The Relive Box and Other Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  “Mason?”

  “Yes?”

  “Graham Shovelin here. How are you?”

  Before he could answer, the deep voice rolled on, unstoppable, Old Man River itself: “I have good news, the best, capital news, in fact! The funds will be released tomorrow.”

  “You’re”—he couldn’t find the words—“you’re okay? The, the treatment—?”

  “Yes, yes, thanks to you, my friend, and don’t think I’ll ever forget it. I’m weak still, of course, which is why you haven’t heard from me in some time now, and I do hope you’ll understand . . . but listen, we’re going to need one more infusion here, just to assure there are no glitches tomorrow when we all gather in Mr. Oliphant’s office to sign the final release form—”

  “How much?”

  “Oh, not much, Mason, not much at all.”

  WARRIOR JESUS

  In the first panel of the very first issue you see Him striding across the desert with maybe nothing around Him but sand and the ruins of a shattered village in the distance. He’s not wearing a robe and sandals but bike shorts and black lace-up combat boots and a tight black tee and He’s not the skinny hippie all the paintings make Him out to be, but buff, as if He’s been doing weight training, but of course, like Wolverine or the Hulk, He doesn’t really have to sweat anything to be built like that. He just is. And His hair—it isn’t that long, actually, just long enough to give Him a topknot like a samurai, and His beard isn’t shaggy like some biker’s beard, but trimmed close to His rock-hard jawline. His eyes—at first—are calm, and they’re not blue like in the paintings either, but green like Asia’s (she’s my girlfriend). What you see, right off, is that this isn’t the sort of hero who’ll turn the other cheek or out of some misguided notion of fairness or love or whatever won’t use His powers to the very fullest degree. No, just the opposite. Warrior Jesus is the scourge and the whip—the Cleanser—and He’s come to wipe up all the slime of the world, the Al Qaedas and Boko Harams, ISIS, the Mexican Mafia and all the rapists and slavers and drug dealers out there, dog abusers, wife beaters, anybody evil who seeks to inflict pain on the weak—they’re going to be dust. All of them. Just like what He’s walking over in that first panel, the sand grains symbolic of what He’s going to reduce them to. No hell, no trial, no punishment: just dust. Or sand. Or whatever.

  Saturday night, the place mobbed, and I’ve got my head down pretty much the whole shift, just trying to keep up with the orders. Stressed isn’t really the word for it, just busy, so busy I’m startled when one of the customers—an older woman who comes in on a regular basis—asks me how my drawing’s going and the best I can do is rotate the upper half of my body away from the grill, show her some teeth and say, “Great, just great.” There must be twenty steaks up and I’m working my tongs like a master conductor waving his baton, only the stage here is a ten-by-three-foot space between the grill and the salad bar and the audience is a snaking line of semi-drunk people with big oval salad-bar plates in their hands, but I’m the main attraction, make no mistake about it. And the meat, of course, sizzling there over the tiny yellow fingers of flame and sending up that authentic mesquite-seared aroma that has them all choking back saliva as they lean over the sneeze guard and fish out cherry tomatoes or avocado slices with the salad tongs. The truth is, on this particular night, I all but blanked on the public-relations aspect of the job until the woman brought me out of my reverie, and that isn’t good, because my boss, Mike Twombley, always makes a huge deal of it. You are representing Brennan’s every minute you’re standing there at the grill, never forget it. People like to see their steaks go up and they like to see somebody cool, somebody friendly, flipping them, right? Well, yeah, I get that. But they also like rare rare and medium-rare medium-rare, and if the grillman’s busy bending over backwards for everybody—especially on a night like this—then there are going to be fuckups, and what would you rather have, dinners sent back or a grillman who’s focused on the task at hand?

  Toward the end of my shift, after I’ve already dumped the grease and taken the wire brush to the grill, Mercy, the cutest waitress, who just happens to drive all the old men at the bar gaga because she’s older (thirty-two, divorced, one kid), brings me a late order, party of two, a New York well for the guy, prawn-and-scallop kebab for the girl. Normally the kitchen closes at nine-thirty, after which it’s burgers only, flipped in a pan in the kitchen and served at the bar, and it’s nine-forty now, but I’m in a good place, really riding high on Warrior Jesus and seeing the panels unfolding in my head as if I’ve already drawn them, and it’s nothing to throw one more dinner on the grill, which will have to be scraped again, but it’s not as if it hasn’t happened before. The restaurant is in the business of making money and I’m a good employee, a model employee, really, as I try to remind Mike every chance I get, and if it costs me an extra twenty minutes, so what? I’m only going to sit at the bar anyway. Asia’s out with her girlfriends—a movie, she said, then barhopping—and there’s nothing for me at home except staring at the walls, unless I want to play video games (I don’t) or watch TV (I doubly don’t).

