Generation X, page 13
Throughout, both boys had numerous questions. Yet they remained silent.
“Do you both willingly submit to these conditions?” Emma asked.
Jono meant to say, You just think you’re all that and a bag of chips, don’t you, lady?
Walter meant to say, When pigs sprout wings!
Instead, both enthusiastically said, “Yes, ma’am,” and followed Jetstream back out into the reception area.
Jono was growing what might have been a knot in the belly, except that he had no real belly to speak of. It grew anyway.
Suddenly, Walter spun around to smile at Jono and made a gesture with one hand. A thin shock of static electricity leapt from Walter’s fingertips to where Jono’s belly used to be and the quick shock blew open Jono’s psionic voice.
“What the bloody hell’s going on here?”
Emma stopped and looked at him. Statis grinned. Jetstream faded away into nothingness.
Again, even louder, Jono’s artificial voice shattered the illusion of the Heilfire Club with the bone-shattering demand:
“What the bloody hell’s going on here?”
With that, they found themselves back in the biosphere. It was pitch dark out. The windows and doors of the main building flapped open in the wind, unattended. Emma sat on the ground, her expression dreamy, leaning against the inward-slanting exterior wall of the biosphere. Walter, thin and weak with veins protruding from his arms to make streaks in his tattoos, fell to the ground, exhausted but conscious.
Before Jono, a mist swirled and collected and began to form a horrible image.
A voice, whispery at first but strengthening, sounded as the mist took form. “Oh how delicious. A reaction, and an angry one, from both of you. It has been days since I injected you into the Frost creature’s illusory consciousness, and finally you give me something to feed on.”
Then, before Jono stood what could only be called a demon: black-and-white skin covered in rippling black.
D’Spay re.
Jonothon fell on the ground beside W'alter.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DEMONSTRATION IN THE SQUARE
Perhaps Synch’s most useful power was his uncanny ability to find a parking space under the most adverse of circumstances. Whenever Sean took the whole group somewhere, he let Everett navigate. Here in Harvard Square—possibly the most difficult neighborhood to park in north of Midtown Manhattan—he slid the little Jeep Wrangler into a space between a deli and the big triangular Harvard Lampoon building.
“Good old Synch, the Zen motorist.” Angelo clapped his friend on the back trying to reclaim the good mood of yesterday afternoon.
Everett smiled unconvincingly, and joked, “Yes, truly I am one with the city.” But his heart wasn’t in it.
The pair of them walked into the deli, called Elsie’s Luncheonette and found Amanda and LaWanda just as the latter ordered a Saul Bellow sandwich: pastrami and chopped liver on rye without the top slice of bread and a kosher dill pickle on the side.
“We half-thought you guys weren’t going to show up,” Amanda said, “after the way you just disappeared last night.”
“Almost didn’t,” Angelo said before Everett jabbed him in the ribs.
“Did we do something wrong?” Amanda asked.
“How about your John Kenneth Galbraith for me with a Mango Madness Snapple?” Everett asked the counter woman, ignoring the question. “What about you, Ange?”
“You got something like a ham and cheese?” Angelo asked.
The woman replied, “Sounds like the Martin Luther King cheeseburger. Comes with two strips of Georgia bacon, tomato, lettuce, and mayo with peaches and cream on the side.”
“Good deal,” Angelo said. “Same thing they call the ‘Ray Charles’ sandwich back home.”
“Why am I not surprised?” the counter woman asked. Angelo’s right eyebrow rose—about three inches, actually—in mild offense.
“You’re avoiding the question,” Amanda said with a touch of sternness.
“So what’s with this guy Harrowhouse?” Everett asked.
LaWanda shrugged. “We thought you’d find him interesting. Didn’t you?”
“Oh yeah, he was very interesting,” Angelo said. “Sort of like a bird thinks a python is interesting. Can’t look away from him.”
