by T. C. Boyle
It’s two-thirty on the dot when she calls, off work now till they reopen for dinner at five, and finally remembering she has a boyfriend, me, that is, who got shut out the night before and must have called her a dozen times and even, at one a.m., tried her at her parents’, though admittedly he—I—hung up after the third ring because the last thing I wanted was for her mother to see the caller ID and answer in that spooky accusatory voice she has.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
“Sorry I missed you this morning. I guess I overslept. This cold’s a real bitch, you know?”
She doesn’t say anything, or if she does—my ears seem to be stuffed up too—it’s “Yeah,” which isn’t much more than a space filler (Yeah, she knows? or Yeah, it’s too bad? or Yeah, I’m at the dentist having my teeth drilled?).
“How was the movie?”
“What?”
“You know, the movie you guys saw—Stephanie and who-all? What was it again?”
“Oh, that,” she says, her voice dropped low and clogged up, as if she’s the one with the cold. “We wound up not going. It was Steph’s birthday, did I tell you?”
“No, you didn’t mention it. And you didn’t answer your phone or your messages either. I even tried your parents’ at like one—”
“What can I say, Devon—girls’ night out, okay? I guess I just didn’t feel like checking my phone—I mean, it’s not like we’re Siamese twins.”
I let that hang a minute, then I’m irate, and I’m sorry, because this isn’t the first time and I know something’s going on, I know it. “Shit, you don’t have to jump down my throat—I’m not the one that didn’t call. I’m the one that had to sit at the bar and get shit-faced till Tonio shut out the lights and locked the door, and still you wouldn’t answer.”
“I’m not going to argue,” she says.
“No,” I say, “me neither. If you want to know the truth I’m working, really working for the first time in like months, and you—this call?—you’re interrupting me, you’re distracting me, okay?”
Another pause. And then, her voice dwindled down to practically nothing, she says, “What is it—Warrior Jesus?”
For some reason, this sets me off even more, and yes, I’ve told her all about the concept, talked it up for weeks, but right now, in the mood I’m in, I can’t abide the idea of her horning in on it, of getting between me and my character, which is a kind of intimacy I never asked for. I don’t know what comes over me, but I shout into the phone as if I’m shouting across the street at her. “Fucking A!” I yell. And then repeat myself, even louder: “Fucking A!”
The next scene He enters isn’t all that much different from the first, though it’s a matter of degree. We’re in a city now, not a village, a big city like Ramadi, which is where they think Bruce was killed, though the backdrop of the video was so generic—dirt, rocks, rubble—nobody could really be sure. I’ve downloaded a ton of pictures to give me an idea of what it’s supposed to look like, which is no different, really, than what you see in photos of WWII or Vietnam and, it goes without saying, in all the apocalyptic comics and graphic novels, as if it’s a genre, Shell Cities. I do try to make it my own, give it a little originality, but you don’t want to go overboard—it’s a bombed-out city, that’s all you need to know. Anyway, there’s a whole lot more of it than what you got of the village, so in the splash you see Warrior Jesus’ head in profile and the city, with all the rubble and one-sided storefronts rolling out to the gutter on all four sides. Where is He? You see that in the next panel, when He walks up to a towering mosque-like edifice decorated with all these wedding-cake curlicues around a pair of big reinforced double doors, which can only mean He’s heading up the stairs of the palace where the big guy, the caliph himself—al-Baghdadi—is holding court. Or hiding. Or whatever.
There are guards, of course, hundreds of them, ranged up and down the street and perched on the roofs of the buildings that are still standing, but Warrior Jesus never even bothers to give them a glance—He’s after bigger game. Up the steps He goes, completely ignoring the shitstorm of bullets and rockets and grenades blasting all around Him, which even if they’re direct hits, just fall harmlessly to the ground. He doesn’t have to open the doors: they swing open automatically and in He steps, which is when we cut away to the deepest hold in the deepest subbasement of the place, where all the drone strikes in the world couldn’t even begin to penetrate, and here’s the big guy, looking scared—he’s heard the rumors—and his minions are strapping suicide vests on two little girls, retarded girls (all right, Asia: mentally challenged), which are his last line of defense. Then back to Warrior Jesus, inside this big glittering palace-like place with maybe a few shell holes in the roof and the far wall, and here come the girls, hurrying up the steps to take Him out, whether they know what they’re doing or not.
