“I think she’s losing it,” Kid Mercury said.
“She’s definitely not normal,” Grimdark piled on. “Honestly, Johnny, the kid was barely a week old. It’s not like she can’t have another one. Maybe you should start trying again.”
Chiaroscuro shook his head. So concerned! “Who knows what could happen if . . . if someone like her really went totally mentally airborne. The veils between the Atlantean dimensions look like someone’s grotty old underwear as it is.”
“I don’t know. Just let her be, man,” sighed the Insomniac, but no one paid any attention to him. Thanks, superheroes! You’ve truly saved the day! What would the world do without you?
John Heron, Avast, my husband, my golden lighthouse in the dark, my fire-weeping darling, slugged back the last of a scotch my mother had been saving for her jubilee and groaned. “I wish I’d never met her. I know that’s a horrible thing to say. I’d never tell her, not in a hundred years. But god, whenever she opens her mouth these days, I wish I’d just let her drown out there, gone back up the lighthouse steps, and had a smoke instead.”
He still thought he’d saved me all those years before. That somehow, the Queen of Atlantis had needed a lifeguard. Those good, kind, clean-cut All-American boys comforted him, hugged him (manfully), said they understood him. Nobody deserved a wife like me.
And so my husband put me away. In the gentler, medical wing of Davy Jones’s Memorial. For my own protection, they said. So I could heal. So Megalodon couldn’t find me. So they’d know I was safe. But really, so they’d feel better. So they could get back to the show already in progress. It was just so messy, the whole wife-and-kid thing. Doesn’t go with the outfit. Leave that shit for a Very Special Episode and get back to prime time! I laughed in his face when he signed me over to the doctors.
“I’m sorry, John. I just didn’t get it.”
“What are you talking about, Bayou?”
“I thought we were a punkrage anthem for the ages. You and me against the world. But all you wanted was a groupie. You could get over Angus dying—Azure dying—you could stomach a psychotic shark out for your blood. But you couldn’t share the fucking mic. So, do what you do best, John. Smash everything around you and let someone else clean it up. Go be special in your shitpile world of nobodies and leave me locked up with the wreckage of us. Maybe someday you can tell a morning talk show about your crazy wife and watch the ratings soar. I’m not crazy; I just hate my life, you fuck.”
• • •
John hasn’t come to visitors’ day in years. My cousin Baleen is running the joint out there. As far as my doctors are concerned, Queen Bayou is a quiet, easy patient. She doesn’t cause any trouble. She floats in her room and doesn’t bother anyone and every once in a while, she sings real soft to the waves: Blue is the color of love, my darling. Everything good is blue. As far as anyone can tell, my husband plans to leave me here forever, a gun on the mantle, a hammer under glass. In Case of Emergency, Break Plot.
But you know what? Megalodon was right. The sea is full of doors. And all the doors lead to power.
One of them leads here.
THE HELL HATH CLUB VS. THE JUNGIAN SUBCONSCIOUS
The evening crowd starts drifting in through the frosted-glass door of the Lethe Café, doing that familiar little Charleston of wriggling out of coats and hats and conversations about grandchildren, and started back home in the blackstone rows. They’re dressed beautifully, pearls and half-Windsors all around. A woman swathed in a glittering red swirl of amazingness hands her matching red fur coat to Neil the gargoyle, who kisses her hand with his wolfy lips.
“I wish they’d’ve buried me in something like that,” sighs Daisy Green, curled up next to me, shoes off, bare feet tucked under her in the long, curved booth. She lays her head on my shoulder. She smells like the best part of a nice city, the part that’s all lights and laughter and tidy, blooming trees. “I never wore anything like this a day in my life.”
Daisy Green is stuck for all eternity in a modest black sack dress with a ridiculous lace Peter Pan collar. An Amish schoolmarm would cringe and ask for something with a little more flair. Her gorgeous butter-blond hair is frozen in a straight homeschool braid, and her shoes were clearly fished out of a lost-and-found bin at the funeral home. She’s Miss America dressed as Norman Bates’s mother.
“You and me both,” I sigh. I’m no better. I’ve got the dress I graduated in, and it’s plaid.
HEAR ME, O YE MIGHTY LIVING!