“Y’know, everything’s not about politics, you guys,” Amanda said. ‘ ‘Pat Harrowhouse is a charismatic, articulate guy with a message. I mean, people come to the city and they don’t know anybody. They’d rather not hang out at bars and maybe can’t meet anyone on the Freedom Trail—surprise, surprise. So they go to see Pat Harrowhouse and maybe meet some nice people and eat doughnuts and enjoy the show.”
Somewhere in there, Everett and Angelo got their sandwiches. Synch was the only one eating his. I should’ve ordered something with some meat on it, he thought.
After swallowing his food, he said, “You’re aware the Friends of Humanity is a hate group, right?”
“Well yeah, technically, I suppose.” LaWanda gestured grandly. “I mean we’re supposed to be against mutants taking over the world. Well, duh!”
“Duh? That’s a pretty flexible term,” Everett said. “Would that be ‘duh’ meaning ‘you’re not telling me anything I don’t know and of course we hate mutants;’ or ‘duh’ meaning ‘you’re telling me something that may or may not be true, but it doesn’t matter either way;’ or maybe something else altogether?”
LaWanda and Amanda looked at each other, trying to figure out the shades of logic in Everett’s argument, until Amanda said, ‘ ‘Is this a multiple-choice test? All of the above.”
“So you hate all mutants,” Everett suggested, “but it’s not that belly-hate like you reserve for, say, the guy that forgets to flush the toilet or the professor who gives you a C because he can’t place your face to your name and figures you probably didn’t show up for many classes.”
“What?” LaWanda said.
“Well, sure,” Amanda said. “Yeah, I guess I’d feel safer if I knew there were no blood-drinking, baby-stealing mutants around to replace humanity in a few hundred years. I’d like to think my grandchildren aren’t going to get killed off in a race war. Who wouldn’t? Wouldn’t you?”
Everett had nothing to say to that.
“What’s the deal, you guys?” LaWanda asked. “You got some stake in mutants? You got a mutant landlord or a mutant once catch your grandmother falling off a train or something? Why is this bothering you?”
“Did we say it’s bothering us?” Everett asked as he picked up LaWanda’s thick half-sandwich with a palm under the floppy paper plate on which it rested. “Something bothering you, Angelo?”
“Well—”
“What gives you the impression that something’s bothering us?” Everett interrupted as he balanced the sandwich on the tips of his fingers.
“What are you doing with my lunch?” LaWanda asked. She was starting to sound indignant.
“You ever hear of something called the Ku Klux Klan?’ ’ Everett drew away each of his fingers one at a time until the sandwich on the paper plate balanced on just the tip of his forefinger.
LaWanda rolled her eyes. “You’re comparing the Friends of Humanity to the Ku Klux Klan? Very nice. Do you juggle, too? What other tricks can you do?” The sandwich started to turn slowly on the tip of Everett’s finger.
LaWanda continued: “We don’t wear masks and we don’t go after any innocent people. Just creatures who aren’t even human. What’s wrong with that?”
The plate rose in the air, turning.
“What are you doing with my lunch?”
The sandwich rose over the plate, turning in the opposite direction.
“I’m human,” Everett said.
Chunks of sandwich components flew in all directions. They spun in little curlicues around and through the blades of the ceiling fan. Little globules of mayonnaise whirled around, caromed off the walls in figure-eights around LaWanda and Amanda’s faces.
Everett stood quietly now in the center of the room, eyes closed, concentrating. He had a bead on every molecule of every object in the room. He cupped his hands in front of himself, clapped them together—
—and every object flying around the room stopped. Changed course. Rode a beeline in the direction of Everett’s clapped hands. One layer of sandwich after another assembled like soldiers above the little paper plate that still hovered, rotating slowly above Everett’s line of sight.
Then all the disparate elements of what used to be half a Saul Bellow sandwich thwocked together. Every crumb and particle found its spot relative to every other crumb and particle like a deck of cards rising suddenly from a game of fifty-two-pickup. Suddenly, it was once again a half of a Saul Bellow sandwich, complete with a bite precisely arranged in LaWanda’s incisor pattern extracted from one side. It then gently lowered itself to the paper plate which, in tum, gently lowered itself into Everett’s open left hand.
