Mending the Moon (3 page)

She's knitting an ornate lace shawl with outrageously high-end yarn—a qiviut-cashmere blend she ordered from a musk-ox farm in Canada—and she has to concentrate on the minute stitches. The tray table on her lap holds Barbara Walker's
Treasury of Knitting Patterns,
open to page 204, Frost Flowers, a twenty-four-row repeat in a multiple of thirty-four stitches plus two. Walker assures her readers that this is actually a simple lace, quickly learned after the knitter has gone once through the pattern, but Anna's only on row fourteen. If she decides she likes the pattern, she'll photocopy it and return the book to its shelf. If she doesn't, she'll rip what she's done and start again with another pattern.

William isn't home; he's working late, getting ready for a show at the gallery. He took the dog with him into the city. Percy's not home, either. He doesn't like being surrounded by water unless it comes with a lot of sunshine, and he's fled to Mexico for two weeks to escape the onset of autumn. William's parents had extra timeshare points. The resort's American-owned: by a Seattle company, in fact, one that's made a big deal about how good their security is, since so many Americans have been killed down there. Percy went down by himself, which seems a little odd for a kid his age, but Anna knows he'll meet people. Most of his friends are working or in school, and can't take the time. He decided to take a year off between college and starting his MBA, to give himself more time to study for the GMAT, so of course he wound up back home, in his old room with its garish comic posters and high school lacrosse trophies. Anna had hoped he'd redecorate—the colors in that room give her a headache—but he's kept it the way it is. Well, of course. It's only for a year.

She'll be glad when he's in school again. Miranda Tobin, another parent on the Blake School board, always asks about him. “And how's dear Percy? Still back with you and Bill?” Miranda's son Tobias—Toby Tobin, what a terrible name to give your child!—was one of Percy's lacrosse teammates at Blake. Percy thought Toby was an ass; Anna thinks the same of Miranda. It must be a dominant gene. Toby's in his first year at Harvard Medical School, a fact Miranda trots out at every opportunity. “He can't decide between neurosurgery and urology,” she told everyone last week. “They both pay well, but the hours are better in urology.”

After interactions like that, an evening alone in the house is healing balm. The house feels very peaceful like this, the drone of the TV and the steady pattering of raindrops the only sounds. Anna focuses on her knitting pattern: yo, p2 tog, p2, yo, p2 tog, k2, p1, yo, p4, p2 tog, p4, p2 tog-b, p4, yo, p1, k2, p2, yo, p2 tog, p2, repeat. The length of the repeat is dizzying, and it's easy to get lost. Lace knitting is a precision sport. She can't fudge if she makes a mistake, and ripping the fine, fuzzy qiviut is a challenge in itself.

She works her way through the pattern, paying absent attention to the television—weather, sports, traffic, the usual state budget woes—and looks up only when she hears the front door open. William calls out a muffled “hello”; Anna hears Bartholomew's toenails clicking across the floor before he nuzzles her arm in greeting and lies down next to her chair, 120 pounds of Irish Wolfhound hitting the carpet with a thump. He yawns, hugely, essence of dog breath and wet dog wafting over her. Her nose wrinkles.

“You're home early.”

William comes into the living room, rubbing his hands together for warmth, and bends to kiss the top of her head. “The setup was easier than I thought. Three of Kip's friends helped.”

“Do you think the show will go well?”

William shrugs. “We'll see. The work's not to my taste, but a lot of people like it. Have you eaten?”

“Soup and salad. I can heat up that leftover quiche if you're hungry.”

“I'll do it. Don't get up.” He goes into the kitchen, Bart raising a head to sniff in his direction before flopping down again, and Anna hears the dull thud of the fridge door closing, the soft hum of the microwave.

“On second thought,” she calls, “I'll have a piece too.”

“Okay.”

