Monstress (10 page)

Later, I show him. “Is that the place? Did I get it right?”

“The Santa Monica Pier. That's how I remember it.”

“I worried the pier was on the wrong side of the beach.”

“It's perfect. Really.” He flips through my sketchbook, looking at my drawings, impressed with every one. Then he sets it down on the floor, and turns to a blank page. “Draw yourself,” he says.

I have never done a self-portrait. Except by doctors, I haven't been photographed since arriving in the colony. There is no mirror in my room, and I turn away from any window I pass to avoid my reflection.

“Come on,” he says, “I want to see you.”

I look down at the page, at all that empty space, imagining the movement of the pencil, the ways it will travel along the paper to arrive at a face. “If I do it,” I say, “will you describe yourself, and let me draw your picture too?”

I stare into the curtain, waiting for an answer. Finally, he says, “Deal.”

I pick up the sketchbook. I start with a faint oval, add a few sharp lines to show the texture of bone, then soften them to make them flesh. Below the eyes the cheeks are round, the mouth full and wide. The black hair parts in the middle, falling past the shoulders, framing the face. “Your turn,” I say.

He describes his eyes, the right a bit sleepier than the left. His hair is brown, short but wavy, curling just above his ears. He has a square jaw and thin lips, a tiny scar that crosses the cleft in his chin. I go back and forth between us, shading in lines and erasing mistakes, his voice guiding my hand the entire time.

It's past dark now; I finish by candlelight. I set the picture down on the floor, my face on his side, his on mine. Two people stare back at us, together, alive on the page. “When I hear your voice,” he says, “that's the girl I see.”

I
t's raining when I wake, all morning long, then all afternoon, so hard that everyone stays indoors. I don't go out either, and I don't see Jack; the path uphill would be too muddy, the steps too slick to climb. But with the plaza deserted, it's not so difficult to imagine him walking through it, or sitting on the edge of the fountain, watching children play their games with shells and stones.

I take my sketchbook and try to draw that scene.

But there is no rain the next morning, and I'm eager to be out, so for once I am early for my checkup at the hospital. I sign in at the front desk, and the nurse stares at me, like I'm different from the times she has seen me before. “You're the friend of the American?” she asks. I nod, and she tells me that he has just checked in as well, and is waiting to be seen by a doctor. “Fourth door on the left”—she points—“if you'd like to say hello.”

I look toward the hallway, at the ceiling and floor, the walls and doors—all of it white. Somewhere down there, he sits. I could stand here, wait for him to pass me by, say nothing; he would never know it was me. Or I could go to him and open the door, and finally say hello.

I walk slowly, counting off doorknobs until I reach the fourth. I grab hold of it but I'm not ready to enter, so I stand on my toes and peer through the small window of the door. His back is to me, but I can see his hair really is a shade of brown.

I open the door. He turns to look at me, and now I know we lied. His left eye is swollen shut. His face, neck, and shoulders are covered with lesions, his arms purple and black with open sores. And his left hand, the one he must have hidden from me, is nearly gone, the fingers curled into themselves, the remaining nails yellow and chipped.

No smile or hello. I let him think that I am just another patient, one who has wandered in by mistake. I mean to apologize, to excuse myself and leave, but all I can do is breathe. We look at each other, at our sameness, for just a moment more.

I long for the black curtain, for the fabric to rise like a tide and drown us both in darkness.

I close the door, hurry down the hall to the front desk. The nurse takes me to a room filled with a dozen other patients, and when it's my turn, two doctors examine the patches of warped and hardened flesh covering my arms and legs, the lesion scars on my chest and neck. They touch the places on my face where skin and muscle used to be. Then they look at me and tell me that I'm fine.

A
day passes without seeing him, then two. When I finally visit, he asks why I've been gone so long. I tell him that it's a busy time in the colony, that I'm helping to prepare for the volunteers' arrival. Then I excuse myself, wish him a good night.

He didn't mention what happened at the hospital. He never knew who that girl was.

B
efore the Peace Corps volunteers pass through the colony gate, they put on gloves and surgical masks. When they enter, doctors and nurses shake their hands, and a group of nuns led by Sister Marguerite bow their heads in thanks as they walk by. The smallest children run toward them with welcome banners and signs, but this time the volunteers don't back away. They bend down, pat their heads, offer toothbrushes and small bars of soap as presents.

I don't know if the American can see us down here, what his view from his side of the shack might be like. But one day soon he will draw the curtain and step out of that room, take the path downhill. It won't be long before we're face-to-face, and when he hears my voice, he will know exactly who I am.

One more person approaches the gate, the military escort for the volunteers, a big, dark-haired man with eyebrows so thick his eyes are like shadows. He puts on a mask and gloves too, but with the holster at his side he looks more like a criminal, and no one approaches him.