“That was a breakthrough, man,” Angelo told Everett. “Sean always said you’d be able to do stuff like that—get synchroaicity with inanimate objects.”
“Only when I’m really angry, I guess,” Everett whispered, eyes closed and serene as a monk.
LaWanda stood with her mouth hanging open.
“That was like an illusion, right?” Amanda said hesitantly. “Like a hologram or something?”
Everett flicked the middle finger of his right hand over his thumb as though he were shooting marbles—•
—and a tiny sesame seed shot out of a crust of the half-slice of rye bread, like a tiny bullet into the tip of Amanda’s tongue.
“Eep!” she said, bit down and swallowed it.
“Can’t taste an illusion, babe.”
The woman behind the counter—who, as it happened, had been serving sandwiches for thirty years and was not surprised by much of anything—said to Everett, “Thanks for cleaning up after yourself. That’s a boy from a good family.” Then she continued wiping down the counter.
LaWanda finally forced out the words: “What... are ... you?”
“He’s a mutieV’ Amanda hollered and grabbed her friend by the arm and bolted for the door.
Skin spun and reached for the door from across the room. His arm unravelled faster than Amanda could run and certainly faster than she could drag LaWanda along. He tapped them both on the shoulder from across the room.
“What?” LaWanda said as she and her friend stopped short. “You too? You’re one too?”
“I was just wondering,” Angelo said, reeling in his arm and not moving toward them, “what time did you say that rally in the Square was?”
“Noon,” LaWanda said automatically. Then, realizing what a mistake it was to answer, she allowed Amanda to pull her out the door.
Perhaps a thousand people milled around Harvard Square this weekday noon. Pat Harrowhouse held a megaphone and stood on a milk crate in the center of human traffic, drawing listeners in with his amplified voice. Over one hundred people—two dozen of them from last night’s meeting—stopped to listen to his invective.
“Today,” he said, “we are a small band of brothers and sisters.”
Stirring, positive sounds from the crowd. “Tomorrow,” he continued, “we are a movement.” Applause and scattered cheering.
“And in this generation,” he went on, “we will prevail.”
The crowd cheered. And over their hollering—as if to tell them to quiet down because what he had to say was more important than their positive response to it— he said: “Because we cannot afford to fail.
“Would you give away your wallet to a person who simply asked you on the street to give it to him?’ ’
The crowd murmured.
“Of course not. Would you sell your birthright for a bowl of soup? Or your freedom for a vague possibility of peace or a job or even some measure of financial security?’ ’
“No,” the faithful among his listeners called out.
“Would you surrender your home to an intruder without a fight?”
“No!” many of the crowd hollered as the newcomers began to get the idea.
“Would you surrender your children ..
“No way!” an enthusiastic supporter roared in a voice louder than Harrowhouse’s.
“No you wouldn’t, would you? And would you surrender your children’s future to a race who have terrorized innocents for years? Who tell us that they are the face of our future?” ■
“No!” a hundred or more people in the courtyard of Holyoke Center in Harvard Square said as one.
The press always arrived late. Harrowhouse had been careful to start on time so that he could work this group up before they arrived. And they had better arrive—or else it didn’t count. If the rally didn’t make the six o’clock news, there was no point to the rally.
“No!” his crowd roared again, even louder.
“So what do we say when some politicians present us with ballot measures allowing special rights for mutants?”
“No!”
“And what do we say when some Congressman wants to allocate public money for doctors to study some phony-baloney virus that only infects mutants?”
“No!”
“Or when the drug-swilling, gene-altering parents of a mutant kid in school with your kid, say their monstrosity is a ‘special needs’ student and your community has to fork over extra tax dollars to educate the Son of Frankenstein properly so he’ll grow up to be a well-adjusted little abomination?”
“No!”