Down here in Deadtown, all us boys and girls are cursed to wear whatever the hell you buried us until the heat death of the universe, so give us a goddamn break! The stars will burn out and the oceans will boil before I can take these stupid plastic butterfly barrettes out of my hair and wipe off the Carefree Coral lipstick some mortician thought looked timeless. Well, it’s pretty fucking timeless now, and I hate it like hellfire. I’ve seen men in powder blue suits and long-toed loafers trying to claw them off in the alley. Girls bending scissors on their black wool twinsets. Daisy’s braid might as well be made out of stone. But some people get lucky, like Miss Red over there, savoring her empty wineglass. Somebody thought to take care of her. Buried her in a prom dress or her favorite gown. Let her hair hang loose and full. Must be nice.
We order another round. Outside the Lethe’s big, dark windows, the streetlights flicker. It’s starting to rain.
“Turn on the radio, would you, Neil?” calls Miss Red. The bartender reaches up above the top shelf. With one thick, steel-colored claw, he turns the dial on a big deco monstrosity like flipping the tap on a pint of beer. Static glugs out and the Lethe Club goes quiet. Well, not totally quiet. The dead are a loud bunch. But while the moon never sets and the dark never fades in Deadtown, the clock on the wall says 5 PM and that means one thing in this neighborhood. A voice as warm and rich as the head on a chocolate stout pours down from the speaker.
“You’re listening to DPR, Deadtown Public Radio, the Voice of the Underworld. That was Quarter Inch Bleed with their hit ‘Cyan Eyes Make Cyanide.’ And now, ghosts and gargoyles, dames and demons, boys and beasts, spirits dire and kindly, sit back and let your favorite rag-and-bones girl cart your cares away. It’s time for Daisy Chain, the talk of Deadtown, with your dear departed host, Daisy Green.”
Daisy smiles against my shoulder. It’s her voice. It’s her show. She likes to listen to herself in a crowd. Seeing them listening. Seeing them care so fucking much about what she has to say. Being in two places at once is no problem in Deadtown. Her echo is down at the studio, wearing huge headphones and making love to a microphone, while she drinks with us. Down here, people remember her from the movies, but they only mention the really arty ones. Down here, her voice is always the best it ever was on some perfect day after a good night’s sleep, no cigarettes in a week, and a quart of honey in her tea.
Down here, it’s always her best show.
DAISY GREEN SAYS I LOVE YOU
Hello, Deadtown, my darling. You look wonderful tonight. Just as beautiful as the day we met.
I’ve been thinking a lot about rules lately. About karma, I guess, even though most people just viciously abuse that word. They don’t give one spangly fuck about the wheel of becoming and unbecoming. They just want to rub themselves raw against the idea that bad things only happen to bad people. Samsara is just something they name their cat. But the longer I’m dead, the more I think the universe is a big blackboard with rules scrawled all over it in chalk and stardust and it’s just that the damn thing is flipped over and turned away from us so we can’t see anything but the eraser, which is death, hitting the floor. Write out your life one thousand times, kid, or you’ll have to come back and finish tomorrow.
Deadtown, maybe it’s time to spill my very specific and personal beans into your soup bowl. Maybe it’s time to answer those questions you’re all too far too polite and gracious to ask.
Bad things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to okay peo
ple. Bad things happen to everyone. Good things happen to . . . well, somebody, probably. Somebody somewhere else.
But I think I’ve figured out one of the rules on the other side of that great squeaky cosmological blackboard. It’s not a big rule. No need to carve it in clay tablets with fiery finger paint and proclaim it from any kind of mount. It wouldn’t even make the Macrocosm Top Ten. But it’s there, I think. Crammed in at the bottom just under Light Is Both a Particle and a Wave but above Don’t Cut in Line. Are you ready? Here it is: Daisy Green’s Zero- Sum Law of Luck.
Luck is a finite and rare substance in the universe, like palladium or cobalt. To use it, you have to take it from somebody else.
I’m pretty sure Misha Malinov stole my luck.