She's folded up her knitting and is about to turn off the TV when something catches her attention. “Mexico,” the announcer says, and Anna looks up to see a somber anchorwoman. “An American tourist has been found brutally murdered in the Castillo del Sol resort in Cabo San Lucas. The resort owners, Seattle hospitality magnates David and Delores Strucking, have issued a statement—”

Percy.
Anna's chest constricts, and for a moment the TV's drowned out by the white noise in her head. She forces herself to focus, hears, “The woman's body”—a woman, good, no, not good, of course not good, but at least it's not Percy, and Anna breathes more easily again—“was discovered by housekeeping staff. Her name is being withheld pending notification of the family. We'll be sure to keep you updated on this story as it develops.”

Panic pricks Anna's throat. “Will? William! Come here! Something horrible has happened. We have to fly Percy home.”

 

2

Comrade Cosmos was born during the humid summer of 2002 in Princeton, New Jersey, when a group of Information Systems majors, sharing a rented house and bored with the usual rules of beer pong, invented a new challenge. The winners of each match would have to invent a superhero; the losers would have to create that superhero's nemesis. Later, the boyfriend of one of the participants said, “It was kind of like their version of the
Villa Diodati
.” The boyfriend was an English major, and while his professors might not have ranked Comrade Cosmos and the Emperor of Entropy with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the comparison was apt in at least one way. Just as several stories came from that famous summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva, so a number of hero-and-villain pairs were born of the 2002 beer-pong rules. In both cases, however, only one narrative went on to capture the imagination of the wider culture.

Desi Santamaria and her friend Peter Phillips were the winners who came up with Comrade Cosmos, Champion of Order. CC lore has it that the hero was largely a response to the fact that this particular round of beer pong had knocked eight full cups of beer to the floor. However improbable that number may be, we know for a fact that the losers, Jacob Morganthau and Honoree McKenzie, responded by creating the Emperor of Entropy, Curator of Chaos.

These characters might have been as fully forgotten as the others invented that summer, save for a fortuitous combination of talents. Desi had a flair for graphic art and had been devouring DC and Marvel comics since she could read. Jacob, who'd almost majored in English himself, wasn't half bad with a storyline. Peter was a canny marketer, and Honoree, even more than the others, excelled at Web design and publishing.

Thus an empire was born.

It started small, of course, with a modest Web-comic. Comrade Cosmos—muscles bulging beneath skintight blue and gold spandex, teeth and hair perfectly straight and aligned—answered the summons of a small-town mayor whose tiny community of Oblivion, Nebraska, had been destroyed by a windstorm. The panels showed wreckage everywhere: car parts strewn across the high school football field, pet goldfish and small mammals impaled on the branches of trees, bras and jock straps hanging from the steeple of the First Presbyterian Church of Oblivion, and a black, yawning pit where the local fire station had once stood. Sobbing citizens wandered the streets, searching for their fenders, their hamsters, their underwear.

“This was no ordinary storm,” the mayor told Comrade Cosmos.

“Like unto a tornado it was, and yet not so, for it was one wild wind everywhere with no focus or funnel.” These words were gummed, spat, and sputtered by an old man whose dentures had been blown clean out of his mouth, and whose pigtailed granddaughter had to translate for him.

“Our fire station was brick and metal and had stood against many fierce winds,” the fire chief told CC, “and yet this one demolished it.”

“No,” proclaimed Comrade Cosmos, “it was clearly no ordinary storm! It is most evidently the work of that dastardly coward, that vilest villain, the Emperor of Entropy!”

At these words, the Emperor himself appeared: a swirling darkness in human shape, his eyes glowing red coals, exploded galaxies flowing through the emptiness he occupied. One of the distinctive features of the CCverse, from the beginning, was that invoking EE—naming him, speaking of him, sometimes even just thinking of him—summoned him instantly, for this most dangerous of genii is inherently everywhere, omnipresent, lurking in the very fabric of creation. Comrade Cosmos, in contrast, has always been merely a frail human, although initially one with bulging muscles clad in spandex.

“You have perceived aright,” boasted the Emperor, flinging his arms of shadow wide to encompass the devastation of Oblivion. “This is my work, the play of an instant, a mere eyeblink and flick of my finger. How shall you withstand me, puny superhero? It would take you years to undo even a microfraction of the chaos I have caused. Admit your frailty, and despair!”

