But all this reeks of fantasy, and I know it. Despite what Dr. Janet has told me, recognizing one’s delusions isn’t helpful. It only makes you feel worse.
In Biloxi, I stood my ground on Highway 90 in sustained winds over 150 miles per hour, wind gusts up to 200. At that point, I’d stopped looking for stranded civilians and knew I was alone. The storm surge was up to my belly, and the waters were rising. In those conditions, flying would be tricky, but something I might manage. Still, I did not leave. Debris spun in the air, and I let the hurricane pelt me with rage. Something, an oil drum maybe, slammed into my face, and I nearly passed out. But then I heard the sounds of people crying for help, screaming loudly enough to be heard over the howling of those locomotive winds. Peering into the pelting rain, I saw the shape of what looked like Noah’s ark, shifting in the rocking waves. It was some kind of casino hotel, built on a barge and loose from its dock. Half the size of a football field, it lumbered my way. And though I could see no people, and my brain told me there was no way anyone was inside, my heart heard their desperate cries, and I knew I had to save them. So, instead of swimming clear or trying to take flight, I tried to find some purchase beneath my feet and braced myself the best I could. For the sake of those people, I raised my hands and stood my ground.
I came to when the eye passed over. In water sloshing up to my waist, I was pinned between the sideways barge and the shell of a warehouse, and I could only see a sliver of bright blue sky above me. I was weak and couldn’t move. Even breathing was hard. I knew the second half of the storm was bearing down on me, and I thought it quite likely I would die. And this seemed fine with me, perhaps even better than fine. Maybe because my head got whacked or maybe because I’d already gone a little bit batty—I heard people clapping. From the sideways casino, which I knew to be abandoned, I heard cheers and applause. I’d blunted the force of the barge just enough. I’d saved them all. And it was such a pleasant delusion, waiting for my end that way, that in the moment I truly wished it were real.
Maybe before I fly back to the HALO, I’ll visit a middle-of-nowhere pharmacy, one that’s not open all night. One that has no security cameras. The Zone helps me forget who I am, so I can pretend to be the man I’m supposed to be.
I start scanning the landscape below me, looking for a small town or a cluster of lights. Instead, though, incredibly, I pick up a flying figure. It’s too small for a plane, too big for a bird, rising toward me. Even in the moonlight, without being able to see his bright red hair, I recognize Sparkplug. He floats alongside and says, “Thought maybe you could use some company.”
I stare straight ahead, rub at the back of my neck, and wish this were a dream. “Please just fuck off, Billy.”
“Why don’t you let me help you? Look, I know you’re having a doozy of a night.”
“Can’t you go haunt somebody else?”
He shakes his head. “You’re the only living person I’ve spoken with since the accident.”
I pretend I don’t see him and consider his choice of words. Accident. At the World’s Fair in Hamburg, King Chaos had just done the unthinkable, defeating Titan in hand-to-hand combat. The rest of us—Gypsy, Sparkplug, Menagerie shaped as a green-eyed rhino—surrounded him. Chaos, wearing the full red-and-black battle armor that covered even his face, knew that with Titan down, I was the next biggest threat. He turned toward me with that helmet crowned with three horns and unleashed a laser blast from one of his power gauntlets. The blue beam came right at me, but at that point in my life, I truly was impervious. I knew I could take it, and then I would move in, defeat the man who had defeated my mentor. I would take my place at history’s table.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, Sparkplug jumped in front of me, absorbing the blast and suffering a mortal wound. Chaos escaped from Gypsy and Menagerie. As for me, I held my friend as he died.
In the twelve years since Billy’s passing, he and I have had maybe a halfdozen conversations. His appearances come in clusters, usually around some major event in my life. The last time was the birth of Nate. Billy showed up in the damn maternity ward. Looking at him now, flying beside me at high altitude, a strange question occurs that I can’t help asking. “So you’re saying you actually speak with dead people?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I’m in the club.”