He didn’t mean to. They never mean to do anything in the beginning. But a superhero is like a black hole. They bend everything around them without even thinking about it. And they’d better be lucky as a goddamned leprechaun wearing a rabbit-foot coat on lottery day, or they’ll never get through one single fight with a D-list villain. So, they just . . . suck it up from everyone around them. Trust me, kiss one hero and the coin will never land your way again for the rest of your life. And all that shit, all that horror they can leap in a single bound . . . all that shit has to land somewhere.
I had a little luck, for a little while. Not born-a-Kennedy or cash-out-your-stocks-in-1928 luck, but something small, something all my own I could fold up and keep at the bottom of my sock drawer. My dad moved us from Lewiston, Maine, to Brighton Beach when I was six, so I’d never have to save up enough on my own to move to New York. My mother was in a terrible car crash when I was a baby, but she lived, and she only has a little limp. You’d barely notice it. I was born looking the way most people secretly figure a Real American Girl™ should look—blond, blue-eyed, good figure, nice teeth. No major allergies or crippling anxieties. A good mind for math and a flair for performing. I’ve played Juliet more times than you want to know about. Directors look at me and think, That’s just the kind of girl you fall in love with the minute you see her at your parents’ garbage party and kill yourself over a week later. I drew good cards from a stacked deck, and I played them well.
Until I met Misha Malinov.
You know him as Mikey Miller, the Insomniac, the Coney Island Crusader, Working Class Warrior and Skee-Ball Champion of the World.
But when my dad buckled me in next to a shy, worried-looking ten-year-old boy on the Cyclone at Luna Park, his name was Misha Malinov, and he hadn’t slept in six years. He only spoke a little English and he had these big brown eyes like the kind of liquor grandfathers drink and he was way luckier than me. You have to be, if you get yourself born in a place called Pripyat in 1982 and you think it’d be pretty sweet to see the ’90s. His parents worked at the nuclear plant, right up until it decided to shit molten poison into the Ukrainian forest and make sure everyone would remember its name forever. They died trying to save the machinery. By the time his aunt and uncle brought him to America, Misha knew something was very wrong with him, even if he didn’t know what. By the time we rode the Cyclone together, Miasma was already coming through to our world on a semi-regular schedule.
We didn’t date in high school or anything. I recognized him at the start of sixth grade, Mikey-not-Misha-thank-you-miss, sitting in the front row, flinching if Mrs. Kendrick moved too quickly, drawing in his notebook in a way that looked like he was taking notes. But I had my own thing going back then, and that’s how I kept my luck as long as I did. He saw me play Juliet for the first time, and Mary Magdalene and Ophelia and Laura in Glass Menagerie and Emily from Our Town, High School Drama’s Greatest Hits. He always came. He waited after curtain call to tell me I was wonderful. And that was it. Mikey-not-Misha got nervous around people, and the longer he had to be around someone, the more nervous he got, until he looked like he was going to shake apart right in front of you and you’d see that he’d just been a bunch of little kids in a trench coat all along. I know what you’re thinking—that old story. Pretty, popular girl doesn’t pay attention to the shy boy who loves her, film at eleven. But he didn’t give anyone a chance to get close. He was trying to save us from day one.
If he talked to someone for too long, Miasma would come after them.
But I didn’t know that then.
I went out to Hollywood; Mikey Miller went to law school. I got an Apple commercial and then a recurring role in the latest iteration of Gorgeous White Teens Inventing Problems for Themselves, a show that can never be canceled, only renamed. The lead actor took my glasses off in the Christmas episode and discovered I was beautiful. After we cut for the day, he locked me in his trailer and wouldn’t let me out till I blew him. Whatever. It’s not like I hadn’t read a book about Hollywood in my life. Nothing unexpected. I flew home for the holidays, ate turkey and ham, went out for beers with the prodigal gang of returning collegiate conquerors. Beers turned into martinis, martinis turned into shots, I ended up back in Mikey Miller’s dorm room in the city, fucking like it was the end of the world. When I came, I saw sunflowers opening in my mind, yellow and red as summer.
He wouldn’t let me stay over. He looked so sorry and miserable as he pushed me out the door. It stung. It always stings when there’s this whole story going on and you’re really just a B-plot walk-on who only got a look at three pages of the script.
