Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  With Lee Stamz’s help, The Mick placed an ad in the personals section of the Urbanite. The ad offered to negotiate the purchase of a high-grade Count Geiger outfit from any former or secret Count Geiger imposter who phoned the real Count Geiger’s personal rep at the number given. Discretion assured, the ad cajoled. Three people telephoned. One wanted a million dollars for his costume, sight unseen. The second, an unemployed seamstress, proposed making a facsimile from aluminum foil, Swingline staples, and ordinary kitchen gripper pads. She would do this for $39.95. The third caller identified himself as the man whom Xavier Thaxton, aka Count Geiger, had humiliated in front of his impressionable daughter at Zoo Salonika. “I wouldn’t sell that jerkbrain my suit,” he declared, “if he crawled through a kennel of rabid pit bulls to kiss my foot. Besides, my wife and my daughter like me in it.”

  Bari had no more success than The Mick. She asked Howie Littleton to fashion a suit like the One that had first relieved Xavier’s Syndrome, and that had later enhanced his stalwartly powers. Howie couldn’t believe Bari’s gall. He didn’t like Xavier. Xavier had invited him to take “a lovelorn header out a window.” He concluded, “Hey, even if I wanted to help, there’s not a scrap of the right material anywhere and Du Pont’s stopped making even limited quantities. You want the impossible.”

  Bari telephoned fabric centers, piece-goods emporia, and Du Pont’s Experimental Station. Howie had neither exaggerated the scarcity of the fabric nor lied about Du Pont’s decision to stop producing Chemesh No. 9. It was no longer a cost-effective synthetic fabric, even if sold for exorbitant sums to the U.S. defense industry. Xavier was Suitless and would remain so. In fact, Stickney might now be the only man in the world who had a bona fide working Count Geiger costume. “How many suits did you make from that experimental Chemesh?” Bari asked. Howie replied, “Just one, on a secret commission from SatyrFernalia right before you hired me. Later, they had other suits like mine in inventory, but all made of cheap materials by fly-by-night operators ripping off my tucks and stitching.” Soon after this conversation with Bari, Littleton packed up his belongings and moved to New York City. Xavier had mixed feelings about his leavetaking.

  *

  In the absence of his Suit or a working facsimile, Xavier made a secret midnight trip to the stream on the Hazelton farm. The most recent Urbanite report had noted that the water below the millrace, despite the removal of the contaminating rad-waste cylinders, remained a health hazard. The Army Corps of Engineers was considering diverting the creek and filling in the rock pool into which Stickney had once dropped radioactive depth charges, but Hazelton argued that this would “unbalance the fragile ecosystem” on that portion of his property, and so the NRC asked the engineers to cool their ’dozers pending the results of another environmental-impact study.

  Thus, Xavier thought—hoped—that the radioactive residue in Placer Creek would counteract his Philistine Syndrome symptoms and the chronic weariness that had afflicted him ever since giving his Suit to Stickney. Although the realization surprised him, Xavier wanted to be a stalwart again.

  As he had months ago, he took a rented car up into the Phosphor Fogs. He parked in a stand of fragrant hardwoods and crept through cuff-snagging foliage to the overlook on which he’d once pitched a tent and eaten a picnic dinner, with wine and a backdrop of mysterious splashings. Tonight, he could observe the evidence of the NRC’s and the state’s clean-up efforts: a fence around the area first affected, chain-link glittering on both sides of the stream, and an empty cranelike vehicle silhouetted on the far bank like some kind of mechanical tyrannosaur. They had probably used that to dredge up and dispose of the muck-smeared canisters responsible for the pool’s contamination. Warning signs on the fence, but no security cops anywhere—so it was easy, once he’d shed his clothes, scaling the fence and slipping into the pool.

  It was a hot night. The water effervesced soothingly around Xavier. He kicked lazily through the scarflike currents wrapping and unwrapping his feet. Where were the lavender eels, giant frogs, and three-eyed catfish? All the mutant wildlife had vanished. Xavier felt like an intruder. It seemed unlikely that this would-be cure-all would restore to him the Nietzschean great healthiness that he’d known as a newcomer to Salonika. He crawled out of the water and sat on the bank reflecting that his midnight swim, with all the risks of getting here, of flouting the many NO TRESPASSING and HAZARDOUS AREA signs, had constituted a fool’s errand.

