“Neat,” breathed The Mick.
20
Introducing Count Geiger
At last, the Decimator introduced the final brand-new stalwart, a character called Count Geiger. Xavier looked up at the first mention of this vaguely askew monicker, pricked by something both familiar and disturbing in it.
The actor-model doing Count Geiger strode in on panther’s feet, and a profound hush fell not only on all UC personnel, but also on the media people. Count Geiger wore what looked to be a micron-thin aluminum-mesh suit with an “energy counter” set just beneath his rib cage. His shoes were silver-lamé slippers, and his helmet, hood, or cowl actually qualified as a burn mask. This mask gave him a more forbidding appearance than that possessed by either the DeeJay or Gator Maid, and for a moment Xavier feared that the person essaying the part was a crook who had chosen this disguise as a way to get inside and steal Goldfinger’s ready cash. The Mick was even more enthralled, if that were possible, than he’d been by the previous two stalwarts. He shifted his comics and waited for either the phony Decimator or editor in chief Bowman to provide details.
What were the origins of this new superhero? What powers did he have? How did he fit into the Stalwarts for Truth team now comprising the Decimator, Mantisman, Saint Torque, Ladysilk, and so on? Would he have his own TV show? newspaper strip? feature-length film? Who would write and illustrate his stories? But, breaking the pattern already established, “Count Geiger” handled his own presentation:
“I am the stalwart known as Count Geiger,” he said in an accent convincingly East European. “My real name is Wladyslaw Leshowitz. I am a Polish nuclear scientist once affiliated with the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow. My great-grandfather was a titled Polish nobleman who fought to secure freedom for all ranks and classes of his countrymen. As for me, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, I worked for weeks near the stricken reactor. I was heedless of the risk that my proximity to so much radiation posed, and eventually, falling ill, I was returned to a hospital in my native land—specifically, the city of Gdansk. My Soviet colleagues wished to keep me at a facility in Moscow, but I exercised my rights as a scientist and an acknowledged hero of the battle to entomb reactor four to fly home for treatment. For a while, though, I was near death.
“In about sixty days, a turning point in my radiation poisoning occurred. Instead of deteriorating further, I experienced strange augmentations of my body’s capabilities. Cuts that would ordinarily require a week or more to heal now healed in only a day or two. I saw better in the dark, almost as if equipped with a natural variety of ultraviolet or infrared imaging. I could live with no distress or loss of strength on, yes, merely an apple or a slice of melon every few days. And, from the people around me, I could now pick up spiritual emanations identifying them as friendly or hostile. Indeed, I soon became aware that this capability allowed me to distinguish degrees of spiritual and moral integrity among those with whom I came in contact.
“In my hospital lurked a Soviet KGB agent posing as an orderly, and this person deduced what was happening to me just as I intuited his real identity. He, I saw, wanted to take me back to Moscow to be schooled in espionage. The KGB would then engineer a situation making me look like a defector to the West, when, in fact, I would be a Soviet pawn using my radiation-augmented powers to spy for the Kremlin. Therefore, I sneaked out of the hospital, stowed away on a merchant ship at the Gdansk docks, and voyaged all the way from Poland to the Gulf of Mexico, Choctawhatchee Bay, and up Sidney Lanier’s river to the inland port of Salonika. In your great city, I acquired forged papers presenting me to the world as the stevedore Wallace Lester. After meeting Grant Mayhew in my work as a dock employee and after plumbing his secret identity as the Decimator, I confessed my wish to become another Stalwart for Truth and gained my place in this exclusive fellowship by demonstrating for him the full range of my powers as . . . Count Geiger!” Almost imperceptibly, the Count bowed.
Prompted by Bowman and the two other superhero impersonators, everyone in the office began to applaud—even the reporters from the local TV stations who prided themselves on a sardonic insusceptibility to hype.
Xavier refused to join in. “Come on, Mick, let’s get out of here,” he said loudly.
“Why? It’s not over yet.”
“Because it’s bullshit. Because these people don’t even quail at exploiting a historic disaster like Chernobyl. They know nothing, but pretend to know everything. They impute the acquisition of superpowers to an accident that killed people and to a phenomenon, radiation, that threatens to destroy even more. They lie to seduce the immature imaginations of kids like you, Mick, and to separate you from as much money as you’ll let them!”