When I deplaned in LA, I’d been written off to make room for an exciting new accidental-murder storyline. My character had jetted off to Denmark as an exchange student. Fucking Denmark.
Was that how it started? One night with Misha Malinov and you lose your oldest dream. I thought I’d bounce back. I booked a dog food commercial. A spring catalog. Sang a jingle for a car insurance company. And that was it. LA went dry as Last Chance Gulch for me. After all, in California, every girl looks like me. We’re a clone army of former Juliets with peroxide pistols on our hips. Money ran out, and I was honorably discharged from the ranks. I moved home to sort my shit out, and, well, Misha’s new practice needed a secretary. I needed rent. I’m not too proud to file and make coffee. But it stung. Juliet doesn’t answer phones for eight hours a day. Ophelia might. Laura, definitely.
We fell back into old patterns. Brooklyn and sunflowers. But he still never let me stay over.
When my friends back in California asked what I was up to, I said I’d moved to Denmark. Hej! Jeg ville ønske at du var her!
I stayed late at the office one night in December. It’s funny; the case seemed so important then, and now I can’t remember one single thing about it. Nobody v. No one. Briefs and affidavits and depositions, oh my! I didn’t see him come in, but you never do. I just looked up from my cup of toxic waste–dump coffee and my sanity went down for a nap. This thing towered over me, just staring with those eyes like holes punched through to hell. Seven, eight feet tall, wearing a brown leather duster and a plague doctor’s mask with glass gas-mask goggles bolted into it. The beak was so long it covered his chest, and there was nothing inside the mask, nothing. Just blackness and heat and the absolute certainty that nothing you could possibly do in this world had any meaning at all.
Miasma. In the flesh, as much as he ever is.
Miasma reached out for me—his hand was all bone. Then it was straw. Then it was my father’s hand. Then Misha’s. Then the electric lights of Luna Park and the Cyclone twisted into fingers, a palm, a fist . . . and I was falling into the lights, down into the midway and the wooden roller coaster slats and the game with those little plastic horses lurching ahead on the big green board, stopping, shuddering forward again. The plastic jockeys turned to leer at me; their faces came alive—my father, my mother, my agent, laughing and laughing, the handsome monster who took off my glasses for the world to see, Romeo, Hamlet, George from Grover’s Corners, Tom Wingfield screaming about opium dens, and Mikey Miller, poor, kind Misha Malinov. One by one, they caught fire and the fire was sickly black. I screamed. I screamed like a girl in a movie. I’d always hated that s
cream. I thought, nobody really screams like that. But in the pinch, I was as good as any final girl drenched in corn-syrup blood.
The plastic jockey–Misha broke free of the pack and roared off the electric board, growing bigger and bigger as I screamed. He wasn’t plastic anymore; he was real, and alive, and kicking the absolute shit out of the Halloween costume that had come to kill me. I never had any idea he could move like that. Maybe nobody can move like that. When Miasma and the Insomniac get down to business, you can’t tell what’s actually happening. Misha drove his fist through the thing’s chest and dragged something out—not a heart but a wriggling, writhing mass of black-violet nightworms that hissed into smoke in his hand. The leather duster and the plague doctor’s mask collapsed instantly. The lights of Luna Park went out in my head, the midway vanished, the slats of the Cyclone blew away, and we were standing in the office again. I dropped my coffee. Misha caught it.
And, loyal listeners, thus began the happiest days of my life.
Mikey Miller explained everything. Since that terrible day when Chernobyl bled out and his parents died, Mikhail Dmitrivich Malinov had not slept for one solitary second. And, it seemed, in losing this, he’d gotten everything else imaginable. He told me what he could do and it sounded like a little boy’s Christmas list. Dear Santa, I have been very good this year you can ask anybody they will tell you how good I am. I would like teleportation, super strength, the ability to travel through other people’s dreams, heightened senses, and if my sweat could also make regular humans absolutely fucking trip balls, that would be awesome. Oh, and also peace on earth and goodwill toward men. Love, MM.
“Can you look into my dreams?” I asked shyly. I expected him to say no, actually. Like, the power of love kept my secrets safe. But he nodded. Okay, then. I remembered the sunflowers opening in my mind. That sweat thing is a fucking curveball, even in the superpower lineup.