Mending the Moon (21 page)

After everyone left, she forced herself to visit him again. She brought him some stollen, which he's always liked, and a fleece jacket because he gets cold so easily. The nursing home was decorated for the holidays, of course, and there were many more visitors than usual, including volunteers singing carols. Some of the residents sat smiling, spruced up in red and green outfits, in their wheelchairs. Others seemed agitated, bewildered by too many strangers.

Walter was asleep, turned toward his window. Rosemary sat with him for a while, remembering all the Christmases they'd spent together, remembering—because she knew he couldn't—his many years as Santa Claus at his firm's holiday party, and his delight in touring the neighborhood Christmas decorations, and how much he always exclaimed at the gifts she gave him.

If he'd woken up, she'd have told him those memories as a story, the way she'd told him about Melinda as a story. That tale had sparked a moment of recognition. Would this have done the same?

But he didn't wake up, and after an hour of listening to his deep, even breathing, her need to be out of the building suddenly rose to an intolerable level. She left the jacket on his bedside table and fled, and she hasn't been back since.

All the ornaments and lights are off now. She folds up the little tree and puts it back in its box. Christmas has been relegated to the garage for another year. The house is empty, too large. Echoing.

Before next Christmas, Rosemary thinks, shivering despite her thick sweater, I have to do something just for myself. Travel, or take a class, or schedule a retreat. Do something I've never done before, something I can't associate with Walter or Melinda. I have to learn how to be by myself, before everyone else is gone and I have no choice.

 

11

Some readers have always seen in Cosmos's penchant for order and cooperation a dictatorial streak, the clear and present danger of fascism, and even if this is difficult to reconcile with Cosmos's somewhat nebbishy personality and even more nebbishy appearance, with his blue jeans and rumpled button-down shirts and constant worry about, and work on behalf of, Vanessa and Charlie, the theme runs throughout CCcrit. How much order is too much? When does communal effort become coercive, oppressive? What allowances does the CCverse make for rebellion, for individual tangents, for simple dissent?

The CC Four argue convincingly that Cosmos is no dictator. He appears only to newly devastated communities, and goes back home once rebuilding efforts are under way. While some real-world dictators have indeed exploited vulnerable populations, they used times of turmoil to entrench themselves, and were removed—if at all—against their wills. Real-world dictators don't say, as Cosmos is wont to do, “Well, guys, looks like you're getting this under control, so I'll be going home now, okay?” Real-world dictators, if they leave the places they rule, leave them under the thumb of trusted henchmen. Cosmos employs no stormtroopers.

Furthermore, Cosmos simply ignores those who ignore him, who turn their backs on whatever group efforts he's organizing in each issue. He doesn't have lists of enemies, or stables of informers, or secret police. He doesn't throw people who disagree with him into gulags. Indeed, he never meets them. They aren't even on his radar.

And that, according to the naysayers, is another problem. CC doesn't debate his critics. He doesn't engage in constructive dialogue.

The CC Four, and the rest of the CCverse, are sensitive to these issues. And so in issue 72, a small town decimated by a fire found itself, after Cosmos's departure, chafing against the rule of the Misguided Mayor, who had instituted a system of tasks and schedules, fines and curfews, that left his community almost paralyzed. The townspeople of Wishful, Wyoming, despaired. It didn't even make sense to ask CC to come back, since order is his province, and too
much
order was the problem.

The town succumbed to Entropy-worship. Local churches held prayer vigils imploring God for just a little bit of chaos; law-abiding citizens contemplated armed rebellion; a Wiccan group convened a Dissidents' Circle, scattering salt and sage to try to invoke the Emperor.

For once, the Emperor couldn't get in. The town was locked too tightly against him. Disturbed and indignant, EE himself turned to Cosmos for help, appearing in CC's kitchen during an especially frustrating attempt to feed Vanessa, who had lost her appetite over the last three issues and become alarmingly thin. Her doctors were making dire noises about hospitalization, g-tubes, force-feeding. EE showed up just as she had spit the pureed carrots CC was spooning into her mouth all over the kitchen table.