But that doesn’t happen. That’s the point: it can’t happen. There’s no kryptonite in this universe, no Mist or Magneto or Dr. Polaris: Warrior Jesus is all-powerful. And, as we see now, merciful too. He doesn’t lift His finger to annihilate the girls, but just winks one eye and the suicide vests are gone—and better, the girls are instantly cured, which you can see in their smiles and the way their eyes radiate intelligence. Then it’s al-Baghdadi’s turn. He’s cowering in the subbasement with its bomb-proof walls and three-foot-thick tungsten-steel doors and all the rest, but it’s not going to do him any good. Warrior Jesus just steps right through the steel door as if it’s made of paper like in manga or the old samurai movies. And then He lifts His finger, and the big guy is dust.
I wind up working all day, just on fire, really, and the funny thing is I keep seeing Bruce in flashes, as if there’s something in this that’s for him, as if I’m doing this for him, when really, as I say, he was nothing to me. To my mother, maybe—he was her sister’s only child, taken from her in this incredibly senseless barbaric way, and how could people be like that, et cetera—but I wouldn’t even know what he looked like if my mother hadn’t taped him every time he did a story from one dusty outpost or another. To me, he was like any other reporter or TV personality, completely disembodied, as unreal as the image itself flickering there in a haze of pixels, and if I felt any emotion at all it was disgust, especially with the bland smugness of his face as he mouthed the words nobody was listening to and nobody cared about, palm trees waving in the background and him going through the whole battery of facial tics they taught him in broadcast journalism school. But still, as the day wears on and the light goes bad and I’m working under my lamps, I keep seeing him, scenes from ancient times shuffling in a loop over and over in my brain. An example, a thing I hadn’t thought of in years, is the time his mother, my aunt Marie, took him and me to the Central Park Zoo when I must have been five or six, I guess, and we both broke away from her and ran up to the leopard’s cage. It was summer. Or no, spring. I remember I had a jacket on, and the colors, I remember the colors, everything concrete-gray and the black bars of the cage cutting the backdrop in neat rectilinear sections and then this cat, this huge muscle-rippling cat, that stood out as if he’d been dipped in Day-Glo. Bruce was older than me, faster and taller, and he got there first so I arrived at the moment the leopard let loose with a sudden soul-stripping roar that scared the living shit out of us because this thing wasn’t a stuffed toy and we both knew it could hurt us beyond repair, that it wanted to hurt us. One of us cried, I remember that too.
Anyway, though I never did get hold of Asia, which really irritates me (did that earlier conversation qualify as a fight, in her mind anyway?), I nonetheless get in the car come nine and go to pick her up at work, which is what I usually do on my day off. She’s got her own car, but over the past couple of months, it’s become a ritual for us to meet at the bar at Cedric’s, which might be a mortuary, but it’s convenient and they pour a killer drink. We have maybe two, on her employee discount, and then go out to get something to eat or hit a late movie or just go back to my place, where
the most essential thing is—the bed—because with her living at home it’s pointless to go to her place. Unless her parents take off on a cruise, which they did last month and we had the whole house to ourselves, with the bed the size of a life raft, the Jacuzzi and the Samsung forty-inch TV and a freezer full of frozen entrées like Stouffer’s lasagna and Bistro sesame-ginger salmon bowl.