  Nothing more, nothing less.

  64

  “A Revenge-Crazed and Fleeting Avatar”

  Tim Bowman came to trial between the deaths of the Wilkinses and their controversial funerals in the Full Gospel Holiness Church on Lickskillet Road east of Philippi. The DA, Hamilcar Clede, a forty-year-old man with the hatchet jaw of a farmer and the luxuriant prematurely grey hair of a soap-opera actor, called Xavier to the stand on the first day of the trial, at ten o’clock in the morning. Xavier took the oath in an oversized summer suit a pale tan slightly darker than his own complexion. He felt lightheaded and detached, like a Mylar balloon hovering around a door lintel as it leaks toward complete deflation.

  Even though F. Deane Finesse had fired Bowman from his position as supervising editor at Uncommon Comics—before Bowman’s armed assault on Xavier—the defendant was being represented by a small brain trust of Finesse’s attorneys. Xavier reckoned that Finesse had assigned them to Bowman as a kind of humanitarian homage to his most talented protégé. After all, Bowman had conceived just about every character in the UC stable and elevated the upstart Finesse-backed company into full competition with the big-time players in New York City. He deserved the best legal counsel that Finesse could give him. Bowman’s creative and managerial efforts at UC had enlarged Finesse’s empire by stalwartly bounds.

  Now, however, it appeared to some—Xavier included—that Finesse might try to make amends with Bowman by supplying him with counsel, to enlist him as a friendly witness in his own forthcoming trials. For if Bowman beat his attempted-murder charge, Finesse’s lawyers would have a leg up defending him on that indictment, particularly since the alleged victim in both cases was the same man. If the judge let Finesse’s attorneys raise the issue of Xavier’s alleged history as a failed murder victim (as if he habitually incited near-lethal attacks on himself), the jury might see him as a goad and a provocateur, like a good woman sullied as a tart by the cynical barristers of a rapist.

  You can’t impute that much ulteriority to Finesse’s motives, Xavier thought. He wasn’t even arrested until weeks after making arrangements to help Bowman.

  Yesbutt, still . . .

  *

  “Can you identify the person who shot you in the Ralph McGill Building?” asked Hamilcar Clede. He was trying the case himself as a visible warm-up for the Finesse trial. If he won the latter, it could catapult him to the governorship or a U.S. Senate seat.

  “Yessir, I can,” Xavier said.

  “Do so, please.”

  “That man there,” Xavier pointing at Tim Bowman, a redheaded clotheshorse in a suit more expensive than his, who, this morning, was sitting calmly at the defense table, a seemingly traditional specimen of Suthren manliness and rectitude.

  “Hey, Xave the Knave.” Bowman lifted a hand in wary acknowledgment. “How ’bout it, buddy?”

  Clede put Xavier through his paces describing the shooting and its aftermath. At one point, Xavier confirmed that although he had panned the debuts of three new UC stalwarts—the DeeJay, Gator Maid, and Count Geiger—he had never given Bowman cause to hate him. He had certainly never done anything to provoke violent retribution.

  “Wasn’t panning those comics enough?” Bowman interjected from the defense table. “I bet you didn’t even read them.”

  Judge Devereaux gaveled the defendant silent for speaking out of turn, and the proceedings continued.

  “What was the last thing Mr. Bowman said to you as you both lay on the floor of the dayroom?” Clede asked Xavier.

  “He said, ‘
Shit, you didn’t die.’ ” A minor stir in the courtroom, including a faint but heartfelt groan from Bowman himself, not so much to express the conviction that this disclosure would hurt him, Xavier felt, as to signal remorse for ever having uttered such a callous sentiment.

  “No further questions, Your Honor,” Clede said.

  Bowman had pleaded innocent by reason of temporary insanity. Even given the mitigating circumstances of that mental state, he claimed that he had never intended to inflict debilitating injury. This was an odd plea, even in Salonika, and Finesse’s legal team, alternating testimony elicitors with a frequency akin to Papa Bach’s visits to the conjugal bed, pursued it with a purse-lipped zeal.

  The first attorney to rise, a curly-haired youngster with a ponytail overlapping his coat collar, ambled up to Xavier for the cross-examination. “Did Mr. Bowman succeed in killing you, Mr. Thaxton?”