  “I can’t see them,” I say, “where are they?” My eyesight isn’t the best and I don’t like to wear my glasses at the grill because they tend to steam up, which means everything out there in the dining room is just a blur.

  “Around the corner? Table thirteen?”

  “Okay,” I say, “okay, great,” and why do I always feel so stupid—or awkward, I guess—around Mercy when I’ve got my own girlfriend and Mercy’s too old for me anyway? It’s the eternal urge, the mating urge, common to us all, though not Warrior Jesus. He’s beyond all that—He doesn’t have the time, for one thing. And this isn’t Greek mythology, with gods pulling the wires behind the scenes or bickering with each other or coming down to have sex with mortals—this is the One God, the Only God, and He’s here for vengeance. “Just tell them we’re about to take the salad bar down any minute, so they need to get to it ASAP, okay?”

  “I just want to get out of here,” she says, giving me a tired grin, and I watch her glide off in her black miniskirt and the low-cut top that adds an extra five dollars to her tip when it’s a male paying the bill, which is about ninety percent of the time.

  So here they come, the late diners I’ve gone out of my way to stay open for, a guy and a girl, and the guy’s wearing some sort of headgear that flashes white all the way across the restaurant so even I can see it in my semi-blind state. And what is it? A turban? The term raghead shoots in and out of my mind, a term I don’t think I’ve ever used because it’s not p.c. and Asia’s always on me if I make any kind of ethnic reference to anybody, whether in my comics or in person, and then he’s there at the salad bar and the girl right beside him (she’s mid-twenties, cute, dyed-red hair with black roots showing and a sleeve of tattoos running up her left arm). I can tell they’ve been dating for a while because he goes ahead of her, flipping a plate off the pile as if he’s going to start juggling with it and bending low to dig into the bowl of romaine and pick out the crispest pieces—and he has to bend low, I realize, because he’s tall, as tall as me at least, and that doesn’t seem right somehow, as if people like him, from wherever he’s from, should be shorter than that. He’s got a beard, of course, a full beard that just about touches the cracked ice cooling the stainless-steel serving trays, and his skin’s not much darker than mine used to get in the summers when I was a lifeguard at the lake. And what is he, a Paki or a Hindu or something? I don’t know much about it, one way or the other, though the guy that delivers produce in the mornings is some sort of Arab and there’s a Hindu, definitely a Hindu, running the Conoco station. Plus, what do I care? He’s just another customer and I probably wouldn’t have noticed him at all if he’d come in during the rush.

  It’s just then that he glances up and gives a little start as if he didn’t expect to see anybody there, though even first-time customers seem to get the drill—suck down your cocktail, put in your order
, troop up to the salad bar and let the grillman provide the entertainment till you’ve heaped up your plate and trooped back to your table again. As I say, he was bent at the waist, picking out his toppings, and now suddenly he straightens up and gives me a look. “Oh, hi,” he says. “I guess you’re our chef, huh?”

  “Right,” I say, and I’m looking at her too, wondering if I know her from someplace—high school? Pratt?—and what she’s doing with him. “You’re the New York well.”

  He lets out a laugh then, which is meant to be all urbane and above it all, and says, “Well, I hope I’m more than that”—and here he gives the girl a sly look—“though for our purposes, that designation suits me just fine.” He’s got a trace of an accent, which I’m just now picking up—British or something, or maybe Indian. From India.

  “It’s a crime,” I say and watch his grin waver, which gives me just the faintest little tick of satisfaction. He thinks a lot of himself, this guy, this dude, and maybe I don’t, maybe I take an instant dislike to him.

  “What do you mean? What’s a crime?”

  I glance at the girl and back at him, then turn away to toss his steak on the grill, where it lands with a hiss and sends up a puff of smoke. “Oh,” I say, turning back to him now and letting my eyes run first to her, then to him, “the steak. I mean, well-done is kind of like sacrilege. The other grillman—Bobby Reyes?—I’ve seen him refuse to do well-done.” (And once, when he had a buzz on, actually go into the dining room and stand over a party of four, pleading with this woman to at least let him do hers medium.)

