Lettie plays it until Tonya unplugs her speakers. She burns it onto a CD, just that track, and sticks it in her Discman; she can listen to it two and a half times on the way to class, and again between there and the cafeteria. She puts it under her pillow and listens until she’s too tired to hit repeat.
Tonya slumps down in her seat when she realizes Lettie’s got her headphones on at the movies, right up until the feature. “It’s not even that good a song!” she hisses.
Lettie agrees. Stupid beat. Stupid minor chords. Stupid desperate euphoria.
“There’s this old radio joke,” says Ira. “The doctor goes ‘well, I’ve got your test results,’ and she goes ‘gosh, Doc, what is it?’ and he says ‘hypochondria!’ And there’s a beat, and she sounds hopeful and says ‘… is it contagious?'”
Eunice laughs. He’s got that perfect Richard Crenna delivery, quick and impatient, just waiting for the audience to quiet down enough to shove in the next joke.
“You still telegraph,” she says.
“You still like it,” he says.
“Cancer?”
He grins; this time his eyes are darker. “Nah,” he says, “something else, I wasn’t really listening when they told me.”
The bubbles stop. Vicious hauls Captain Hawk up out of the pool of blood, then grabs his big shiny gun and blows some more holes in his chest.
“He’s dead,” he mutters. “He’s dead now.”
“They don’t die,” says Professor Cold. He’s tired. His robes are open; his undershirt is dingy. “You really can’t understand? He’ll be in suspended animation, or a clone, or some kind of time anomaly…”
“I cut him and shot him and drowned him!”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I hate them!” screams Vicious, and throws down the body. “Fucking heroes!”
“Really?” Cold shrugs. “I don’t envy them at all.”
In November Mindy ceases to be real, which is great. She haunts him. She becomes each girl he drives by; she slips her name between words. She sets herself to music.
She’s looking forward to going off alone, too, until she begins to understand that time is passing between these moments. Sometimes minutes. Sometimes months.
Mindy tries to look away, to watch how the world is changing. She can’t get very far. Things accelerate like those videos of flowers growing; her glimpses get shorter: a minute, ten seconds, a second.
Sometimes she’s just a name, blinks of hearing, scattered over years.
“Death is so loud!” The pigeons puff and shuffle; Spiro pulls the stitch through awkwardly, left-handed. “Maybe for other people it’s quiet. You’d want it to be. In bed. When you’re old.” He jerks out a smile.
The patch is almost done. He bites off the thread and blows on it, waiting for the superglue to dry.
“No,” he says, “for me it’s all roars and bangs and whistles. Bullets and trucks, hot fires and mudslides. Showoff!”
The pigeons scatter. Spiro laughs and hauls his ragdoll body up, testing his right arm on the wall. It only leaks a little.
Patricia was wearing these jean shorts ten years ago but she’s still got the legs for them, right? Yeah. She wouldn’t be getting waitress work otherwise.
Her boyfriend Burke’s going to get her car running again soon, but meanwhile the bus is screwing her over. Her hands flick and flutter: white moths in a bubble. They have long Lee nails with French tips like you’d get in a salon.
Patricia’s face is wound and gathered like tie-dye around her unhappy mouth. Her eyes are a dark, thick blue, like the water in Jacques Cousteau books, too blue to be real.
“Duffy?” The rabbi touches his shoulder. “It’s getting late.”
Duffy’s kneeling. His lips are moving.
“We don’t really do vigils?” says the rabbi. “I know you need to grieve for Saul in your own way, but it’s…” Duffy hasn’t looked up. The rabbi sighs. “Hit the lights when you leave, okay?”
And Duffy is fighting the demons of orthodoxy, of their refusal to believe. His prayers are bursts of light and force against them; he is burning, burning. The time to save his lover’s soul is so short.
This aye night, he whispers, this aye night, fire and fleet and candlelight.
Above, Quan-Ti doesn’t turn around. “I expected the blonde boy,” he says.
“I’m lighter,” Toe mutters.
“Do you even know anyone in China?” He does turn, now, tapping the bronze dagger on his lips. “Did they ask for your help?”
Toe glares.
“Where were you when they burned four thousand years of art? Tortured monks? Locked up authors? Where were you in Tiananmen Square?”
“Eating crayons.”
“Even if you could stop me, how do you expect to erase the past?”
“We’re fucking nerds, man,” says Toe, “our job is the future,” and Hugo’s sword falls smack in his open hand.