Except me. I welcome him, thank him for coming, and he blinks in surprise; I don't know if it's my good English or my face that startles him. But before he can speak I tell him about the American, a lost soldier far from home. I explain how sick he is, and that he must return to California because we have done all we can for him. He looks at me skeptically, but I keep talking, and even I can hear the plea in my voice. “Look around. There's nothing for him here.” Then I take his gloved hand and lead him several steps toward the church, and point to the top of the hill behind it, where the American hides.

T
wo days later, a pair of Peace Corps volunteers walks with Jack through the colony, crowds of patients looking on. A white towel is draped over his head, obscuring his face. I never told the military escort that he was AWOL, and yet the escort walks close behind, hand on his holster, as though he's watching over a prisoner who might escape. When they near the end of the plaza, Jack shifts his head from side to side, like he is searching for me, and for a moment I think of calling out to him
.
Maybe this is how we start again, in daylight, no curtain between us.

But then he moves on. Across the plaza Sister Marguerite watches, and when he passes her by she turns in my direction, a mix of pity and worry on her face, like something terrible has happened to me, or very soon will. She starts to come my way but I leave, walking toward the church, then up the hill to the shack.

The curtain is gone now, just a black pile of cloth in the corner on the floor, and now I see what I couldn't before—a thin mattress on a sagging cot, a bucket half-filled with water, a tin cup beside it, the children's drawings rolled up like scrolls. Pieces of rind are scattered on the floor, but they still smell of the orange we ate. I pick them up, line them along the windowsill.

Sitting on the edge of the cot, I stare out the window and draw the sails of merchant ships in the distant water, the thin cords of clouds above them. I draw the sky, the faint daylight moon, whatever is in front of me. I finish the picture before dark.

Superassassin

September 1958. Coast City, California. The noble alien Abin Sur, protector of sector 2814 of our galaxy, crash-lands on Earth. Buried beneath the rubble of his spacecraft, he uses his last flicker of energy to summon test pilot Hal Jordan and offers him the fabled Ring of Power, a weapon created by the Guardians of Oa. With his dying breath Abin Sur asks, “Will you be my successor, Hal Jordan? Will you swear to use this ring to uphold justice throughout the universe?”

“I swear it,” Jordan promises. He slips the ring onto his finger, and takes
the Guardians' Oath:

Let those who worship evil's might

Beware my power—Green Lantern's Light!

For nearly four decades Hal Jordan will save the universe on countless occasions as the Green Lantern, one of Earth's greatest champions. But in the 1990s, just years from the new millennium, he turns on the Guardians, and becomes the most powerful villain in the galaxy. The question remains: Did the Green Lantern die a villain or a hero? This question has stumped historians in recent years. This essay will retrace the history of the Green Lantern, and conclude once and for

Black ink streaks across my paper when Brandon DeStefano swipes it from my desk. “May I?” he asks. His eyes rush side to side over my words. “Listen to this crazy shit,” he tells Tenzil Jones, his best friend. Brandon reads my paper to Tenzil in what is supposed to be my voice, adding an accent that isn't mine. Then he looks up at me, shaking his head in disapproval. “It's supposed to be about a real person in history, freak. What's wrong with you?”

“Hey,” Tenzil whispers from behind me, “maybe I'll do mine on the Tooth Fairy.”

I don't waste my time with talk. I put my hand out for the paper's return. Brandon makes sure that Mr. Cosgrove isn't looking and then crumples my paper, hurling it at me like a grenade. It hits my face and falls dead to the ground. “Kapow!” Brandon says, pointing his finger at me like a gun. “Why didn't you use your power ring to stop it?” Tenzil holds up his palm, and the two high-five each other, as if they've accomplished some great feat of teamwork.

“You are no Dynamic Duo,” I tell them.

“What?” Brandon asks.

“You are”—I lean into him, aligning my eyes with his—“no Dynamic Duo.” I say each word slowly, every syllable getting equal time. It's not my place to make terrible truths easier to hear; all I do is reveal them.

Suddenly Tenzil's finger flicks my ear, fast and hard. My neck jerks, my back stiffens. I feel the heat just below my right temple. “You're whacked, man,” he says.

I know better than to tell Mr. Cosgrove. Not because I'm afraid; I just prefer another kind of justice.

I pick up my essay from the floor, pulling at opposite corners to undo the crumpled mass. It's wrinkled, like old skin, so I rub it between my hands, up and down until my palms burn from friction. When the page is smooth, I continue to write, even after the bell rings and the classroom has emptied. Only when Mr. Cosgrove starts locking up windows and shutting mini-blinds do I stop.

“Mr. Cosgrove?” He can't hear me above his whistling, so I say his name again.