“You!” Cosmos said, not even needing to turn around to recognize his opponent. He feels EE now, a prickle in the skin; they are linked as closely as lovers. “I know you're responsible for this. I know there's no coalition I can mobilize to make her want to eat. I know that—”

“That's not why I'm here,” EE said, and gave CC a terse rundown of the MM situation. “He has left no crack for me to enter. His people are paralyzed into productivity. You have to help free them.”

“Not my job,” CC said, doggedly trying again with the spoon, this time full of bananas. His sister loves bananas. Not these, though. Out they went, a gloopy spray right into CC's face. A tear streaked down his cheek, wending its way past banana chunks. “They have to figure it out for themselves. I've done what I can do there.”

“You did too much.”

“Nope, old enemy. Sounds like MM did too much. The townspeople need to figure out how to depose him. I can't do everything. I've never said I can do everything. I can't even get my sister to eat her favorite fruit.”

He was weeping in earnest now. In the panel, the reader sees him leaning on the kitchen table, spoon abandoned on the wooden surface. His back is to the Emperor, whose expression has softened, and who has reached out a tentative tentacle of darkness, as if in comfort.

In this moment, Comrade Cosmos and the Emperor of Entropy are equally powerless.

Enter Archipelago Osprey.

This is her real name. She insists that it be used in full and spelled properly. She will not tolerate nicknames, abbreviations, or initials. She routinely gets into furious hissing matches with hapless customer-service personnel who mangle Archipelago into Archie or Archibelle or Archangel. She holds popular opinion in contempt and considers decluttering a project for simple-minded automatons. She sneers at rules, laws, and curfews.

She lives in Wishful.

Archipelago has no patience for most of her fellow mortals. She would boast, had she any fellow humans to boast to, that she cares for no one but herself and Erasmus, her pet emperor scorpion, a creature she respects because it has large claws and dislikes being handled, as she herself does. She moved to Wishful because she found a cheap apartment there, and while she paints houses for income when she has to, she has a little bit of money saved, enough to tide her over for a year if she's careful, and she relishes the freedom from other people's expectations. No, that trim's too sloppy. Aren't you going to clean up the drippings on the porch? Why aren't you using dropcloths?

Even Archipelago grudgingly acknowledges some wonder that anyone ever pays her at all.

But they do, and so she's living in Wishful, painting singularly angry and ugly acrylic canvases and feeding Erasmus his crickets and mealworms, carefully dusted with a vitamin/mineral supplement—for all her sneering nihilism, she's a responsible pet owner—when the fire breaks out. Her apartment isn't in any danger, but she can see the action a few blocks away, can hear the high-pitched wailing of screaming and sirens.

Archipelago's exquisitely sensitive to noise, one reason she's such a recluse and why she owns a quiet scorpion instead of a barking pit bull. She doesn't like this din at all, so she puts in her earplugs. She does sit in her window and watch, though. She moves Erasmus's cage onto the windowsill so he can watch, too. This is better than TV.

Naturally, she has nothing to do with the rebuilding efforts when CC shows up. “Fucking do-gooder,” she tells Erasmus, dropping another vitamin-enriched cricket into his cage. “Why doesn't he mind his own business and let the town clean up its own mess? Who needs him, anyway? Not us.”

Erasmus, waving his pedipalps as he closes in on the cricket, ignores her. Erasmus always ignores her. Erasmus cares only for his crickets, and disdains their source. Archipelago respects this.

Wishful's one grocery store burned down in the fire, but Archipelago maintains a supply of canned food, bottled water, and freeze-dried crickets, insurance against natural disaster, terrorist attack, or the many days when she simply has no desire to go outside. She hunkers down in her apartment while Cosmos organizes the town, and exhales in relief when he finally leaves. She was getting tired of Spam and canned peas, and she was starting to run low on instant crickets, which Erasmus considers vastly inferior to the living variety, no matter how much yummy vitamin dust she dumps on them.

She soon discovers, however, that MM makes CC look like an anarchist.

