Mending the Moon Page 5

  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 abov
e 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 comrade.cosmos@gmail.com.

  Obviously, this creates some boundary issues. His phone rings at all hours with pleas for assistance. Strangers knock on his door to ask for help for themselves, their families, their communities. Although his mother’s patents have made him as wealthy as Bruce Wayne, he is constantly turning down inappropriate gifts: offers from grateful beneficiaries of his services to pay his mortgage, free wheelchair vans, even bags of groceries that appear mysteriously on his doorstep. He doggedly diverts these resources to places that need them more than he does: food banks, struggling community hospitals and nursing homes, young married couples with young children trying to keep their homes in the midst of layoffs and foreclosures.

  He also routinely turns down offers of lucrative endorsements. The purveyors of products and services as diverse as housing developments, closet-organizer systems, and air-traffic-control software eagerly clamor to use his name. “We are champions of order,” the CEO of a company selling high-tech litter boxes once told him, “protecting the floors and noses of our customers from unwanted intrusion by cat waste, and we believe we are doing your work.”

  “Good,” said Cosmos, who—even more emphatically than he shed his spandex suit—has long since shed the pseudo-Shakespearian diction of the first webzine. “Wonderful. That’s great, really. Keep doing my work. But, you know, everybody should be champions of order, or at least part of the anti-Entropy resistance—that’s what I do, bub, try to make everybody else a champion of order—and I don’t need the money, and I just don’t want my picture on a litter box. I don’t even like cats, much, although maybe it’s just because I’ve never lived with any. Sorry.”

  In the frame, he looks drawn, exhausted, with rumpled hair and bags under his eyes. In this issue, he has just had to fire his sister’s home health-care aide, a minor imp of Entropy who tried to steal her medication for black-market resale. The agency has not yet sent a replacement, and so Cosmos has had to handle all of her care himself. He hasn’t gotten much sleep. He’s a little snappish.

  Several issues later, Cosmos discovers that the litter box company has been using his name and likeness anyway. An attorney contacts him to find out if he wants to sue. He refuses. He’s not a brand. He won’t copyright his name or visage.

  “But then anyone will be able to claim that they’re doing your work!” the attorney protests.

  “Well, if they are, good for them. I want everybody to be doing my work. If everybody were doing my work, I wouldn’t have to do so much of it, and neither would the other people who are doing it but aren’t getting enough help. If everybody were doing my work, we’d all be less burned out, you know?”

  “Harummph!” snorts the attorney. “So if imitators sprang up claiming to be you, stealing your identity, that wouldn’t bother you?”

  “Stealing my identity? If they’re stealing my Social Security number or Google password, sure, it bothers me. But imitators? I want people to imitate me. Have you been paying attention at all? Any of you? Imitating me is the entire point. I want more imitators than Elvis. I won’t be happy until I have so many imitators that even I can’t tell who I am anymore. Beware of non-imitations! Say, are you allergic to spandex?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I have a present for you,” Cosmos says, and sends him the box with the tights and cape in it. When the attorney calls to thank him, he tells Cosmos the ensemble doesn’t fit. “Sure it does,” Cosmos says wearily. “It fits everybody. Try again. Just keep trying: you’ll see.”

  This sequence offers obvious opportunity for Christian exegesis, and clergy leapt on it, pointing out the correspondences between Cosmos’s rhetoric and Jesus’ love-your-neighbor commandment, identifying the attorney with the rich young lawyer in the Gospels. Jesus, like Cosmos, had to struggle to escape the needy multitudes and find time and space for himself.

  But clergy—and therapists, teachers, health-care providers, social workers, and emergency personnel—relate to Cosmos quite aside from any theological subtext. They identify with his efforts to lead his own life in the midst of constant, urgent demands from others. They empathize with the fact that he can’t go to dinner parties without the other guests telling him how chaos has struck their own lives, just as doctors can’t attend social events without being treated to catalogs of symptoms. They feel in their own bones the pressure he faces, the fact that he always has to be on his best behavior, because he represents more than himself. If Cosmos disappoints or betrays his constituency, they will lose faith not just in him, but in everything he stands for.