The bar is separate from the dining room at Cedric’s, unlike at Brennan’s, where you can sit at the bar while you’re waiting for your table and see people eating, which, in theory, gets you to drink more. At Cedric’s, you come into a vestibule where you can stomp the snow off your boots and hang up your coat. The swinging doors straight ahead lead into the dining room and the ones to your right open directly on the bar. On this night—it’s starting to freeze up outside, the drizzle whitening under the headlights until it’s suspended there like in a Japanese print—I don’t bother with my coat and just push through the doors and step into the bar, which isn’t as dead as usual, three or four older couples getting raucous at the bar and a scatter of people at the tables, and I don’t at first see Asia, which isn’t unusual, because sometimes she’s in the kitchen or still out in the dining room, depending on the dinner crowd. But then—and this is the strangest thing, like something out of the Believe It Or Not! strip—I spot the white turban floating there in the candle gloom like a seagull, and it’s the non-Hindu from last night and his girlfriend right beside him and I’m thinking he’s either a restaurant critic or he must really like steak. I hear Asia before I see her, this distinctive machine-gun laugh she’s got—ack, ack, ack—and now I’m really confused because she’s sitting right next to the guy in the turban and laughing at something he obviously just said.
There’s no room at the bar—some guy I’ve never seen before has his stool pushed right up against hers and he’s laughing too, all of them part of some joke or routine and all of them, I realize, smashed. So what is going on here? I don’t have a clue. But I push my way in and slip my arm around Asia’s waist, which causes the guy next to her (weasel face, long black hair) to practically jump out of his seat, and I say, “What’s up?” and Asia turns around and gives me a look like she doesn’t even recognize me.
“Oh, hi,” she says, after a minute, and the turban guy turns his head too, like this has anything to do with him. She pauses, everybody does, as if in freeze-frame, then says, “I didn’t think you were coming. I mean, after—”
“After what?”
“When I called? And you yelled at me?”
The new guy—he’s so close I can smell the old-fashioned limey aftershave he’s got on—is just looking at her now, studying her, as if she’s some kind of experiment he’s been working on, and then the turban guy, in his fruity tones, says, “Hey, don’t I know you?” And all of a sudden he slaps his head and comes on with a big lemon-sucking grin. “From last night, right—you’re the chef.” The grin goes wider. “So what’s this, a busman’s holiday?”
I am full of Warrior Jesus, the whole dividing line between how intense work was and this moment here as confusing as if I’m just now waking up from a dream, and I don’t know what to say—don’t, in fact, want to say anything. These people are nothing to me. And they’re drunk, way ahead of me, and even if I started throwing down shots I’d never catch up to them. What I say, and I don’t even glance at anybody but Asia, is “Time to go.” And because that might sound maybe too abrupt or harsh, I add lamely, “I’ve got a cold? And I’m really wiped from working all day.”
Asia gives me a steady look. “I’m not ready,” she says. There’s half a drink in front of her and a full one backing it up, which somebody obviously bought her—a mai tai, which she only drinks when she’s in interplanetary space, which is where she is now.
“Yeah,” I say, and both guys are watching me, one from the left, one from the right, and the tattooed girlfriend too, “but maybe you didn’t hear me. I said, it’s time to go.”
Asia doesn’t like to be told what to do, nobody does, really, but I have certain rights here—she’s my girlfriend, not theirs—and when she says, for the second time, “I’m not ready,” something just goes loose in me and I say, “The fuck you’re not,” and the Turban starts in with, “Hey, hey, now, no need for that,” but there is a need, every need in the world, my need, and before I know what I’m doing, I’m stalking out the door and into the cold, cold night.
Which is where I see the Mercedes parked at the curb, two cars down. It’s an older model, a classic, I guess, the sort of thing your parents might hand down to you once you get your license and they go for an upgrade. It’s a mustard yellow, more gold where the streetlight hits it, and everything else bordered in the black of the night so it stands out as if it’s the only car on the street. And didn’t I see this very car in the lot at Brennan’s just last night? One of the last cars there and the Turban and his girlfriend lingering at their table over after-dinner drinks? Maybe. Maybe so. It doesn’t really matter at this point—and it only takes me a minute to extract what I need from the trunk of my car, and yes, I do occasionally tag around town, very distinctive, eyeless faces usually, with my own DD insignia underneath, and I will not apologize for it because it’s public art, at least the way I do it. Nothing so exacting as that tonight, though. Tonight it’s just one word, in black, dripping right down the driver’s side door. Can you guess what it is? I’ll give you a hint: seven letters, starting with R.
