Mending the Moon (6 page)

The cats now have their heads safely ensconced in their food bowls. Veronique escapes to the living room and sits on the couch, but quickly finds herself back on her feet. When she sits still, she starts to think about what happened to Melinda, and then she feels sick. She doesn't want to throw up again. She hates throwing up.

She has to relax somehow, or she's going to be up all night. She doesn't keep alcohol in the house, having had some bad run-ins with it when she was younger. She could listen to music, but that's not enough. She needs something completely involving. She needs to read. Books have been her refuge since early childhood, a bulwark against the painful, messy world.

But she can't read. Not now. She wonders how long it will be before even the sight of a book won't remind her unbearably of Melinda.

*   *   *

Anna's on the computer in the den, checking flights. One way from Cabo to Seattle, leaving tomorrow. William's pacing with the cordless: every minute or so, regularly as a metronome, she sees him passing the den doorway, first one way and then the other. “It's going right to voice mail,” he calls in to her.

“Leave voice mail, then.” She's amazed at how reasonable the flights are: $272 even for the next day, and it's not a bad itinerary. She clicks on a flight leaving Cabo about five and getting into Sea-Tac about ten. Alaska Air, by way of San Francisco. Not bad at all. She books it; Expedia has her credit card on file.

William crosses the doorway again.

She gets up, calves and back taut with tension, and walks into the living room. “Honey, give me the phone. I'll leave him voice mail with the itinerary.”

“You bought the ticket already?” He squints at her. “Shouldn't we check with him first?”

“No. I bought the ticket. He's coming home.”

William cracks his knuckles, a tic he displays only under extreme stress. “What if he doesn't want to? He isn't a child anymore.”

“He's my child,” Anna says, realizing with annoyance that her voice has grown shrill, “and he's coming home.” She's gone into Warrior Mother mode. Her son is in a dangerous place; she's doing what she has to do to bring him back to the safety of the house, to get him back on the right side of the moat. She'll bring him home and raise the drawbridge: Percy will never again vacation anyplace where someone has been murdered.

She's completely aware that this is irrational, that this policy would keep him from going on any trips at all. At the moment, she doesn't care.

William gives her the phone, but folds his hands over hers to keep her from using it. She senses him calming himself, knows that he's picked up on her bubbling hysteria and realized that he has to be the sensible one. They've always been a good team that way, able to balance each other. “Anna, he's fine. He'll be fine. I'm sure there isn't a maniac with a machete running around the resort. The woman who died probably knew the person who killed her, or it was a drug deal gone bad or something. Percy isn't a target.”

She knows he's right. At the moment, she doesn't care. Castillo del Sol was supposed to be safe. She pulls her hands from his, extracting the cordless at the same time, and hits the redial button.

“Hi, this is Percy. You know what to do.”

Voice fraying, she leaves him the flight information, along with instructions to call home the minute he gets the message. “Dad and I love you. We need to know you're okay. Bye.”

She hangs up, redials. Same thing. She doesn't leave a message this time.

She wants to throw the phone across the room.

“Why,” she asks her husband, “does he have his phone off?”

William sits down now, sagging into an armchair. Bart, banished to his spot in front of the fireplace because he kept trying to follow his pacing master, bolts over and nuzzles William's knee for reassurance. “Damned if I know. Maybe he's trying to be responsible and avoid international rates?”

Anna almost laughs. “That would be a first.” Percy has gifts, but being sensible about money isn't one of them. “He has to know we're worried about him. He should have called us. This doesn't make sense.” Now she's the one pacing.

“Give me the phone. I'll call the resort.” She does; he does, but after a minute he puts the phone down with a grimace. “All circuits busy. I'm sure every friend and relative of everyone staying there is as worried as we are.”

“Oh, God.” Anna flings herself into the chair next to his. Bart trots over to nudge her hand; she tolerates this and then pats him, knowing that he's picked up on the emotions of his humans and needs reassurance. Poor thing. She can't imagine not being able to speak.

Bart licks her arm and goes back to William. A minute later, he comes back to Anna.

Now the dog's the one pacing.

