Flex (2 page)

P
aul Tsabo woke
to discover that once again, his six year-old daughter had stolen his right foot.

“
Aliyah!
” He half-rose from the La-Z-Boy he’d drifted off in, then realized hopping about the apartment on one foot would be more likely to make Aliyah giggle than repent. Not that Aliyah was much on repentance, anyway. He wondered what he’d do if she didn’t come; without Imani to help corral her, Aliyah might realize exactly how much leverage she had at Daddy’s new apartment.

But no, his daughter appeared in her bedroom doorway, clad in her pink-and-green Kermit-hearts-Piggy nightgown. She clutched the prosthesis protectively against her chest. She had her best pouty face on, somehow adorable beneath her mop of tangled black curls – a messiness Imani would have combed flat, but Paul liked to see his daughter’s wildness made manifest. Against his daughter’s soft brown body, his artificial foot’s sharp carbon-and-titanium profile looked like a blade.

“You know the rules, Daddy! You fall asleep before bedtime, I take your foot!”

“We made no such rule, Aliyah. Bring my foot here.”

She stayed put. Despite his irritation, Paul felt pride at his daughter’s cleverness. She’d never once asked how he removed his foot; she’d just watched him press the pin-lock button that let him take it off before bedtime. And she moved deftly enough that despite the sores on the inside of his prosthetic socket, she’d managed to spirit his prosthesis away.

We’re gonna have to bar the windows on that one before she turns thirteen
, Imani had once laughed… and for the first time, Paul was concerned that Aliyah’s bedroom window led straight out to the fire escape.

“I said bring it here, Aliyah.”

“I only get two days with you now, Daddy! It’s no fun if you fall asleep.” That was almost heartwarming, but then she added, “You don’t even have good TV.”

Paul felt guilty about the lack of kids’ entertainment. The handful of Dora the Explorer DVDs he’d brought were stacked in boxes along the living room walls, packed up along with the TV. Back at Imani’s house, Aliyah had all the toys in the world, but Paul had been sufficiently stunned by the affair-and-divorce that he hadn’t even thought to get some stuffed animals for Aliyah’s room.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said, rubbing grit from his eyes. “I’ll unpack the DVDs tomorrow.”

“I don’t
want
DVDs!” she yelled. “I want to play with
you
.”

Ironically, Paul had nodded off because he’d been up too late playing. Paul remembered experimenting with the manila envelopes last night; they’d crumpled and expanded, breathing like living creatures, as he filled out forms asking for CIA surveillance data. To his delight, the envelopes had unfolded themselves shyly, like a bride lifting her veil, to reveal classified reports meant for the President’s eyes only…

Paul was just an insurance claims investigator.

That was when Paul realized he was able to do ’mancy.

“You’re sleeping
and it’s not even bedtime!
” Aliyah hugged Paul’s foot and retreated farther into her bedroom. “I had a jigsaw puzzle saved for us to do! But you worked late again and now you’re sleepy!”

Aliyah had inherited her mother’s ability to target his weak spots. “Sweetie, I
have
to work late; that’s how I help people–”

“Help me with puzzles!”

He winced. Imani had yelled at Paul for similar reasons –
Why do you spend all your free time at that damned insurance company
? And Paul had shot back,
Maybe
because nobody yells at me in my office
. But that wasn’t quite true. When his marriage had deteriorated to the point when the most innocent remark risked inciting hour-long arguments, arguments he refused to have in front of Aliyah, Paul could have retreated to the bar for safety.

Instead, he went to the office, because he loved filling out forms.

“Aliyah, I–” he started to say, then foundered.

It was ludicrous, losing an argument with a six year-old girl. Paul remembered something his co-worker Lenny had told him once, back on the force:
You’d be a damned fine cop, Paul, if only you had any people instincts
.

And it was true. Whenever he asked how she felt about the divorce, Aliyah pursed her lips as if to say
None of your business
, falling silent until Daddy changed the subject. He’d tried everything to get her to open up, but Aliyah kept her secrets tight. Not that he’d have been able to explain why Mommy and Daddy’s marriage had ended anyway; he’d naively thought that they were going through a bad patch, albeit a long one, and things would clear up once he just figured out how to explain to Imani what had
really
upset him about that ’mancer crushing his foot.