“You mean to write that, Mr. Thaxton?” Bowman asked. “That we’re exploiters? That our additions to the Stalwarts for Truth team are cynical lies?”
“I’ll write what’s required,” Xavier said. “And I won’t lie.” He looked at his nephew. “Come on, Mikhail.”
“You’ve got a poker up your ass, Uncle Xave. You think life’s all one thing. That you’ve got a lock on it because you’re so fucking high-minded.”
“Life is earnest. So is art. What we choose to extol in the way of art ramifies into our lives.” Xavier could not believe he was carrying on like this in Goldfinger’s, the top retail outlet of UC Comics, Inc. That he was fighting to uphold the sanctity of high art in this bastion of commercial kitsch. “Come on,” he said again. “Let’s get out of here.”
“You’re going to dump on UC, aren’t you? Like you’ve done to every other thing you’ve reviewed lately.”
“Mick—”
“What you dump on ramifies into people’s lives, too, doesn’t it? You look like a genius prince and everybody else like unseeing peasants!”
The Uncommon Comics staff, including the impersonators in their costumes, applauded The Mick. When a photog from one of the comics trade publications snapped Xavier’s picture, he thought, I’m outnumbered here, an owl among sparrows. Outraged and embarrassed, he turned on his heel and strode from Goldfinger’s with no backward glance or any thought as to what The Mick’s next move might be.
As he exited, Tim Bowman stood and twirled his stupid UC cape around his shoulders like a bullfighter performing a contemptuous veronica. Once again, the crowd in the room applauded.
21
Volleys
A week later, Xavier was playing racquetball with Lee Stamz in one of the sweltering courts at the Oconee Tech field house. He was wearing the ex-linebacker down, stroking shots that zoomed past Stamz or dropped so tantalizingly from the wall that Stamz, walking on his knees to reach them, ended up with his torso applying a sweaty lacquer to the hardwood. “You’re one mean sonuvabitch today, Xave,” Stamz said, rising. “Let’s quit—you done whipped my ass.”
A moment later, racquets at their feet, they sat next to each other, backs against the rear wall. The echoes of smashes and ricochets carried to them from adjacent courts, and, for the first time in days, Xavier was semirelaxed.
“What’s happening?” Stamz asked. “You only play like that when you’ve got a hard-on for somebody.”
“What? When I’m erotically aroused?”
“Shit, no,” Stamz said, giving him a funny look. “When you’re angry-mad.” He narrowed his eyes. “Who’re you angry at?”
“I’m not angry at, or with, anybody. It’s The Mick who’s angry at—with—me.”
“Yeah. I thought that might be it.”
Xavier explained that his column on UC, Inc., and its three new campy stalwarts had upset—alienated—his nephew. In fact, Mikhail hadn’t been home since the press conference, at which his nephew and he had engaged in a silly public argument about art and popular culture.
“Hasn’t been home? You called the police?”
“I would have, Lee, but he phones and leaves messages on my machine.”
“Messages?”
&nb
sp; “He says, ‘Uncle Xave, I’m not lost or missing. I’m hiding out. I’ll come back when I’m finished being pissed.’ Every day I get something like that. Which means I can’t tell the police he’s run off or been kidnapped. All I can do is wait for him.”
“You can’t trash a kid’s heroes and expect him to love you.”
Nobody loved Xavier for his jeremiad against the shoddiness, the dishonesty, and the discouraging derivativeness of Salonika’s home-grown comics industry. Letters to the editor had arrived in olive-drab mail bags. Only a few agreed with Xavier’s arguments. Most laid into him for (1) snobbery, (2) the sin of reverse provincialism (in which one always ranks the foreign over the domestic, no matter how superior the local product to the exotic import), (3) a passion for arbitrary deconstructive pronouncements, (4) treason against the best economic interests of the city, (5) an unduly harsh assessment of a minor but legitimate, often magical, art form, and/or (6) sheer wrongheadedness.