  Helping professionals know from firsthand experience what a prison such expectations can be. They know the burden of fiduciary trust. And thus many of them, early in the life of the franchise, became as concerned about Cosmos as if he were flesh and blood, a friend or family member. Scores of them wrote letters to the CC Four, fretting about Cosmos’s reluctance to ask for help with his own difficulties, cataloging his symptoms of stress, demanding that he get an unlisted number and disconnect his doorbell. “Give him a vacation!” more than one reader insisted. “He can’t delegate any more than he does, because his entire mission’s about delegation, but he needs a break from delegating. He needs to go on a trip where he isn’t responsible for anybody but himself and doesn’t have to worry about anything. That would be hard, of course, because of Charlie and Vanessa. But if you can’t give him a vacation, for heaven’s sake, can’t you give the poor guy a friend? Somebody who knows his first name? Somebody he can hang with when he wants to drink beer and let his hair down?”

  Thus Roger Cadwallader was born.

  Roger is a librarian, another Champion of Order. He runs the Keyhole Community Library almost single-handedly, since most of the rest of the staff has been laid off in one or another budget emergency. Roger and Cosmos met when Cosmos went to the library to borrow some audiobooks for his father. Cosmos watched Roger, middle-aged and balding and spreading at the waist, explain the Dewey Decimal System to a visiting third-grade class. He could tell from Roger’s smile and nod that Roger knew who he was. He was deeply grateful that Roger didn’t say, “Hey, kids, look who’s here! It’s Comrade Cosmos!”

  Roger treated Cosmos like any other patron. After they became friends, Cosmos learned about Roger’s struggles to keep the library open, to maintain the funding he needs to acquire materials. He learned that Roger is a widower who nursed his wife through cancer, and is thus as intimately familiar with health-care snarls and insurance companies as Cosmos himself. He discovered that when his nerves are jangled, going to the library after hours to help Roger reshelve books—unasked, simply as an act of companionship—is just what he needs to regain his balance.

  Roger does not know, and probably will never know, Cosmos’s first name. Cosmos still has a listed phone number and a working doorbell. But now Cosmos also has a friend and sidekick, and often, in the deep silence of the library at night, after everything has been returned to its rightful place and the integrity of the Dewey Decimal System has been upheld, he and Roger sit behind the reference desk and share a beer.

  5

  The windshield wipers emit a steady squeak as Anna, William, and Percy drive back from the airport. The car�
��s a Lexus, and it’s last year’s model. It shouldn’t make infuriating noises. Anna makes a mental note to call the dealer tomorrow.

  Her earlier panic and determination have dissolved into exhaustion and badly jangled nerves; from William’s white knuckles on the steering wheel, she guesses he feels the same. Percy huddles in the backseat. He’s hugging his backpack; his small duffel bag sits next to him. When Anna spotted him waiting for them at the curb, he looked as impossibly huge-eyed as a child. He hugged her more fiercely than he has in years.

  “You’re all right. You’re safe,” she told him. “Oh, Percy, it must have been horrible.”

  “Yeah.” He shivered. He didn’t seem to want to meet her eyes; he was probably steeling himself for a barrage of questions. “Can I get into the car now? It’s cold here, after Mexico.”

  “So,” Anna says now, risking one question at least, “do you feel like talking about it?”

  “Not yet,” William says firmly. “Not while I’m driving, please. Save that for home. Tell us about the vacation part. There must have been some fun, too. You were there five days before—”

  “Yeah,” says Percy. “Well, you know, I swam every day. I went snorkeling, and I saw fish, but there are more in Hawai’i, and the water’s clearer and warmer. But I saw sea lions and manta rays; that was pretty cool. And there were whales and dolphins. And the market there’s awesome, Mom, you’d love it, it’s right around the harbor with all the cruise boats and tour boats and stuff, all kinds of jewelry and pottery.” Even over the windshield wipers, she hears him swallow. “I was going to buy you something, but I was waiting until the last day, and then—”

  “Percy,” she says. “For God’s sake. You’re home and you’re all right. That’s more precious to me than any souvenir.”