“What? Oh, sorry.” He turns to me. “Didn't realize you were here.”

“I know.” I start erasing the chalkboard for him. “I just wanted to tell you that I'm excited about this assignment. I think I'll learn a lot from this.”

He nods. “I'm sure you will.”

“I used to hate your class, this subject.”

“History changes,” he says.

“And I used to hate you.”

For four seconds Mr. Cosgrove is silent. Then he says, “I guess we all change then, don't we?” He looks me in the eye, smiling, and after some moments of examination, I decide the smile is real, so I nod in return.

I wipe chalk dust from my shirt and offer to help him with the windows, but he says they've been done, and explains that he needs to get home soon. I grab my backpack from my chair, and before I leave, I tell him that his class is my favorite, the only one that's useful in the real world.

L
ong before the heckling from classmates, the questioning stares from old churchwomen, and long, long before I knew the true story of my father, I was aware of the strange mutant abilities that my body possesses: though my skin is fair, I never burn in the sun, can barely manage a midsummer tan. When seasons change, so does the color of my hair, back and forth from brown to black. Despite my roundish face I have a unique bone structure that captures both shadow and light in just the right places, so that in the proper lighting my face can be startling. And my eyes—somewhere between slanted gashes and perfect ovals—are of two colors: the right is as brown as wet earth, and the left is jet black, a perfect obsidian orb. I keep them behind slightly tinted eyeglasses.

Fifteen years ago, at the moment of my spawning, no one could have guessed the potency of my hybridity.

“What are you goofing about now?” Luc asks me. He is quick to interrupt my meditations, dismissing them as daydreams. He shoots a rubber band at me from across the table. It bounces off my right lens. When I tell him to quit, to stop or I will kill him, I am shushed by the librarian, who frowns at me like an archenemy whose plans I have just foiled. “You're zoning out again,” Luc says, sliding his grammar book over to me. “You said you would help me, so help.” Though Luc is the most intelligent and perceptive student in the ninth grade (and the only other person I've ever known who is able to comprehend the theories of an antimatter universe), his counselor insists that he take ESL classes. His English, standardized testing says, is not up to speed. In grade school they said the same thing about me. I knew the words—I had a tenth-grade vocabulary by the time I was eight. I simply chose not to speak.

We muddle through the textbook examples of the passive voice, and I even devise my own exercises, in comic-book format.
“Superman has been killed mercilessly by me,” proclaimed Doomsday.
But today I am in no mood to be a champion of standard written English. “Later,” I promise. Luc shrugs, thinking that I have given up, that surrendering is a possibility. So I rescue the moment by suggesting “Dystopia?” and his frown morphs into a smile. In a flash we cram books into our backpacks, slip on our raincoats, and pull hoods over our heads. As we exit the library, the words “psychos,” “faggots,” and “losers” reach us from behind study carrels. Luc and I stop to face our accusers, giving them looks we will substantiate when the time is right. Then we are out the library door, off the campus, and under the afternoon drizzle. We stand at the bus stop, two secret heroes on the fringes of winter, waiting for the sun, any source of rejuvenation, just one outbound bus away from here and into the city.

D
ystopia Comics is the only all-used-comic-book store in town. Most stores file away their back issues in neat alphabetized rows, each one sealed in a plastic bag. But Dystopia lives up to its name. Comics are stuffed into shoddy cardboard boxes, and Luc and I spend hours rummaging through bin after bin. In the past half hour Luc has found issues of
Justice League
and
Sandman,
even a water-damaged issue of
The Watchmen,
and I've started a small stack of old issues of
Green Lantern,
precisely what I need for my research. I sometimes think that Luc and I possess an extra sense, an instinct for finding small treasures among the torn and the discarded.

“Closing time,” a husky voice mutters from behind and above me. I do a quick one-eighty, fists clenched and ready. I face the cashier, who stands just inches away from me. His globular, fleshy belly is even closer, oozing over the elastic waistband of his Bermuda shorts. “If you're going to read it, then buy it.”

I give Luc the signal and then shift my eyes back to the cashier. “Pardon me, sir,” I say, “but your volume is infringing upon my space.”

He blinks. “My what?”

“The amount of space your cubic units are occupying.”

He blinks again. “So?” I've confused him, thrown him off, and all he can do is point to the clock. “Just hurry it up, all right?”

My eye catches the exposed belly once more. With the proper serrated edge I could carve a tunnel right through it.

I smile at the mass before me. “Let's go, Luc.”

We walk out the door and turn the corner into a narrow alley. We crouch down to the ground, shielded between Dumpsters, and Luc unzips his backpack. From between textbooks and folders he pulls out our stack of comics. “Distract him longer next time,” he says. “He almost turned around too soon.”