“Let me take him for a walk,” William says, standing up. “He obviously needs to burn off some energy. So do I.”

Anna bites back her annoyance. “And what am I supposed to do?”

William rubs his eyes. “You could always come with us.” She knows that he knows she won't. She hates walking the dog. She's never walked the dog. She feeds the dog and makes sure he has chew toys and cleans up after him inside the house—mopping up fur, slobber, masticated bits of chew toy—but outside, he's William's and Percy's.

As much as she enjoyed being alone before, she doesn't think she could stand it now. “Please don't leave right now, William. What if he calls? He'll want to talk to you. I need you here. Please.”

“All right. All right.” He sits down again. “So what do we do instead?”

“I have no idea.” Bart's come to her again, and, huge as he is, has crawled halfway into her lap. Aren't Irish Wolfhounds supposed to be calm?

William stands up. “Anna, I can't stand this. I need to move. We can both go: I'll forward the house phone to my cell.” But just as he's crossing the room to the dog's leash, hanging on a hook by the door—it's a measure of Bart's loyalty or neurosis that he doesn't remove himself from Anna's lap at this signal for Walk—the phone rings. It's much closer to Anna, but William gets to it first, because she's weighed down by the dog.

“Percy! Oh, thank God.” Anna hears the relief in William's voice, feels joy washing over her like a drug. “Are you all right? Where are you?”

She watches William's face, sees him frown. “Okay. Okay, then. Right. See you soon.” He ends the call and says quietly, “He's at the airport.”

“And you didn't tell him about the flight? He must be there trying to book a ticket! William, honestly! Call him back and tell him—”

“Not the airport at Cabo.” William's voice is oddly flat, and he's still frowning. “He's at Sea-Tac already. He called to see if we can pick him up.”

 

4

All superheroes need origin stories, tales that explain what has set them apart: Spider-Man's radioactive arachnid bite, Superman's extraterrestrial birth, Batman's childhood trauma. Whether their special powers are a function of magic, metabolism, or machinery, there is always a foundational myth.

This is, of course, equally true of most supervillains. Consider the Joker and his chemical bath.

When Santamaria, Phillips, Morganthau, and McKenzie—the CC Four, as they are universally known—realized that their creation was a success and would be staying around for a while, they knew they had to decide where Comrade Cosmos had come from. He was an unusual superhero, strictly speaking not a superhero at all, since he had no special powers save an unusual gift for inspiring and organizing people. Furthermore, his nemesis was not a twisted sociopath, but the personification of a thermodynamic principle.

The CC Four went on a creative retreat, backpacking along the Pacific Rim Trail in Oregon one Labor Day weekend and hashing out Cosmos's backstory over their evening campfires. They decided that since his gifts were entirely human, their origins should be, too. The key to his personality, they decided, was his family.

Over the course of the weekend, they determined that CC's father, Charlie Cosmos, had earned his PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, writing his doctoral dissertation on the persuasive rhetoric of bumper stickers before leaving the academy to become a union organizer. While he was still in graduate school he met his wife, the beautiful physicist and Tai Chi master Anelda Villon, whose lucrative research career underwrote Charlie's passion for organizing daycare workers, burger flippers in fast-food joints, and carwash employees.

CC had a happy childhood. From Charlie, he acquired an abiding respect for the collective power of seemingly insignificant people, along with a knack for turning phrases. From Anelda, he learned the power of science and the importance of balance, of equilibrium, of yin and yang.

When CC was five, his little sister Vanessa was born. When he was eight, Vanessa had her first seizure. Over the course of the next five years, although Vanessa received excellent medical care and enormous love from her family, her epilepsy left her increasingly impaired. Before her first seizure, she had been a bright child, hyperverbal and affectionate. By the time she was ten, she no longer spoke, no longer recognized or responded to her own name.

This tragedy had a profound effect on the Cosmos clan. Anelda, distracted on her drive to work by an NPR story about epilepsy research, skidded on some garbage that had spilled onto the street during a freak windstorm, and was killed in the ensuing accident. Charlie, heartbroken, had a massive stroke triggered by the stress of his losses. He lived, but wound up in a wheelchair, the right side of his body essentially nonfunctional.