But even when he was baffled as to why his marriage was crumbling, Paul knew his day was done once he’d checked every box on his Samaritan Mutual case files. He was
effective
there, quietly correcting clients’ mistakes, ensuring Samaritan’s notoriously stingy claims department couldn’t refuse them. If he couldn’t fix his marriage, at least he could fix
other
people’s problems.

Paul loved the
justice
of paperwork. Bureaucracy knitted humanity together – imperfectly, perhaps, but it was mankind’s rough attempt at a hive mind. When human memory failed and you needed to know where your neighbor’s property ended or how much money was in the bank, where did you turn? The paperwork. People were sloppy, forgetful, occasionally evil; good records kept the corrupt from lying, arm-wrestled tight-pursed bureaucracies into handing out cash, left trails to track down stolen goods.

So Paul had holed up late at the office to avoid fights, devising increasingly elaborate rituals for his paperwork, pretending he needed to fill out each form in perfect order to feed an imaginary guardian Beast.

Then, shortly after Imani had filed for divorce, his rituals had begun to
work
…

This bureaucratic marvel he’d assembled in his office – it now ran on its own, fuelled by what he knew, objectively, to be his ’mancy. He’d tracked down enough ’mancers as part of his job to know how things worked: ’mancers believed so thoroughly in their obsessions that their belief wore a hole through the laws of physics.

But the Beast hovering over his desk didn’t feel like obsession; whenever he commanded fountains of folders to erupt from his file cabinets, the act felt
freeing
, wild, as though the universe was using him as an excuse to go on a beautiful bender.

He envisioned the octopoid shape of the Beast: a floating origami construction of forms and certificates, inhaling addresses and exhaling information. Last night, after pulling the CIA reports, Paul had realized the Beast could access anything that used paperwork – he’d flipped through its infinite file cabinets to fetch data from Hollywood agents, from the IRS, from the United Nations…

…so lost in this new toy that he’d forgotten his daughter was staying over tomorrow night…

Paul felt like a terrible parent.

“Come here.” Something in his tone must have changed, for Aliyah hopped in his lap. She hugged him, and the world grew a little kinder. He put the artificial foot down on the table with a clatter, getting a painful glimpse of the divorce papers Imani had sent over with Aliyah.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry,” he told her. “I shouldn’t fall asleep when you’re here. But you can’t keep stealing my foot.”

“I can. You never notice.”

He stifled a chuckle. “Okay, you
can
. But you won’t, or you’ll get in trouble. Daddy–”

What should he tell her? That he’d spank her? That only bad girls were criminals? Those sorts of things were likely to appeal to Aliyah, who seemed to feed on rebellion.

Might as well try the truth.

“Daddy’s very ashamed of not having a foot,” he admitted. “It makes him feel stupid and sad when you take it from him. How would you like it if I took your foot?”

She hid her face; someone less familiar might have thought she was covering her smirk, but Paul knew Aliyah well enough to understand she was hiding shame. “You take my nose sometimes.”

“Never permanently. And never for reals.”

“But Mommy says you lost the foot for good reasons! You were fighting ’mancers. You shot them and stopped them from making drugs. She said you got a badge.”

“She said it
is
a badge. Of pride. That’s… not quite the same, sweetie.”

He rubbed his forehead. Aliyah was technically correct; he
had
gotten a medal for shooting that illustromancer. But he’d never felt
good
about that. The illustromancer had made Flex because the poor girl had become convinced she could buy Titian’s paintings from the Metropolitan Museum with enough cash.

Paul had tracked down rumors of a scrawny girl who lurked around the museum every day until closing time, ragged, breathless, gazing at Titian’s portrait of Emperor Charles for hours. His fellow cops ribbed Paul for his weak interrogation skills – but no one doubted his courage and resourcefulness. His boss had once told the department, proudly, that Paul could track a cockroach through a garbage dump.

Paul had been so desperate to stop her. ’Mancers ripped holes in reality – if you ripped too many holes, you wound up like Europe, a demon-haunted ruin of melted physics. So he’d tracked her to her lair, a tarp-covered alleyway festooned with reproductions…

…and it was beautiful.

