoulder, eliciting a drowsy moan, and then I slipped out of bed. I got dressed, wandered through our wrecked home, and, restless, went out for a midnight walk.
I didn’t have a destination in mind, but I wasn’t surprised when I realized I was heading toward the ocean. What did surprise me was the shiny, expensive-looking black car with tinted windows parked near the path in the woodsy area that led down to the secluded beach. Nobody in Singleton had a car like that. I approached it and peered into the windows, but they were too opaque. I didn’t want to touch the vehicle; it might have a sensitive alarm.
Stealthily, I made my way down to the beach. There was a man standing there, facing the ocean, away from me. He was very tall — well above six feet — and wore blue jeans and a brown turtleneck. He was pointing some kind of handheld device toward the water; it emitted a high-pitched ping! as he arced slowly from east to west and back again. He repeated the gesture several times before folding up the machine.
As he turned around, I quickly dropped to the ground and tried, as silently as possible, to hide in the foliage.
When he reached the path, he stopped. I saw him take out his device again. He pointed it at the woods on both sides of the path. The ping! sound was especially grating from this close. I stifled a gasp when I got a closer look at the device. It resembled exactly those impossibly intricate Jake Kurtz machines from Destroyer of Worlds, with mazes of exposed circuitry arranged like some kind of alien alphabet.
The man folded the device again and walked up the rest of the path. The next few minutes dragged on, but eventually I heard the roar of a car engine. When I reached the main road, the black car was gone.
I took the path back down to the beach and sat in the wet sand staring at the ocean until sunrise, bewildered yet oddly excited. I was about to head back home when the woman walked out of the water and onto the beach.
In the aftermath of the storm, the morning air was unseasonably chilly. She was naked, just as she’d been when I’d last seen her yesterday. But she seemed untroubled by the cold.
When she saw me, panic briefly seized her features. She made no attempt to cover herself.
I waved hello, trying to seem as unthreatening as possible.
She hesitated, but then she walked up and sat next to me. I silently offered her my jacket. She declined, but I insisted. It was more for me, anyway. She nodded, but we still hadn’t exchanged a word.
I tried small talk, but after a few awkward unfinished sentences that provoked no reaction from her, I decided — what the hell — to launch right into it even if it did sound crazy.
“Okay. The way I figure it, you’re not really human. At least not normal human. Maybe even alien. There’s some people hunting you — maybe others like you, maybe government — and you hid in the ocean for a whole day. That’s either as long as you could stand or maybe you somehow figured they’d lost the trail. I don’t know what kind of senses or powers or whatever you have. And you’ve done this before, hiding in the ocean. Maybe I should be scared of you. But I’m not.”
She tentatively smiled at me. “You’re not far from the truth.”
I waited.
She wasn’t saying anything else, so I told her how I had seen a tall man pointing a strange device at the ocean. I looked at her closely while I related that, and I saw her tense up.
She let out a deep breath, turned toward me, and said, “I was fortunate. Fossil-fuel residue can confuse the scanner, and the water here reeks of it.”
“He tried the scanner on me. In the woods. And it didn’t work.”
“The device is calibrated to locate me. It doesn’t register anyone else.”
I waited again.
This time, she broke the silence. “Where am I?”
I hadn’t expected that. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I mean, tell me about this place. The city, the country, the government, the date. The rest of the world. Everything.”
She nodded at the things I told her, as if checking the facts against her memory.
More silence.
Then, “Did anything else unusual happen?”
I told her about the storm.
She nodded. “Yes, that always happens.” But she didn’t elaborate. Another mystery. She persisted, “No other strangers?”
I shook my head.
“That’s good. They haven’t reached this place yet.” They? Before I could ask, she said, “Do you really want to help me?”
Her eyes smouldered with a ferocity at odds with her imploring tone. Her body language was so different from the previous day, when, resigned and defeated, she had walked into the ocean. She seemed like an entirely different person. For a second, I became afraid of her. But then I nodded. I was surprised at how sure I was of my answer.
I had glimpsed something else in her eyes. I couldn’t articulate what it was — but it awakened a profound longing.
Janet was picking through the broken wall hangings. Casually, even half-cheerfully, she asked, “Where were you?”
We kissed hello. Her mouth was delicious. It had been years since she’d kissed me so playfully.
“Couldn’t sleep. Went out and walked around. The dawn light makes the destruction look especially eerie.”
I got
a garbage bag from the kitchen and started sorting through the debris. We spent the whole day cleaning up. I couldn’t remember the last time Janet and I had such a good time. The day whizzed by while we worked, joked around, and reminisced. I was falling in love again.
Despite all that, my thoughts kept straying to the strange young woman who had walked in and out of the ocean and to the man in the black car.
After supper, Janet — exhausted from a full day’s work around the house and hit hard by postprandial wooziness — went upstairs to nap, and I took the opportunity to rummage through her old clothes to find something for the stranger. I also got her some food. I had offered to bring her home — although I was hesitant at the idea of sharing my knowledge of this woman’s existence with anyone, even Janet — but the stranger insisted she could hide in the water or in the woods until she was ready to leave. All that mattered was that she keep safe and out of sight until “they” got here. Her story remained vague, but she skirted around direct questions. Like a liar. Or a crazy person.
When I returned to the beach, dusk was softening the summer brightness.
I called out “Hello!” and the stranger emerged from the woods that isolated the beach from the town. Her eyes told me how furious she was, and the tone of her voice confirmed it. “Where were you?” Janet had asked me that same question, but the meaning was different this time.
I promised I’d come back later, probably even that very night. “I have to go back. Our house is still a wreck . . . and there’s so much to do around town. I do want to stay, but I have other responsibilities.”
We almost argued, but she managed to keep her temper from boiling.
On the way home, I considered not returning to the beach. The stranger’s arrogance irritated me, but she intrigued me too much and I knew I’d be back the next day. In some way, despite the evidence of her walking, breathing, talking body, I still thought of her as dead, and, as the only witness to her “death,” I felt responsible for her.
Objects of Worship Page 16