The scene changes for Warrior Jesus, no more desert, no more ISIS and Al Qaeda. He’s in the tropics now, palm fronds stirred by a gentle breeze, butterflies hanging like mobiles in the air, and the place He’s approaching is in a block of storefronts, a glitter of windowpanes, white stucco, red-tile roofs gone dark with night. Out front a sign that says Cantina. Who’s in there? The narcos and their minions, some of them out-of-uniform federales even, everybody bought and sold and every business on the street—in the whole city—paying the extortion tax. We see them partying in a tier running down the right side of the page, tequila bottles, cocaine, video games, and their whores hanging all over them, women they’ve forced into prostitution because it’s either that or die, and some of the girls as young as thirteen, though obviously I can’t show all of that without getting into some serious backstory. Just let the drawings give you the picture and you can fill in the rest from general knowledge. The point is, these are bad guys, very bad guys, and at the center of the action, just like in Ramadi, is their kingpin, a kind of El Chapo figure, only bigger, the way El Chapo would be if he was younger and pumped iron. They look menacing, armed to the teeth, and yet for all that they don’t stand a chance—we’ve already seen Warrior Jesus in action and they are half a beat from being reduced to dust. Or at least that’s what you think.
But—and I had to backtrack here, trying to dredge something up from all those years I went to church with my mother as a little kid—a new element enters the picture, and it’s so obvious I have to slap myself for not having thought of it earlier. Of course there’s a nemesis—what was I thinking? It’s Lucifer, the Devil himself, Satan, the original nemesis, the one that ruined Adam and Eve and tempted the old Jesus in the desert. All this evil, what they did to Bruce, the mass killings, all of it—it’s got to be coming from someplace, and here it is, evil incarnate. Anyway, he’s lounging in back, just behind the kingpin, and he doesn’t have horns or a pointed tail or anything like that, but you can see from the way he’s built and from his eyes—slit yellow eyes, like a goat’s—just who he is and what he thinks of himself.
That’s when Warrior Jesus comes through the door and the whole room freezes. We see Him run His eyes over the narcos and corrupt cops and the whores and then the kingpin before coming to rest on Satan, who you see in closeup in the next panel is sporting a mercury tattoo that reads EL ÁNGEL CAÍDO, just in case you’re not getting it. Right. And though this part isn’t really worked out yet, you see Warrior Jesus raise His finger and point it right at Satan and nothing happens. The w
hole room is one big smirk, the joke’s on Him. What comes next is the fight scene, the two antagonists, with all their powers, locked together in a Manichean struggle as if the forces of good and evil neutralize each other all the way down the line. You see fire, radiation, suns exploding, and they wrestle over the oceans and the continents and all the way out into deep space, way beyond the glittering satellites and even the spacecraft of aliens we haven’t even dreamed of to this point, and then the panel goes black, as if we’re in a black hole and all the energy’s been sucked out of the universe.
The next day I’m at work, the lunch crowd heavier than usual, and more demanding too—one clown even wants me to Pitts a steak for him (cover a filet in fat, prop it three inches above the grill on kebab skewers and incinerate the outside while leaving the middle all but raw). The meat goes on the grill. The exhaust fans suck back the smoke. I’m sweating, dehydrated, I still have a cold. And I’m upset about the night before, my second night in a row back at home with nothing to do but draw, and she hasn’t texted or called so I have no idea what the resolution of that little gathering at the bar turned out to be, whether she’s fucking one of them or both of them or if she’s going to start wearing a turban now or what. So I put my head down and lose myself in work, and when I look up it’s two-thirty and time for my break, at which point I make myself a burger and a salad, sit down at one of the tables in back and dial her number.