  The guy in the turban bends down to dig into the artichoke hearts, but when he comes up he’s grinning again. “Don’t I know it,” he says and puts his free arm around the girl. “Jenny’s telling me the same thing all the time, right, babe?”

  That’s when I let my mouth get ahead of me, and I have to attribute it to just being tired at this juncture, that and dehydrated because the heat of the grill really does wring the sweat out of you, no different than if you were sitting in a sauna all day. “I thought Hindus didn’t eat meat.”

  I watch the smile fade and then come up strong again, and he takes his time with me, dipping the ladle for the Roquefort dressing and pouring a half ton of it over everything on his plate. “I’m not Hindu,” he says, and then he and the girl are turning their backs on me and heading back to their table.

  That’s all. That’s all there is. Just that little exchange. And I am not prejudiced, or not any more than anybody else, and if you want to know the truth I hardly knew my cousin Bruce—Bruce Tuttle? That ring a bell?—because his family moved out to California when we were still kids and if I saw him more than two or three times over the years that was it. And yes, I did know he was some sort of minor journalist for CBS News—could my mother ever let me forget it?—and I knew he was covering the Middle East and all of that, but I don’t know if I felt personally violated when they took him prisoner and then, without even negotiating, went out and beheaded him six days later, and I only watched the video once, on YouTube, but I felt something, let me tell you. I felt sick, sad, shocked, confused, angry, of course I did—who wouldn’t? It didn’t matter who they were doing this to—that video is the purest expression of evil that’s ever come into my life. But that doesn’t excuse what happens next, once the guy in the turban and his girlfriend disappear round the corner, and I don’t feel good about it, but you have to understand how I was feeling that night, not only because of Asia, who might or might not have been lying to me about who she was going out with, but because I was tired and maybe a little fed up and I’d been listening to my mother go on about Bruce over and over for the last six months till I was either going to have to build a shrine to him in the backyard or go out and shoot myself in the head.

  I flip the steak. Press down hard with the tongs till the juices sizzle and the flames jump up, then I put the girlfriend’s kebab on, and all the while I’m working this ball of phlegm in my throat—I’ve got the cold to end all colds and the Dristan I took at four is wearing off. So he gets his steak, cooked through till it could have come right from the tannery, and if it has a nice translucent glaze on it, I just feel it’s the least I can do for him.

  The second panel shows Him coming into this burned-out village, which is still maybe a hundred yards off, and you can see figures there now, shadowy, wreathed in smoke, and in the third panel He’s there and the people—civilians, victims, little kids, old women in head scarves—are all looking flabbergasted at Him as if they’re wondering what next, expecting the worst, only the worst. That’s when your eye jumps to panel four and you see the bad guys, all dressed in black with black ski masks and AKs and grenade launchers slung over their shoulders. One of them has a knife, and not one of these seven-inch Ka-Bar things like they used in the video, but a huge blade, curved like a scimitar—do they still use scimitars?—and it shines against his all-black clothes, or maybe it’s a robe he’s wearing, a black robe, till it definitely focuses your eye. Panel five is the knife, foregrounded, and just beyond it are the victims, a skinny kid and his father, kneeling in the sand with hoods over their heads. You wonder, What have they done to deserve this?, and the answer is nothing, they just had the bad luck to live in a godforsaken place where the bad guys have sway over everything, stealing their cars, their houses, their food, their wives and daughters and mothers. Maybe the father’s the village mechanic, maybe he owned the burned-out service station you can see in the distance, maybe he tried to stop them when they dragged his twelve-year-old daughter into the back room and shut the door. No matter. The knife’s already in the air, already coming down, and we cut away to just the head, the father’s head, in the sand.

  That’s when Warrior Jesus comes on the scene, just striding ahead, taking His time. The guards see Him coming and they give Him a curious/hostile look, but He’s got nothing in His hands and His shorts and tee are so tight He couldn’t be concealing anything like a suicide vest or a gun or even a box cutter, so though they level their AKs on Him, they’re hardly worried. At worst—or best, depending on how you look at it—He’ll be the next victim, once they get done with the boy. Warrior Jesus doesn’t say a word. And this is something that separates Him from the other superheroes out there—He doesn’t need to talk, only act. Plus, another thing about this character is His power is absolute. He doesn’t have a nemesis, no Lex Luthor or Professor Zoom or Red Skull, and He doesn’t rocket around like Neo or Superman or the Flash. He doesn’t need any of that: He just is. He has immanence. And no one can threaten Him.