  “Not so I’ve noticed.”

  “But you believe he tried to?”

  “That ‘Shit, you didn’t die’ indicates as much, yes.”

  The ponytailed lawyer widened his eyes at Xavier in an effort to repeat his question without saying it aloud.

  “Yes,” Xavier reiterated. “Yes!”

  “Then why did he shoot you between the lower abdomen and the rib cage, where a bullet, even three bullets, might not bring about the allegedly desired effect?”

  “Objection!” cried Hamilcar Clede. “Counsel is soliciting aimless speculation. Let him defend his client without trying to have the victim do it for him.”

  “Sustained,” said Judge Devereaux.

  The ponytailed counselor nodded at a colleague at the defense table, whereupon an intent young Eurasian woman in a sarilike dress of orange and yellow arose to assume the cross-examination. This attorney’s name was Sheila Ling, and Xavier admired her dress mightily.

  “Along with your nephew, a fan of Mr. Bowman’s, you visited Mr. Bowman in Salonika’s main police station shortly after his alleged attempt on your life. Is that true?”

  “It is.”

  “Why did you visit him?”

  “Mikhail wanted to, and I was also curious about Bowman’s mental state.”

  “How would you characterize this meeting?” Ms. Ling seemed to home in, raptorlike, on Xavier’s curiosity. “What adjective would you use to describe the common mood in that visiting room?”

  “Strange,” Xavier said. “Am I supposed to factor in the mood of the police officer providing security?”

  “Of course not. What I’m asking is, How did you and Mr. Bowman react to each other after the joint trauma of your last encounter? With suspicion? With hostility? With mutual tolerance? With reconciliation? With—”

  “Objection!” Clede got to his feet again. “Counsel is leading the witness. Let her defend her client without encouraging the victim to do it for her.”

  “Sustained.”

  “Don’t let me put words in your mouth, Mr. Thaxton,” Ms. Ling said, “but try to answer the question. What was the prevailing sentiment, or mood, between you and the defendant toward the end of your session?”

  Xavier expected Clede to object again, but he did not. “I don’t know. Something akin to . . . understanding? Whatever evil had gripped him the morning of my shooting seemed to be gone. I saw him much as my nephew did, as a confused but idealistic young man with a unique creative drive and a misdirected sense of betrayal.”

  “Jesus,” muttered Hamilcar Clede from the prosecutor’s table.

  “Mr. Thaxton,” Ms. Ling said, “do you think Mr. Bowman should be convicted and sent to prison for attempting to murder you?”

  “Objection!” Clede roared. “The victim’s opinion as to the final disposition of the defendant is irrelevant to the issue of Mr. Bowman’s guilt or innocence!”

  “Sustained.”

  Ms. Ling turned toward Judge Devereaux. “Your Honor, I concede the point. But Mr. Thaxton’s opinion about the final disposition of the defendant may shed light on the degree to which he assumes Mr. Bowman was trying to kill him. And the nuances of that opinion I think altogether relevant.”

  Judge Devereaux inclined her head. “Counselor, please repeat that. Slowly.”

  Ms. Ling obliged the judge.

  “Objection!” Clede roared again.

  “Overruled.” To Xavier, Judge Devereaux said, “Answer the question.”

  The clerk read it back: Did Xavier believe that Mr. Bowman should be convicted and sent to prison for attempting to murder him?

  The Mick was sitting next to Bari in the front row of the courtroom, about three feet behind his idol, the genius-afflicted creator of the Decimator, Yellowhammer, Saint Torque, the DeeJay, Snow Leopard, and countless others. Xavier saw The Mick studying him with expectation and hope. “I can’t see what purpose that would serve,” he said. “So, no, I guess I don’t.”

  “Objection!” cried Hamilcar Clede.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Clede, but you may not object to the honestly expressed opinion of a witness replying to a question legitimately approved by the court.”

  “Xave the Brave,” Bowman said. “How ’bout it, Crusader Kid? Your unc’s ol’ Xave the Brave.”