I laugh but catch myself. It’s too easy to forget that we’re not friends anymore. Though the wind is biting cold, I accelerate with the slim hope of leaving him behind, but he keeps pace easily, something he could never do when he was among the living.
“It’s kind of against the rules,” he tells me, “but I could get a message to somebody if you wanted. Really, anything I can do.”
I picture my father, who died when his NASA rocket exploded on the launchpad. Then my mother, who loved to travel but despised maps. I remember the eyes of that woman who burned to death in my arms in the fire in Peru. What would I say to any of them? But then I come back to where I am and what Billy’s trying to do. “Some debts you can’t pay off,” I tell him.
“That’s what you think I’m doing? You think I’m haunting you all these years hoping you forgive me?”
I plow into a cloud bank, ripe with moisture and blessed with zero visibility. I don’t need to see his face anymore. The truth is that I have forgiven Billy. In my heart, at least a dozen times, I’ve let this whole thing go and been at peace, focused on the good in my life. That’s the value of confession as well as forgiveness. They free you from the past so you can move unfettered into the future. The only problem for me is that the forgiveness never sticks. The old bitterness worms its way back into my heart, and I am cast down. I emerge from the cumulonimbus, and he’s still at my side. I pull up and hover in midair, lay a hand over my heart, and say, “I grant you absolution.”
He frowns, not sure if I’m serious.
I try to look as sincere as I can. “I forgive you of any wrongdoing and free you from further obligation to me. I hereby forgo my vengeance. Now please, fuck off.”
Billy shakes his head. “I’m worried about you,” he says. “That’s why I’m here. And I miss you. I miss how you used to be before everything turned. God, Vince, remember how you used to be? You weren’t like this. You used to shine.”
I know exactly what he’s talking about, the glow of confidence and true invulnerability, and I barely catch myself from saying I miss me too. But his words have spurred another notion I can’t shake. “I guess Sheila didn’t feel that way.”
“You can’t believe that,” he says. “She did what she did. But she never stopped loving you.”
“Shut up,” I say.
“Or what, you’ll kill me? It’s true and you know it. She told me once, before we’d done anything, she said—”
“Stop talking.”
“I’m not going to deny that she and I, that we developed feelings for each other. But you’re crazy if you think she didn’t love you. We both loved you, Vince. And in all the ways that matter most, we both still do.”
I reach for his throat but clutch only air. Though he knows I can’t hurt him, he flinches at my attempt, and his eyes dim with disappointment. Then I say, “Understand me, Billy. There’s nothing you have that I want, nothing you can say I want to hear.”
These words wound my former best friend, the man I thought would fight by my side for decades, help me change the course of history and make the world a better place. When he closes his eyes it’s reluctantly, and I can tell he’s got the message. His image shimmers and fades until he’s gone, and I’m floating alone in the clouds over central Pennsylvania. Some part of me I hate misses him.
Barely a month after his funeral, Billy first appeared to me and confessed about him and Sheila. I was so distraught—at the loss of my friend, at the loss of my wife’s fidelity—that I went kind of nuts. People thought the three-day bender was some aftershock following Billy’s horrible death. Titan gave me a long pep talk about fallen comrades and renewed his vow that we’d fin
d Chaos and make him pay. Ecklar, who up to this point was only doing technical support for the team, was driven by guilt to find a way to get onto the field of combat despite his diminutive size. He went to work designing a battle suit of his own, one based on a version of Chaos’s armor we’d confiscated from an abandoned hideout in Madagascar. I knew it was a bad idea, messing with technology we didn’t fully understand, but against my better judgment I helped him test out the old armor, gave some suggestions for improvements to the weapons systems. Ecklar just wanted to make a difference, and how could I blame him?
As for Sheila, in the aftermath of Billy’s death she tried to comfort me in the way she always found most successful, and one afternoon while Thomas was napping, we fell into the old flow. We were in our bed together rolling and naked, and it shouldn’t have felt good, but it did. Then I found myself wondering if Billy had kissed this exact spot on her neck. If her hands now on me had caressed him in the exact same way.