“No back talk from the sidekick.” I go through the comics and take what's mine.

The rain has stopped. Still, we don our hoods. We proceed into the street outside the crosswalk lines, defying the blinking red hand before us. “Nice work,” I tell Luc. “See you tomorrow, oh seven hundred hours.”

“Oh seven hundred hours,” he confirms.

O
n sad nights my mother listens to her 45 rpm of “Johnny Angel” over and over again until she passes out. Tonight is going to be one of those nights. Before I can even lock the door behind me, she starts screaming, asking where I've been. “Nowhere,” I tell her. “Just out.”

“And what should I do if something happened to you out there?” she asks, one hand on her hip, the other tugging at the neckline of her Las Vegas sweatshirt. “What should I do then?” She takes heavy, staggered breaths and begins to empty out the kitchen cupboards, throwing food we need over the fire escape, weeping, uttering profanities about men and why they are the way they are.

I give her five quick shots of Johnnie Walker and put her to bed. I take off her shoes, pull the sheets over her, and press
REPLAY
on her turntable. She puts her arms around my neck and pulls my face to hers, telling me what a good boy I've been. “Don't you change,” she whispers. I can feel the tears on her lips wetting my ear.

“Go to sleep, Mom,” I whisper. I pull down the shades, shutting out the last bits of daylight.

She got left again. I knew my mother was feeling hopeful this time around. This guy lasted almost four weeks.

When I warn her, she tells me I'm crazy, so this time I kept quiet. But I saw it coming. Her strategy was faulty: she had been making domestic offerings—a home-cooked meal of lumpia and pinakbet, Filipino delicacies she calls her love potions. But they lack any magical properties. Her men always see the food as alien and weird, a little too far from home. So they take what they want and vanish. “Ride a rocket to the moon, that's fine,” she once slurred to some guy on the phone, “but baby, won't you please come back?” It was my twelfth birthday party, but I wasn't the one who wanted him there. I took the receiver from her hands. “Accidents happen, bastard,” I warned, “so watch your back.” She grabbed the phone, hit me with it, and then apologized for my rudeness. But he'd already hung up.

Mom's messed-up universe started with one bad star: a nine-month marriage to the man who was my father. He brought her to the States, a living knickknack from his military days. Their union, brief as it was, spawned me and all my biological peculiarities. “You're like Aquaman,” Luc said when I told him the story—“cool.” But Aquaman's mother was a mermaid, his father a human being. Nothing is human within the man who was my father. He disappeared from her life just hours before I was born. What I imagine, what I've even dreamed, is that he is a sinister breed of assassin, with white hair, white skin, and white eyes, invading alien streets, sent to find and fuck my mother and then finish her off. When she's drunk, she talks about my origin, sticking the sick story in my head, panel after panel after panel.

And then she'll break in half, Johnny Angel and Johnnie Walker to the rescue. But I forgive her. Like all heroes, she needs her Fortress of Solitude, her Paradise Island, any place tucked away from the evil in the world. Not to worry: I keep a lookout.

I
n the morning, I knock on my mother's door, three times, but she's out cold. She's already late for work, so I go into her bedroom and lay her pink waitress's uniform on a chair. I whisper goodbye and then leave for school.

Luc meets me on the corner. “Ready?” I ask.

He opens his backpack. “It's all here.”

“Good,” I nod. “Let's go.”

We have our enemies. Today Luc and I will deliver Brandon DeStefano to justice.

Last week we were reading comics at lunch on the football-field bleachers when Brandon and Tenzil walked by. “It's Luc the Gook!” Brandon screamed. I gave him the finger, and Luc told him to run along with the other nonsentients. “Non
what
?” Brandon said, climbing up toward us, bleacher by bleacher. “I don't understand Korean, gook.” Then Tenzil reached from behind and snatched Luc's comic, an almost valuable issue of
Swamp Thing
#12. He tossed it to Brandon, who stuffed it down the back of his pants, farted on it, and then dropped it in a puddle beneath the bleachers. “Freaks,” he said. Then they walked toward the lunch courtyard, a trail of sinister
ha-ha-ha
's ricocheting behind them.

Luc went down to rescue the comic, but I was still watching when his head started twitching, shoulder and ear crashing against each other. His spine arched him forward and back, forward and back, each vertebra breaking through skin until the body was no more. Then, in a sudden flash of light, Brandon DeStefano became The Gas, a force able to release methane-based emissions powerful enough to stun an enemy or wipe out an entire planet. Luc and I vowed revenge. I intend to get it.

We get to school early, while the boys' locker room is still empty. We find The Gas's locker, and in seventy-four seconds Luc picks the lock. I pull the impostor Right Guard deodorant from my backpack and make the switch.