After a seventy-five-mile round trip to the nearest pet store that stocks live crickets—she tried to trap her own for a while, but found it a tedious and unreliable pursuit—Archipelago roars back into Wishful on her Harley, only to find a police blockade across the main road.

“Ma'am, we can't let you in. It's past curfew.”

“Curfew? What curfew?” She would have said “what fucking curfew,” but Archipelago isn't stupid, and knows better than to deliberately antagonize police.

“The curfew that's been in the local paper? The one posted on all those signs in town? The one we've been announcing through bullhorns?”

Archipelago eschews newspapers and despises municipal signage. “I don't read much. Sorry.”

One of the cops rolls his eyes. “Are you deaf, too? We've been driving around with loudspeaker trucks for the last ten days.”

Archipelago has been aware of some din, but put her earplugs in to deal with it. Her earplugs work exceedingly well. “I was listening to music. Sorry.”

“Twelve hours a day? That'll damage your hearing, ma'am.”

“I'll keep that in mind, officers, thank you. May I go back home now, please?” She pinches the courteous phrases through a clenched jaw, and hopes the cops can't tell.

“No, ma'am. You're past curfew. No one's allowed in by Mayoral decree, not until six tomorrow morning. We can recommend the Motel 6 a few miles up the highway.”

“I don't have money to stay in a motel. I have a pet I have to feed. I truly wasn't aware of the curfew, officers. If I promise to come home on time every day from now on, may I please, please
please
return to my apartment?”

Archipelago hates this. She hates begging people who think they can tell her what to do. It reminds her too much of dealing with her clueless parents, a torture she escaped by running away from home when she was thirteen.

The cops frown, ask to see her driver's license—which, blessedly, she just had renewed, so it shows her Wishful address—and confer among themselves. They finally decide that just this once, they'll let her back into town. Not without penalty, though. They have to write her a ticket for disorderly conduct.

Archipelago feels her brain heating up like molten lava. “How much is the ticket?”

“One hundred fifty dollars, ma'am.”

Her grip tightens on the handlebars of her Harley. “That's more than the Motel 6.”

“Yes, ma'am, but you'll be able to get home tonight and feed your pet.”

Erasmus was fed yesterday; he can go another day or two if he has to. He's a desert creature, designed to endure scarcity. “All right,” she says, seething, “I'll take the Motel 6.”

In the lobby of the Motel 6, waiting to check in, she overhears another guest commenting that the Mayor bought this place last year, which means he has an extremely vested interest in locking out townspeople so they have to stay here instead.

Motherfucker.

Even with her earplugs blocking out unsavory noises from the rooms on either side of her, Archipelago passes a sleepless night. The mattress is too soft. There are bugs. She amuses herself by catching some cockroaches to feed Erasmus—he deserves a special treat after being left alone, even if he probably hasn't noticed and doesn't care—but by the time she finally manages to get back home the next morning, she has a migraine so severe that she has to spend the rest of the day in bed.

Headache finally vanquished, she rises in wrath and heads straight to her ancient computer to do some research. Motherfucking Mayor's going to pay for this shit.

An hour later, she's covered the opening of a shot glass with plastic wrap, picked up Erasmus with a pair of cooking tongs—“Sorry, buddy, but it's for the cause”—and pressed his stinger against the wrap until, indeed, he stings it, leaving drops of venom in the cup. Laboratory professionals use electrical current to excite scorpions into stinging, but this strikes Archipelago as deeply unkind, and is in any case beyond her current technical capabilities.

After she puts Erasmus back in the cage, she gives him a vitamin-dusted cockroach, still alive, to reward him for his labors. He appears to relish it.

She puts the venom in the fridge.

Among the bits of junk Archipelago has hauled around—for no reason other than that they fit into her motorcycle saddlebags and might conceivably come in handy someday—she has a set of steel-tipped bar darts. She takes one of these, cleans the tip with rubbing alcohol to remove any contaminant that might interfere with the scorpion venom, and then coats the tip with the tiny amount of liquid in the shot glass, which she then throws away. She has no idea how stable or persistent scorpion venom is. She doesn't want to take any risks.