I’d lost my wife, just as I’d lost my best friend. The same way I’d later lose Thomas. And now I’m losing Debbie, because I can’t bring myself to give her what she wants. I’m nothing like the hero I once thought I was. I am not the man I wanted to be. And at forty, there seems little chance of turning all that around. Only Nate stills looks at me with admiration. It’s wrong, I know, to place such a weight on a child, but he can still justify me, give my life meaning. Tonight, my boy can save me. I know he can.
I think of Nate and burst into high altitude, where I go to full burn. At this velocity, my body creates friction with the air, and I heat up, leaving a fiery wake. Once I hit top speed and streak over the countryside, I must look like a falling star.
FOUR
Matters of Great Import. The First Step in Being a Good Father.
Anomalous Radiation in the Upper Ionosphere.
Everything We Set Out to Do.
As I approach the HALO, floating and spinning slowly a half-mile over Kingdom Town, the hangar doors split down the center and begin to recede. The column of bright light expands, and I see a solitary figure standing in the back of the landing bay. The planets are finally aligning. Somehow, Nate is waiting for me. He’s always been a perceptive kid, and I shouldn’t be surprised that he sensed his dad needed him tonight. Before I put him to bed, I’ll make us some hot cocoa and we’ll talk. We’ll discuss his latest science project. I’ll let him tell me about that western he watched with Ecklar. I’ll ask what he wants to be when he grows up and hold my breath waiting for the answer.
Only, as I come through the doors, I see something’s not right with my son’s head. It’s too big. It’s not Nate who steps forward to greet me but Ecklar. His hands are behind his back. On his green-skinned face, his slit of a mouth forms an expression of deep disappointment. I know how he feels.
“What precisely were you thinking going to see Sheila?” he asks. He’s wearing fuzzy yellow slippers and a dirty apron that reads don’t say thanks, just eat. “Really, explain to me the optimum outcome.”
“I needed a friend,” I say. “That list looks to be getting shorter all the time.”
“Abandon the martyr act and come with me. It’s cold out here, and we have important matters to discuss.”
“The park?” I say. “How are the hostages?”
“Drunk, as it turns out. Those cavemen were fraternity boys, and the ‘hostages’ were from a sorority. It was all some kind of massive prank gone awry.”
“And the sabertooth?”
“Stolen team mascot. Clyde insists that mind control is involved, but Deb sent me a text. The only mystery is what they were drinking.”
At the entrance, Ecklar’s thin fingers run along a control panel, and the hangar doors grind closed. As I follow him along the curved hallways, I tell myself that he’s almost the same size as my son, that mistaking him for Nate was just a manifestation of my desire, not a hallucination brought on by the Xonopexal I swallowed dry twenty minutes ago.
I found a closed CVS on the outskirts of Binghamton, went straight through the plate glass windows like a car with no brakes. There was a whole box, of course, half a shelf really, but I only took a single bottle. My back’s in real pain. My need for pharmaceutical relief is entirely biological. And the ache in my spine has indeed diminished, though the rise in spirits I also expected has yet to materialize. I feel hazy, not high. I may need to increase my dosage.
The elevator brings us to Ecklar’s quarters on the upper level. He opens the door, and as usual, I’m taken aback by the mess. A dining room table overflows with paperwork, reports from his experiments and unread fan mail. In his time on Earth, Ecklar, who does not sleep, has mastered a dozen professions: he’s composed two operas, earned a graduate degree in landscape architecture, learned Navajo, and advanced to the final table at the World Series of Poker. Just past a row of his abstract paintings, by the sliding glass door that goes to the balcony, his battle armor stands like a statue. Once, this technological wonder blew a hole the size of a tank in the Great Wall of China. Now, draped over one robotic arm is a wet bath towel.
Ecklar leads me into the kitchen, which seems a half-scale model of the real thing. As the HALO’s architect, of course Ecklar customized his quarters. The miniature countertops, only two feet off the ground, are covered in white flour, and pots and pans pile up in the tiny sink. Despite his status as supergenius, Ecklar’s efforts at cooking have consistently failed. He walks to the short oven and pulls down the door, releasing a smoky cloud and a burnt odor. As he fumbles with two lobster claw oven mitts, he says, “Foznar’s beard! There goes my blueberry banana bread.”
