Count Geiger's Blues (19 page)

37
Mikhail Menaker for the Defense

Even at staid Ephebus Academy,
The Mick had his sources. Before his last class was over, he heard from his friend Truitt Gustavson, who’d heard from Juliana Coniglio, who’d caught the story from a report on WPNK Rok Radio, that Tim Bowman, former editor in chief of Uncommon Comics, had seriously wounded
Urbanite
critic Xavier Thaxton in an early-morning shooting incident.

“Holy fuck!” cried The Mick in his sixth-period physical-science lab, at a work station with a wide array of electronic equipment.

“Mikhail,” Mr. Hulet said. “Show some restraint, some respect for—”

“Stuff that, Mr. Hulet! Gotta go!” He grabbed the radiation-detection device that he’d assembled under Mr. Hulet’s supervision and bolted: down the tiled hall, out the glass doors, along West Azalea Avenue, dodging pedestrians, to the condo on Franklin Court. Tim Bowman had
shot
Uncle Xave? That was like, well, learning that your best friend has just run over the fucking family dog. On purpose.

Lugging his Geiger counter, The Mick burst into the apartment to find Uncle Xave sitting in his bathrobe in front of—this was a real boggler—an episode of
For Love Designed
. He had taped it, no doubt. He was alive, no jive.

“You’re home early.” Uncle Xave checked his watch and used the remote to click off both the TV and the VCR. “Caught me, didn’t you?”

“Bowman shot you?”

“Three times.”

“Why?” The Mick was confused, about two unrelated matters. “Why” —nodding at the TV— “were you scanning that? You hate laundry dramas.”

“I tape them for Bari, Mikhail. Sometimes I watch a couple just to, I don’t know, reestablish contact.”

The Mick sat. What if Uncle Xave had been dead or critically wounded? In either case, the flat would have been empty after The Mick’s panicky dash from Ephebus. Why, he wondered, hadn’t he peeped Uncle Xave’s condition
before
rushing home?

“Why aren’t you worm waffles, unc?”

“My assailant’s bullets took a coffee break an inch away from my intestines. They couldn’t go the distance.”

Setting his Geiger counter down, The Mick paced. “Why?” He shook both fists like maracas. “
Why?
”

“Why couldn’t they go the distance?”

“Why’d Timmy Bowman try to desoul you? How’d you manage to rip his cord?”

“The same views that chased you into Salonika’s stews”—guiltily examining his hands—“displeased Mr. Bowman. His response to them, as I’d expressed them in ‘Thus Saith Xavier Thaxton,’ had a longer lead time, though.”

The Mick considered. His uncle’s column on the “cynicism” inherent in the monthly presentation of UC’s stalwarts—particularly such newcomers as the DeeJay, Gator Maid, and Count Geiger—had been about the snootiest criticism The Mick’d ever had the thrashed-out luck to fume over. No wonder the great but bugfuck T. B. had shot his uncle Xave. On the other hand, that had been weeks ago.
Months
.

“It was Finesse who canned Bowman,” The Mick said with as much diplomacy as he could muster. “Why didn’t T. B. shoot that stingy codge?”

“No offense, kid, but some of Mr. Bowman’s logic circuits aren’t reliably wired.”

“Maybe. But if I’d’ve been near when your sappy head-dreck ’bout UC’s brand-new stalwarts came out,
I
’d’ve shot you. No gas.”

“Good thing for me you’d already run off.”

“Bet on it.” Almost spent, The Mick sat down again. “Where’s Bowman now? What’d they do to him?”

“The Salonika city hoosegow. DA plans to indict him for attempted murder.”

“You’re not pressing charges, are you? I mean, he
didn’t
desoul you. His head’s on cattywampus from all the stress.”

“I don’t have to press charges. The shooting had a cloud of witnesses. Murder, even attempted murder, is a crime against the state. It’s almost always prosecuted. The fact that I didn’t die—no thanks to your zoot-suited pal—along with the fact of his agitation when he came gunning for me,
could
help him around sentencing time. Maybe.”

“You going to testify against him?”

“If called to the stand, I’ll answer truthfully all questions put to me.”

The Mick thought hard. “The Suit! The Suit saved your life!” He stood and paced again, like a hotshot TV defense attorney stricken with a wonderful courtroom ploy. “It
wasn’t
attempted murder, Uncle Xave! I mean, you were wearing the Count Geiger costume, and T.B.—this is what trucks it—
designed
that costume! Shooting you was his way to act out, really vividly, just how p.o.’d your fucking column’d made him. It wasn’t really attempted murder because he’d already slipped you one raver of an antidote for the gunshots. I mean, the Suit’s the key to—”

“Mikhail.”

“What?
What?
”

“Unless one or both of you betrayed my secret, the only people who know I wear the Suit are you and Bari.”

The Mick shook his head. “No, sir, Uncle Xave. Griff Sienko knows too. And it’s like an upper degree of probability that he tracked that news on to T. B. So Bowman’d know too. Which means the only—”

“Mikhail, I complimented Mr. Bowman on his Big Mister Sinister getup even after he’d shot me. And he looked at me and said,
‘Shit. You didn’t die.’
”

That halted The Mick. Uncle Xave occasionally talked like a Thomas Fuckington Macaulay essay, but, so far as The Mick knew, he didn’t lie. . . . “Part of the show,” The Mick hazarded. “To make his dummy hit look dirt-dead googol-real.”

“He could have used blanks, but he tried real hard to perforate my abdomen. If he’d aimed at my face, I wouldn’t be here. Sometimes, even our most beloved stalwarts fail us. This is known as Real Life. People who face up to it and go on anyway are called adults.”