“And when your daughter’s prom date turns out to have three lungs or two hearts or an ability to snoop on your thoughts; or when the person your child introduces as the one he or she wants to marry suddenly teleports to the store and back for a carton of milk, or shoots concussion fields from its hands, what do we say then?” “No!”
“No!”
“No!”
A local news van rolled up Massachusetts Avenue, just as the crowd moved inexorably toward a fever pitch. Soon the other television and radio folks would arrive along with the Globe and the community papers. Today was the day Patrick Harrowhouse became a local hero. And tomorrow . .. ?
Harrowhouse was playing the crowd like Nero played his violin. When you can’t draw a crowd, the rule goes, you find a crowd and hold them just long enough for the press to see and the word to spread. Then the witnesses wove among them with their notebooks and their microphones and their little shoulder-held cameras to record and spread what Harrowhouse had to say. “Humanity has always been better at enduring adversity than at avoiding it. That’s why we’re here today. We are here to assert that this adversity must be the exception. If we do not avoid this adversity—this encroaching mutant race—then we will not endure them. They will not suffer our endurance. They will replace us.”
Murmurs.
“Because replace us is what they have come here to do.”
It was still Harvard Square, but gradually these folks— enough of them to change the nature of the air itself— began to take on the look of a mob of pitchfork-toting peasants.
“So here will we stand. And this ground will we hold. And we declare from this spot and this moment that they will not replace us. They will not supplant us. They will never tear us from our ancient roots.”
The crowd went wild.
“Are you all right up here, man?” Angelo asked.
“Yeah, this is cool as a moose,” Everett said.
“What as a who?”
“Something Sean says,” said Everett with a shrug, “cool as a moose.”
“Sean. Figures,” Angelo said. “Man’s been lost in the Eighties since the Seventies. Come on, man. Do your synchronicity thing.”
They sat on the peak of the Harvard Coop building, the highest point overlooking the Square. They could see the lunch crowd milling below, and a clot of people huddled around a guy with a megaphone standing on a milk crate. The rally seemed so little from here, so insignificant even against the backdrop of this little square in this little town. But the reporters gathering around it threatened to make it something bigger.
Unless Skin and Synch stole Pat Harrowhouse’s thunder.
For luck and for power, Synch mussed the top of Skin’s head—hard enough so Angelo’s scalp rode his skull like a wave. But now Everett was in synch.
“Let’s go,” Everett said, and the pair of them dove off the rooftop toward the crowd below.
“Look! Up in the sky'!” somebody said.
Everett shot out a skein of flesh. About a third of the way down toward the ground he flung an arm at the crosspiece of a streetlight. His hand and wrist lassoed the pole and he swung over the crowd in a gende arc.
Angelo had more practice. As Everett was swinging gracefully over the marvelling crowd, Angelo power-dove into their faces. He plunged headlong at the crowd. A thousand people caught their breaths, as four limbs propelled in four directions: at a brass fence around Harvard Yard on the far side of the street; at a big aluminum sign for a restaurant, the Wursthaus, on the corner where Massachusetts Avenue doglegs at a right angle to itself; at the pole connected to the underground staircase that indicated a “T” station; and at the neck of the little gargoyle hanging under a dormitory window just inside the Yard.
No one said a word.
As Angelo hung above the intersection that formed Harvard Square, Everett touched down and reeled himself together a few feet in front of an awestruck Pat Harrowhouse.
Then Angelo reached down to the ground with the leg that he unravelled from the restaurant sign. With the skin of his foot on the spot that the lunch crowd cleared for him, he began to whip his remaining limbs off the gargoyle, the pole, and the fence top. He coiled himself up and snapped his skin back in place, or as close to in place as he ever could get it.
Everett started talking. “Pat, we haven’t formally met but I was at your meeting last night. Sorry I couldn’t stay.”
As Everett extended an open hand to the man standing on the concrete pillar, Harrowhouse recoiled and stepped back with the stage-whispered word, “Freak!”
“People call me ‘Synch,’ actually. As in ‘synchronicity.’ Get it?”