“Never,” said Comrade Cosmos, and turned to bow to the assembled townspeople, who had gathered to gape at this confrontation. “Good folk, our enemy is only one, but we are many. He can wreck entire towns with the flick of a finger, but he has only ten fingers, and we have thousands, if we summon friends and family and even strangers to help us. No repair is wasted, here or anywhere. Whenever you hammer a nail or sew on a button or feed a hungry child, whenever you chop wood or carry water, whenever you plant a garden or pave a road, you work to defeat our enemy. Together, we can repair the world. Let us begin!”

The townspeople responded to this stirring speech with tears of joy and cheers of assent, and promptly started the work of rebuilding the town. No one shirked. All helped with happy hearts: bricklayers, grandmothers, doctors, schoolchildren, the mayor himself pouring concrete. Comrade Cosmos dug and hauled and hammered and painted with the rest of them, and in due course—as EE stood in the background, shooting off the tiny stars that meant he was fuming—Cosmos gestured expansively over a neat, sparkling town square and announced, “Oblivion is restored!”

Wordplay has always been a feature of the CCverse. The cultural critics who study Comrade Cosmos, noting that its language and images are a derivative stew drawn from Tolkien, the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
—to name only the most prominent sources—observe that it survived, and then thrived, by keying into cultural anxieties. CC was born of the fear and grief following September 11, 2001; the yawning pit where the Oblivion fire station once stood clearly recalls Ground Zero, and the destruction of Oblivion echoes the scale and senselessness of the terrorist attacks.

Literary naysayers, and there are many, claim that the storylines are simplistic and the characters cardboard, although even they admit that this has become less true in recent years. Staunch American nationalists maintain that CC is clearly communist: his title is Comrade, and he encourages and empowers collective action. A variety of liberal Christian clergy—the type who read graphic novels as carefully as they do the Bible—maintain instead that “CC” stands for Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, and that the superhero empowers his followers to do God's work in the world. They see in the Oblivion storyline, and many others, strong parallels to the Book of Acts.

Other clergy, often less liberal, contest this by pointing out that the wind and fire EE brings with him are the external, physical manifestations of the Holy Spirit who descends on the disciples at Pentecost, and that EE's omnipresence echoes that of God Himself. The CCverse is a howl of rage at a God who permits horror, and portrays a fractured universe in which the Son himself—for even these readers agree that CC is Christ—must work to heal the excesses of his father. According to this interpretation,
CC
rewrites
Paradise Lost
as a war, not between God and His fallen angels, but between the persons of the Trinity itself, and thus reinscribes chaos and destruction even as it claims to work against them.

Secular observers point out, more mildly, that “EE” stands not only for the Emperor of Entropy but for Electrical Engineering, while “CC” could be Closed Circuit or Cheat Code or CyberCrime. The computerist school of CC criticism reads the series as an entirely tongue-in-cheek comment on debates within the computing community, one that pokes fun at how the field attempts to organize ones and zeros, the very stuff of entropy, into meaningful language.

Santamaria, Phillips, Morganthau, and McKenzie don't comment on any of this. They simply rake in the proceeds from their creation and its spin-offs, from the graphic novels, MMO games, feature films, T-shirts, and action figures the CCverse has generated in such profusion. “The meaning resides with the reader,” Morganthau responds briskly whenever anyone asks for a definitive interpretation. “We all have our own ways of creating order. What do
you
think it means?”

Certainly the multiplicity of meanings holds the keys to
CC
's success. Were the central conflict not such a blank slate, it would simply be a good-versus-evil superhero story, however skillfully rendered by the artists, writers, actors, directors, game designers, and other creative professionals who now preside over the CCverse. The huge, and hugely improbable, success of the franchise depends precisely upon the indeterminacy of interpretation. For seven years now, we have found in
CC
what we want to find, or fear to find, or need to find. We find support for our cynical despair and for our idealistic dreams, for our horror and our hope, for existential dismissal of human effort and fervent faith in its efficacy.
CC
means all things to all people.