Dear Jerks [wrote one disgruntled Urbanite reader],
Get somebody else to write about UC and the three bitching new additions to Tim Bowman’s trailblazing list of stalwarts. Thaxton doesn’t know comics, he doesn’t like them, and he doesn’t bring any objectivity to their criticism. Let him go back to reviewing books whose first sentence is a wraparound of the last one and to wetting his pants every time Screen Dreams shows Citizen Kane again.
I’ve read the first numbers of all three new comics, which are quantum leaps over the stuff churned out by the dolts in New York. The Deejay reveals the impact of our high-tech entertainment and news media on contemporary urban life, while Gator Maid spotlights environmental concerns with a nonsexist portrayal of a female heroine [sic] with brains, heart, and sex appeal.
And then there’s Count Geiger, the most revolutionary title in the entire Unique Continuum. It uses the hardhitting vocabularies of detective fiction, street talk, MTV images, and computer jargon to give us the Word that xenophobia is a sickness, that agitprop is agitprop no matter who’s laying it down, and that a single dude, one stalwart person, can make a difference.
But Thaxton dismisses these ideas out of hand. Why? Because the artists at UC have had the unmitigated gall to present them in accessible, but socially disreputable, comic-book format. (*Gasp*, *cough*, *choke*.)
Well, my advice to Thaxton is to buy himself a oneway ticket to James Joyce’s grave and to sit on it until the agenbite of inwit drives him sufficiently bonkers that none of the rest of us have to wear hip boots to wade through his holier-than-thou drivel again.
[Signed] Noah Ward
That was one typical, if stylistically startling, response to Xavier’s review, and one whose (relative) literacy had disconcerted him. He carried a clipping of it in his wallet to show his friends, a clipping that, there in the Oconee Tech field house, Lee Stamz was now intently reading.
“Saw this when it came out,” Stamz said, returning it. “Sounds to me like The Mick, like he’s coming back at you.”
Xavier had suspected as much. Noah Ward was clearly a nom de plume—for Xavier deserved, please note the sardonicism, no award for his bigoted opinions.
“Do you think he’s right?”
“He scores a point or two. More’n I scored out here today.”
“What point, Lee? Three bogus concepts—a vigilante deejay, a half-croc’d marine biologist, and a Polish nuclear scientist who survives Chernobyl to become a stalwart in Salonika. Three bogus additions to the threadbare superhero format. So what point does this smartalecky kid score, Lee?”
“This one: you’re looking so far down your nose at the format you can’t see if anything good’s being done with the medium. That disqualifies you as a critic whose ravings have any merit, at least to folks who use the medium and who like that format.”
“Medium? Format?”
“Poetry’s a medium, the sonnet’s a format. Comic-book art’s a medium, the superhero convention’s just a format.”
“A bankrupt one.”
“Maybe. But you think poetry and sonnets are legitimate kinds of art, and you’d be glad to praise a poet who goosed a little juice into the sonnet form.”
“What’re you saying, Lee?”
“If you hate eggplant, and if you hate it fried, stewed, or au gratin, how the hell can you pass a useful judgment on an eggplant souffle that eggplant connoisseurs are doing cartwheels over?”
“You’re saying there are levels of aesthetic quality among snuff flicks, Lee.”
“Bullshit. Snuff flicks are immoral. Unless the cook puts in some strychnine, I doubt there’s an immoral eggplant recipe—just good and bad ones.”
“But comics—”
“Same goes for comic-book art. It can be good or bad, if you care about it. And the times when it’s immoral—okay, maybe there are some—you’d have to fault the character of the artist, not his draftsmanship.”
“Isn’t that what I’ve done? I’ve faulted the character of the people who try to pass off these five-bit superhero fantasies as worthy responses to the complexities of reality.”
“Yeah, but you don’t like the comics—so you’re training a bazooka on a swarm of gnats.”