He dumps the pan on a counter, then gives me a disgusted look. He slips off the apron, folds it, and tosses it on the toylike countertop. Naked except for his fuzzy slippers, he crosses his apartment and enters his private lab. For a moment, I think he’s just walked away from the whole situation and won’t be coming out, but then he emerges, holding a white box in his stringy hands. He offers it to me, and when I open it, I find a new Danger Ring. “You think I’m going to need one of these?”
Ecklar gets a knife and starts digging out the bread. “Vincent, I know you had a rough night, but it’s probably a good idea if you quit being such an unmitigated ass. Later, you will see my wisdom is sound. There are things we have to talk about now. Matters of great import.” He deposits a crumbly piece on a napkin and hands it to me. “You should eat something.”
I take a bite, and, no surprise, it’s awful. He sees me struggling to chew and gets a glass of milk. He asks, “So what do you think?”
I put the bread down. “Don’t quit your day job.”
He says, “You will regret being unkind to me this day. I tell you this as your naddeo.”
The Andromedan term translates to something like “friend who stands at my side when all others have left me, though I am faced with a thousand fierce enemies, each with a sharpened spear.” He doesn’t use it except on occasions like this, when things are pretty serious. I try to read Ecklar’s alien expression, guess at his agenda. When I fail, I simply ask, “How’s Nate?”
“Passed out on the couch in my media room. He very much enjoyed the movie.”
“I’ll carry him to my quarters,” I say.
“Perhaps that can wait until we’ve spoken.”
“I think whatever it is can wait. He’s my boy.”
Ecklar finishes chewing a bite of the bread. “You are being unreasonable and obstinate.”
My friend heads for the sliding glass doors beyond the living room, and, after a moment, I follow. We pass his man-sized battle suit, standing like antique armor in the corner, its golden luster covered in a fine layer of dust. Except for its color, it really does look like a replica of King Chaos’s. All across the chest plate, Ecklar has papers held up by thick magnets. Some are shopping lists and coupons; others seem to be diagrams for the interstellar vortex generator he’s been working on for nearly two decades. Like anybody, my friend wants to get home. I wonder,
though, why he’s kept the armor here in his living room. Why keep this constant reminder of his best days in a public place? I consider asking Ecklar if he wants me to store it down in the Vault, but then it occurs to me that I might not be the only one clinging to the past.
Ecklar pulls on the door handle, and a gush of wind sweeps in, making me think of flying. The crammed patio has one miniature seat, a gas grill, and a dying ficus. All around us, patches of wispy clouds drift and float, pull apart and come together. The hum of the HALO’s antigravity engines fills the air. Like everything else in this place, the technology is pure Andromedan. In his old life, Ecklar designed command stations like this for his planet’s war with the Malkovians, a ruthless race of fifteenfoot-tall lizard people. Together, he and I move to the railing, which only goes up to my knee. Almost three thousand feet below us, Kingdom Town stretches out like a map.
Ecklar sets his hands on top of the railing, right at my knees, and gazes out on the skyscape. “You and I, we’ve done lots of good, don’t you think, Vincent?”
Ecklar usually only waxes philosophical late night and post-vodka. But something in his voice is intensely sober. “I guess,” I say. “What’s your point?”
“I’m not sure. We’ve been allies for coming up on twenty years. I have fought beside you in countless battles. And I refuse to think it’s all been in vain. This world is better for our efforts. I know it is.”
He sounds like he’s trying to convince himself. “We’ve done a lot,” I say.
“Certainly more than we expected when we began. Remember those gaudy costumes? Titan’s ridiculous battle cry?”
“Go! Go! Guardians!” I say.
Ecklar says, “Hee hee hee,” which is the sound he makes when he finds something funny. Andromedans apparently don’t laugh naturally.
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