“Or BOFs,” The Mick said.

“BOFs?”

“Boring Old Farts.” He sat down again with his hands hanging between his knees and studied Uncle Xave: the V of skin visible at the throat of his robe, the paleness of his legs, which he’d propped on an ottoman and crossed at the ankles. “The Suit?” The Mick said. “Where is it? Is it full of holes? Can you still wear it?”

“It’s hanging in the shower. I sprayed some of Griff’s Stay-Brite on it. It’s—”

The Mick ran to the bathroom, yanked back the shower curtain, and grabbed the Suit. It looked . . . what? It looked immaculate, slick and unpocked as a brand-new robot. No, there was one subtle puckering in the mesh. And a second. And a final one. Three in all. These irregularities reminded him of sweater snags repaired by hooking the yarn-snag back through the garment’s face. You’d’ve never guessed that three bullets had lodged in the costume’s midriff. The Mick returned to the living room. Uncle Xave sat in another chair, the radiation detector in his lap.

“Your Geiger counter,” he said. “You’ve brought it home. Is it finished, then? Does it work?”

The Mick took a jagged piece of low-grade uranium out of his pocket and placed it on the coffee table. He picked the Geiger counter out of Uncle Xave’s lap, lugged it to the table, and tested the uranium specimen. A series of clicks, hesitant telegraphy, rattled faintly from the homemade contraption, certifying the uranium sample’s feeble pedigree. The Mick raised and lowered the counter to demonstrate its method of operation and its performance at varying distances.

“It works,” Uncle Xave said. “May I try?”

The Mick carried the device to him, leaving it on to show that it could also record harmless background radiation. It failed to click, though, until he set it on Uncle Xave’s knees, at which time it started energetically rattling again. The Mick and Uncle Xave exchanged looks. The Mick raised the device to Uncle Xave’s midsection, from his stomach to his chest, and from his chest to the crown of his head. The counter’s alarmist sputtering got faster and louder each time but the last. Only when The Mick stepped away from Uncle Xave did its chaotic telegraphy dwindle into a lovesick cricket’s song.

“You’re radioactive, Uncle Xave.”

“Maybe a little. Not that much.”

“Mr. Hulet and I field-tested the clicker yesterday afternoon, and I did some fine-tuning today before coming home.” Puzzlingly, the counter went crazy a half inch from Uncle Xave, but registered only ordinary background radiation at every other remove. No doubt about it, though: Uncle Xave was “hot.” The Mick said so. Uncle Xave agreed and asked the boy to turn off the device.

“A holdover from when Plant VanMeter had its relief-valve failure.”

“Or a jump from your most recent trip up there. You should see a doctor.”

“I’ve done that, Mikhail, and I feel better—today’s unpleasantness in the dayroom aside—than I have in months.” Uncle Xave stood. “Did you happen to notice if the fixative on my Suit had dried?”

“Yeah. It had. Totally.”

Uncle Xave checked his watch and said that he’d best get into it again, to prevent any chance of a “relapse into my old P. S. mode.” He came back from the bathroom wearing the Suit, with a ratty jogging outfit that more or less disguised it. The Mick gave Uncle Xave an unannounced Geiger-counter exam, and his device, to their mutual surprise, emitted not a single click. Xavier surmised that the Suit had absorbed and locked in the radiation from Hazelton’s spring.

“You’re not hot no more.” The Mick felt head-blown: his parents in Bangladesh, Bari a defector to the City of Lights, Tim Bowman in Salonika’s catacombs, and Uncle Xave not only a gunshot victim but a walking radioactive cloud. A picture bloomed in his head: an orphan standing in a bombed-out ruin as a wind hurled snow across the muddy hills surrounding the collapsed building. The Mick knew that he was that orphan.

“I know how you feel,” Uncle Xave said.

“
‘The check’s in the mail.’ ‘I’ve never been with anybody but you.’ ‘Why, of course I’ll finish the job if you pay me now.’
”

Uncle Xave fended off The Mick’s attempt to stiff-arm him and wrapped him in a fast, upright hug. “No. I really do. I know how you feel. Exactly. I can remp you.”

“Remp?”

“Read you empathetically.”

“Like pud you can.”

“Listen,” Uncle Xave said: “Desolate. Abandoned. Emptied. Forsaken.”

For The Mick, each adjective had an unwordlike depth that allowed it to echo inwardly. Each had unwordlike resonances. Uncle Xave
did
know how he felt. In fact, he knew exactly. The Mick sobbed. Uncle Xave held him. The shielded radioactivity of his body warmed and calmed The Mick even as the boy let himself cry.

Catharsis. Release. Healing.

“I’m going to visit T. B.,” he said. “You can’t stop me.”

“I don’t want to. We’ll both go.”

The Mick broke away. He felt like a beaker of acid into which someone has poured a neutralizing liquid—but all the acid wasn’t gone yet. Shoulders bent, The Mick slouched to his room. Its blackness was once a shrine to his punk nihilism, but now it was a grim objectification of his mood. He lay down in the middle of his bed. For once, Uncle Xave had the grace, and the good sense, not to follow him. After a while, The Mick remembered the bottles of airplane-model dope in his headboard. He rummaged out these tiny bottles, selected one from the multicolored brigade, and began to paint his fingernails black. In cones of light raying down from the bedroom’s recessed spots, his fingernails shone like ebony buttons, bleak digital bruises.

Forsaken, he thought.

And then, thinking further:
Almost
forsaken.