  The executioner is raising the blade over the boy’s head when Warrior Jesus lifts His finger, just one finger—His index finger—and points it. In that instant the scimitar clatters to the ground because there’s no one holding on to it, no one there, in fact: the executioner is gone, converted, as you see in closeup, into a knee-high pyramid of dust. The others, the henchmen, that is, open up with their rifles and the bullets are depicted hanging there in the air (think The Matrix) but they never reach their destination because they dissolve like vapor and the weapons themselves vanish too, along with the henchmen, who form their own piles of dust, even as Warrior Jesus frees the boy and restores the father’s head, perfectly, just as it was before (which is tricky, but if the old Jesus could raise the dead, why not?). No sutures, no scars, no operating room, just a dip into the immediate past, a time warp that fixes everything. Except for the executioner and the henchmen, that is. They are dust forever.

  One more thing, because this is just the introductory episode and the readers won’t really know what they’re getting into yet, what the rules are, I mean—the village springs back up around the astonished onlookers as if it’s a stage set, every building, every storefront, even the burned-out service station instantly recreated, only better than before, with trees, lawns, a glittering fresh-water stream emerging from the place where the father’s blood saturated the sand, maybe a KFC franchise—or no, Subway, which is way healthier. The people lo
ok around them—and they’re all wearing new clothes and their wounds are healed, even their dogs are back—and they’re wondering who this savior is. Or where He is. Because the next panel shows the village from afar over the squared-up shoulders of Warrior Jesus, who, we see, is already on to His next adventure. Or not adventure, that’s not the right word, though there’s plenty of adventure in the book—call it correction, His next correction. What’s changed? Word is out now and all the psychopaths and murderers and dictators are in for a rude surprise.

  And cheats, cheats too.

  The next day’s my day off and I wind up sleeping in, which means I blow off my date with Asia for a late breakfast at the brioche place before she goes into work at noon (irony of ironies, she’s the hostess at Cedric’s, our rival steak house on the other side of town, a place that’s pricier than ours and a whole lot less fun, the waiters strictly in jacket and tie—no waitresses—and a bar scene that’s pretty well dead no matter the hour; plus, if you want a salad, the waiter’s going to go into the kitchen and bring it out to you). The minute my eyes open I reach for my phone and text her, but she doesn’t text back and I figure I’ll try again later, when she’s at work and so bored she’s going to be checking her messages every ten seconds. Her job, like any hostess’s, is to look great, open up her megawatt smile and lead diners to their tables, which doesn’t leave much room for creativity or job satisfaction, but like me she’s two years out of college (with a degree in art history) and trying to make ends meet any way she can.

  There’s not a whole lot in the refrigerator beyond a couple of bagels as hard as horseshoes and a take-out box of mistakes from the night before (you might think it sounds cool having all the filets, New Yorks and lamb chops you want, but that gets old fast), and so I just pour myself a glass of orange juice and sit at the window awhile, looking out on a bleak February day with a crust of grimy snow on the lawn and a cold drizzle fuzzing the windows. The place I’m renting is a spare room, with full bath and private entrance, in a tract house like the one I grew up in, but it’s my own to do anything I want with and it has a big picture window with a southern exposure, which gives me the kind of afternoon light I like for my work. Am I hungry? Not really. I’m still dogged by the cold, stuffed up when I get out of bed and then sniffling to the point where I’m going to have to go out and buy more toilet paper at some point, and maybe that has something to do with why I overslept and why I’m not hungry, or at least not hungry enough to get in the car and go out and pick something up. At any rate, before I can think about it, I’m at my desk (a Martin drawing table, actually, which my mother got for me two birthdays ago) and I’m deep into Warrior Jesus, inking the first couple of panels and letting the story come to me, no speech bubbles yet, but a couple captions running through my head just to set things up so people aren’t confused (Is this Syria, or what? He can replace a severed head? Really? What about donor heads? What about all the heads already lopped off in all the other villages?). It doesn’t take much. The way I see it, if the drawings don’t tell the story, or ninety-nine percent of it anyway, you’re dead in the water.