  Judge Devereaux gaveled him quiet again. Other witnesses took the stand, including Lee Stamz, Walter Grantham, Ivie Nakai, and Donel Lassiter, each of whom testified to the uproar and confusion in the Urbanite’s dayroom after the shooting, but also to their certainty that it was Tim Bowman in the baggy Big Mister Sinister costume. Ms. Ling and her associates preferred not to cross-examine any of these people, waiting until the afternoon session to call their own witnesses—when they had co-workers at Uncommon Comics and a pair of psychiatrists testify to the severity of Tim Bowman’s depression after his removal from the comic-book company that he had founded. Bowman had “snapped.” Under treatment during his incarceration, he had improved to the point that neither witness—a Freudian depth-psychologist and a nonaligned behavioralist—believed that he now posed a danger to society. His shooting of the critic Xavier Thaxton had been an aberrant response to a hugely traumatic event, one not likely to be repeated.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, the defense team called the defendant Tim Bowman. This time, the lawyer directing the testimony was a dapper black man, Michael Rutledge. Rutledge wore silver-rimmed granny glasses and a ruby pinky ring. Standing near the witness stand, he faced Hamilcar Clede and the courtroom’s spectators rather than Bowman or the jury box. Rutledge’s spaniel-brown eyes bulged in their sockets every time he got to the end of a question.

  “Mr. Bowman, did you wish Xavier Thaxton dead on the day you allegedly shot him?” Rutledge asked.

  “It wasn’t ‘allegedly.’ I did in fact shoot him. Or, I should say, a revenge-crazed and fleeting avatar of myself shot Mr.Thaxton.”

  “‘A revenge-crazed and fleeting avatar’ of Mr. Bowman shot Mr. Thaxton,” Rutledge told the court. “‘A revenge-crazed and fleeting avatar.’ ” Without turning to face Bowman, he said, “Explain yourself less cryptically, please?”

  “It was me who shot Mr. Thaxton, but it wasn’t me. I’m no longer the person who sought to kill Mr. Thaxton disguised as my own arch-villain Big Mister Sinister.”

  “Is it significant that you disguised yourself as a comic-book bad guy to perpetrate the would-be murder?”

  “Of course. Absodamnlutely. I knew what I was going to do was wrong—the real me knew that—or I would never have dressed as a villain to do it.”

  “Tell the court why you think that’s important.”

  “It shows that at some fundamental level, even in my pain and despair, I was still discriminating between right and wrong. A horrible array of circumstances submerged that knowledge at the conscious level, but it was still subconsciously at work.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I—Tim Bowman—am not a bad person. I did wrong. A part of me did wrong. But the essential Tim Bowman, the real me, is an advocate of . . . of the Good, the True, the Beautiful. When Mr. Thaxton and his
nephew came to visit me, I told him—no, both of them—I was sorry, and I meant it.”

  “If the court convicts you of attempted murder, what would you say, here and now, to secure a just sentence?”

  Bowman turned toward Judge Devereaux. “In my time at Uncommon Comics, I came up with far more stalwarts, or good guys, than I did villains. Big Mister Sinister, along with two or three lesser bad guys, recurs from comic to comic, but, in the gallery of my belief, stalwarts abound. It’s not that I deny the multiplicity of evil, Your Honor, it’s just that I’d rather stress the strength and marvelousness of the Good—as you can see for yourself every month in UC’s Stalwarts for Truth comic.”

  “Objection.” Hamilcar Clede perfunctorily half-rose. “The witness is turning his testimony into an ad for the pulp adventures of a comic-book company. It benefits no one but his ex-boss and the stockholders in Mr. Finesse’s financial empire.”

  Judge Devereaux folded her hands before her. “Mr. Rutledge, it does seem that this line of testimony borders on special pleading.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” For the first time, Rutledge looked at Bowman. “Do you have anything to add?”

  “I’d like to remind everyone that I created the comic-book stalwart Count Geiger. In trying to kill Mr. Thaxton, I created—inadvertently—the real-life stalwart called by my copyrighted character’s name. And everyone knows what Mr. Thaxton, as Count Geiger, has done to fight crime in Salonika and to restore our faith in the transforming power of decency. Out of evil, in other words, there has issued good. I claim no credit for purposely releasing the potential of the living Count Geiger, but, as I suggested in an interview with the Urbanite after Mr. Thaxton was fired as Fine Arts editor, it’s unlikely he would have recognized his capabilities so quickly without my intervention.” A wedge of sunlight dropped onto Bowman’s hands through the glass dome of the courthouse, tipping with bronze fire the reddish hairs on his knuckles and wrists.