The paintings loved her so much they performed for her; the illustromancer sat rapt, watching the show as a naked Venus whispered sweet nothings in Adonis’s impassive ear. A lute player sat attentively at Venus’s feet, playing music so beautiful, Paul blinked away tears at the memory. The Virgin Mary, robed in bright crimson, endlessly cast off her body to ascend into an angel-filled heaven vaulted with radiant yellow.

Paul had always been told ’mancy was a violation of natural order. But standing before the illustromancer, he felt like the world had been robbed of something precious – and only here could it be regained.

Then the illustromancer had seen Paul, and Paul’s police uniform, and screamed. Before Paul could explain that no, he was in love too, Emperor Charles had thundered out of the frame to protect her, a lantern-jawed brute on a black steed, crushing Paul’s right foot beneath one massive hoof.

Paul, panicked, had blown off the top of the illustromancer’s head. As she died, the great steed crumpled into old newspaper. The remaining posters had sagged away from the walls, bowing like mourners before collapsing into her blood.

The papers touted the triumph –
Mundane Kills ’Mancer!
He was an unlikely hero, scrawny and stammering, but his superiors had offered Paul a promotion.

Yet every time he thought about moving up the ladder, he’d remember those grieving paintings. After a few months, he’d quit the force to take a job with Samaritan Mutual. The world wanted to reward him for murdering miracles?

Why would he fight for a place like that?

So he resigned himself to investigating insurance claims and – on those rare occasions his supervisors deemed it necessary – looked into potential magical interference.

Until last week, when he had
become
potential magical interference…

“Not all ’mancers are bad, sweetie.” He envisioned the churn of paperwork in his office, pulsing, growing. “The ’mancers in the army protect us.”

“But the one you killed was wandering
around
!” She started to climb up on his shoulders, a strange habit she’d developed whenever she got agitated. “They should all be in the army! Or dead!”

He froze. Aliyah was right; he was a criminal.

“When I grow up,” Aliyah announced proudly, “I’m going to hunt ’mancers. Like you.”

“I don’t hunt them, sweetie. I find them. The cops and the military capture them.”
That is, when I don’t overlook evidence to let them get away
. “And I’m not quite sure why you woke me up when it’s already half an hour past your bedtime.”

“Because I was boooooored.”

“Bored girls need their sleep. Go on, brush your teeth.”

“But I
have
!”

She put her hands on her hips in mock outrage, but a gentle swat on Aliyah’s butt as he set her down sent her scurrying with a giggle. Paul smiled, watching her go – then winced as he pulled his prosthetic foot over the transtibial stump jutting out below his right knee.

The foot clicked into place, but his stump no longer fit into the cupped receptacle that held foot to body; it had shed muscle over time, as stumps do. The looseness caused blisters as the remains of his shin rubbed against the silicone sheath – a pain he’d learned to live with, since Paul’s insurance only covered a new prosthetic fitting every two years.

He limped into the bathroom to check in on Aliyah. Good thing he’d lost the foot back on his cop’s insurance plan, or else he’d be walking on a wooden peg leg. Government insurance had gifted him with a battery-operated top-of-the-line model, one with a motor that adjusted to his gait. His friends all thought he had great insurance thanks to his employer, but Samaritan had hired Paul so they could argue – whether it was true or not – that any expensive claim was ’mancy and, hence, Samaritan Mutual could cut you off without a damn cent. His continued employment was proof of Samaritan’s craptastic coverage.

Imani had accused him of taking the job as punishment. Paul couldn’t argue.

He limped to the bathroom. Sure enough, Aliyah had neither brushed her teeth nor washed her face. He abluted her, then tucked her into bed – she needed no night-light – and watched her until she fell asleep. She drifted off quickly. For all her rebellions, she was a good kid.

But it felt so strange, putting Aliyah to bed without Imani’s help.

Paul walked into the living room, wide awake despite the hour. All his books were still packed away in boxes, waiting for him like Christmas presents. He’d been relishing the meticulous work of filling bookshelves, of separating that jumble of hastily packed history books by era, then sorting them down into alphabetical order. There would be oversized books, books with two authors, new rules needed to handle these exceptions. When it was complete, he’d have an orderly book-garden, filed in clear structures and hierarchies: a comprehensive history of mankind’s attempts to better itself through written structure, from the first cuneiform attempts to track grain storage, all the way up to analyses of the Affordable Care Act.