By the time CC was eighteen, his mother was dead and he was responsible for the care of two invalids, a task made easier by the continuing revenue from Anelda's scientific patents. He has always insisted on caring for them at home, albeit with a great deal of help from aides and therapists.

CC's loved ones were felled by disorder: the electrical storm in the brain, the coffee grounds and tire-slicing broken bottle scattered over the street, the weakened artery rupturing and unable to channel blood cells in their proper course. There was no one he could blame for these horrors, no vengeance he could exact. His enemy was simply the propensity of matter to fall apart.

The evening he fully realized this—after an exhausting day of dealing with insurance companies, durable-medical-equipment firms, his sister's constant drooling, and his father's incontinence—he paced and wept in his mother's old study, mourning all that had befallen him. “Curse you, Entropy!” he groaned in his grief, and at that moment, EE appeared, all shadow and stardust and howling darkness, cackling in the immemorial style of more embodied supervillains.

EE appeared when CC named him. Anyone who has studied the power of names in myth and folklore will recognize the motif. CC himself has never told anyone his first name. He withholds it in solidarity with Vanessa, who no longer knows her name, and with Charlie, who remembers his name but can no longer speak. Charlie and Vanessa's caregivers call him Mr. Cosmos. Communities devastated by sudden disaster or slowly accumulating chaos call him Comrade.

Rumors about Cosmos's name, and about what will or might happen should it ever be revealed—the end of this universe, the birth of a new one, the long-awaited advent of peace on Earth—are rife in fan communities. The CC Four will neither confirm nor deny these speculations.

Eating their baked beans and gorp around the glow of fading embers that Labor Day weekend, the Four fretted about the history they had just given their hero. Was it too dark? Would it irrevocably alter the tone of what had, until now, been a fairly tongue-in-cheek series? Would they be sued by disabilities advocates or lambasted by the American Stroke Association?

Even as they obsessed over PR issues, however, they knew in their bones that the history they had invented, or chosen or discovered, was the right one. It made sense. It felt true. It grounded CC, gave him more weight and depth and focus.

As a consequence, the series indeed darkened, but it also became even more popular than it had been before. It spoke to anyone who had ever struggled against chaos, whether in the form of hurricane debris or medical catastrophe or spilled coffee grounds. That is to say, it spoke to nearly all of us.

Along with origin stories, all superheroes also need buddies, sidekicks, or love interests. For most of them, the challenge is to find the one person with whom they can share their secret identity, often while leading a complicated double life: trying to hide the secret from the rest of the world while protecting the one to whom it has been revealed.

Comrade Cosmos has the opposite problem. While his first name is indeed a secret, everyone knows who he is and what he does. If he goes to the grocery store in jeans and a T-shirt to buy milk, the cashier will recognize him. Because he is a superhero of and for the people, even more than most superheroes are, he has never disguised himself. Since his archenemy is a principle of thermodynamics, he has never had to hide for fear of reprisals.

At the beginning of the series, he wore the standard spandex tights-and-cape combo so beloved of his ilk, but the CC Four quickly realized that the outfit simply wasn't practical for their character. In issue 12, he developed a spandex allergy and boxed up his suit for storage in the attic. He's shown as being relieved by this development, since he's always preferred natural fibers. A thought bubble above his head reads, “Heroes are what they do, not what they wear.” Later, he will confess to his diary that he only wore the “silly suit” in the first place because he wasn't sure he could be a superhero without a cape. Before he had internalized his work and his reasons for doing it, he needed that external badge of authority. Now he doesn't.

His neighbors in the tiny Topeka suburb of Keyhole, Kansas—a location he chose for its geographical centrality and low cost of living—know who he is, although they do not know his first name. The health-care aides, therapists, doctors, and insurance-company employees with whom he so constantly deals know that they are negotiating hours, treatment plans, and reimbursements with a hero. His home phone number is listed—Cosmos, C.—although his cell number isn't, and he has the transparent e-mail address of [email protected].