Xavier was reminded again of the Vonnegut quote about a reviewer who evinces deep-seated hatred for a novel being like someone who puts on battle gear to demolish a banana split. He believed there was a good deal more to it. Even a second-rate work of the imagination can have a powerful impact on its audience, and if it glorifies a glittering lie, that lie may prompt some to regard the world in dehumanizing, selfish, or unrealistic ways. Only if would-be works of art acted solely as pain- or time-killers did they forfeit the privilege of occasioning a reviewer’s lavish praise or heated disgust, and those were the works that had no real significance at all. Thus, by attacking the artists and writers of UC, Xavier was granting them what many of their tribe had long ago claimed for themselves: significance. He tried to explain all this to Lee Stamz, who shook his head and said, “Heavy stuff, Xave baby. Heavy.”
“So was having a President whose entire concept of international relations was grounded in World War Two combat films and the narcissistic heroics of Sylvester Stallone. What if some ten-year-old collector of Decimator grows up with an interest in politics? What if he runs for President? What if he’s elected?”
Lee Stamz stared at Xavier, hard—then broke into laughter, which rolled through the racquetball courts like thunder. “You’re a pip,” he said, finally. “And you know what I think, Xave baby?”
“No, what?”
“It’s time we traded back.”
“Our beats, you mean?”
“Yeah. I’m tired of woodwind recitals and you’re dragged out on tractor pulls and potty-mouthed stand-up comics. So let’s tell Grantham, okay?”
“Fine by me.”
But if he returned to the Fine Arts beat, would he again fall victim to bunions, hangnails, halitosis, a whole smorgasbord of gonzo mix-and-match ailments? He had tested positive for the Philistine Syndrome, and only daily exposure to kitsch kept him symptom-free.
He also had Mikhail to worry about. Where was the kid staying, and who was feeding him, and was he well?
22
Pokeweed and Water Uzis
This long-distance hookup was the worst Xavier had ever had. Lydia seemed to burble at him from the floor of the Marianas Trench, through a six-mile-long breathing tube: “. . . ward to . . . ZZZZZZZZZWHR . . . break from the agon . . . SQQQQQWRRRRRHHH . . . nesday . . . KRRRRXXXXXXX.”
“You’re taking R and R?” Xavier shouted. “Is that it? I should expect you soon?”
“SQQQQQQXXXXX . . . The MickKKKKK?”
“Speak to Mikhail? He’s just stepped out, Lydia.”
“. . . kay . . . KRRRZZK . . . uv ya . . . SQQRRZZZZXXXXX.”
Off the phone, Xavier understood that Lydia, but not Phil, would return to the States for two weeks to see The Mick and visit friends in California. She was flying into Sidney Lanier International Airpo
rt on Thursday. That gave him two days to find the boy and reinstall him in his ebony sanctum. To complicate the issue, Bari would return from Europe on the same afternoon, and Xavier had to meet both flights.
“Now I get why Zarathustra lived apart from the world,” he told a sympathetic-looking plaster flamingo.
The next morning, Donel Lassiter approached Xavier’s desk and leaned toward him with a friendly confidentiality missing from his behavior ever since Xavier and Lee Stamz had swapped assignments. “I saw Mikhail last night, Xavier.” (It had taken Donel years to call him Xavier, but he still said it as if syllabling aloud the Tetragrammaton.)
Xavier sat bolt upright. “Where?”
“At a pokehouse in Satan’s Cellar. Mikhail was toking some steam in a side room with a passel of hard-trade types.”
A pokehouse was a bistro offering alcoholic drinks and tawdry entertainment, but it was also a front for peddling “salad gas”—the street term for the high imparted by eating chemically treated pokeweed (an ingestible substance now illegal) or by inhaling the fumes rising from a bowl of hot poke (a practice possible only in the weed’s presence and so illegal too). Getting poked, or salad-gassed, was now the substance-abuse pastime of choice among Salonika’s urban poor, specifically those northwest of the river. It hurt Xavier to think that by writing honestly about Count Geiger and company, he had driven The Mick into the arms of poke pushers and salad-gas impresarios. It was too late to help that, but maybe not too late to rescue his nephew.
“A pokehouse? My God. Did you talk to him? Try to get him out of there?”
“No,” Donel said. “The company he was with was too rough for us, and The Mick was so poked he wasn’t aware of much but the vapor fuming off his bowl.”
“Take me there tonight.”
“Maybe Bryan can find it again. I’m not sure I remember how to get there.”
Count Geiger's Blues Page 11
