I picture the flat in the Village. As my body twists into that cold, strange place I decide on the little black dress. Keep the focus on the legs. . . .
Coulda
Caroline Spector
IT’S DARK. SUFFOCATING. I can hear the sounds of the helicopters overhead. I’ve got to do something. But I can hear screams now. Oh, God, the way they scream as the flesh is seared off their bodies. I need to bubble. I need to get away from the smell of burnt skin and muscle. Screaming. I need to make the screams go away.
I try to blast my way through the darkness. For a moment, I can’t bubble. It’s as if there’s a wall between me and my power—then a stream of bubbles flows from my hands. Dust and rubble fill my mouth and rain off my body.
There’s light. The light is so clean and pure. I bubble more until I chase the darkness away and blow the weight of the debris from me.
“Stop that!”
I look around. I’m not in Egypt. There are no helicopters. No falling bodies. No fiery flesh. Just the clean, antiseptic testing room at BICC. Biological Isolation and Containment Center—who thinks these names up, anyway?
God, I hate government facilities. Why on earth would anyone build anything in an abandoned salt mine? And in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico, to boot . . .
“The purpose of the test is to see how much force you can absorb, Miss Pond.” The disembodied voice belonged to Dr. Pendergast. His voice was normally silky smooth, so it was hard to tell when he was really pissed. But there was a hint of anger and I knew I’d been bad.
But, really, how many more times could they pound the living crap out of me? I was beginning to feel like Wile E. Coyote. Drop me down into that canyon one more time, boss. Or shoot me with a death ray. Your choice.
I wasn’t even certain what they were testing me for anymore. At first, it was the usual: some joker with a face that could stop a clock and biceps the size of watermelons. He gave me a left hook that I kinda felt. I tried not to laugh at the look of disappointment on his unfortunate face.
Then they started with the cannonballs, bullets, walls on springs. Honestly, who the hell has walls on springs, just, you know, lying around? I mean, did none of these guys watch American Hero? You’d’ve thought they’d never heard of the Amazing Bubbles.
But the superweird thing was that they didn’t want me to bubble. In fact, Dr. Pendergast made it very clear that he didn’t want any bubbling. I tried to explain to him that when I got hit with as much raw energy as they were throwing at me, I had to bubble. It hurt not to.
But Dr. Pendergast didn’t care about that. He was only interested in how much power I could absorb. They’d already found out my max size would just about fill an eight-by-eight room. But I was no Bloat. They told me that when I stopped growing in size I started getting denser. Heavier, but no larger. I kinda got the feeling this was very interesting to them.
The problem was, after they got me as fat as I could get, and they kept throwing more and more force at me, I was finding it more difficult to bubble it off after the tests. The denser I got, the more powerful I became, but the harder it was to access my power. Hell, I could barely lift one of my pudgy fingers.
And it didn’t help that every time I got hit, it brought back memories. Memories that I didn’t want to face. So I did what I usually do—I thought about something else. Thought about anything that would distract me from what was rattling around my head like a bad Rob Zombie movie.
Thinking about Ink naked usually did the trick.
“Okay, Miss Pond, we’ll go again.”
“Yeah? I don’t think so,” I replied. I flung my hands out and released an enormous stream of bubbles, and I could feel my clothes getting looser. I grabbed a handful of waistband with my left hand to keep my pants from falling off.
The bubbles bounced around the room, but I kept bubbling with my right hand. As I filled the room, the bubbles just sort of vibrated against one another. I’d made them soft and rubbery so they wouldn’t hurt anyone. But it would take a while for them to dissipate. The room would be useless for any more games of Kick the Bubbles. At least for a while.
“Miss Pond, you agreed to be tested.”
“I know, and now I’m done with testing. I don’t recall this being anything other than voluntary on my part.”
“You’re acting like a child. We have only just begun to discover the true range of your power.”
I glared at the one-way mirror. I couldn’t see Dr. Pendergast, but I could imagine the patronizing look on his face. That and how he would stroke his Vandyke when he was trying to “reason” with you.
“Yeah, well . . .” Crap, I always sucked at pithy-line moments. “You’re not the boss of me.” I marched out with my pants hitched up, trying not to smack myself on the forehead.
There was a knock on my door. They were lodging me in one of the officers’ quarters. I suspected the hoi polloi got far less kind treatment.
I pulled the door open. One of the homeliest women I’d ever seen was standing there. Her hair was cropped short like she’d cut it with safety scissors. And her cheeks and forehead were acne-scarred, with an angry red breakout in full bloom. “Miss Pond?”
“That’s me,” I said.
“I’m Niobe.” She paused.
“Niobe!” I pulled her to me in a bear hug. We’d been corresponding via e-mail since American Hero. She had really touched me, as many of her e-mails had been heartbreaking. Her parents had been less than supportive when her card turned, which was like saying Joker Plague had some unattractive members. But there had been something else in her e-mails, something unspoken.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Not everyone gets an all-expense-paid vacation at the lovely BICC.”
“Well, my parents weren’t too pleased that their only daughter wasn’t going to have the perfect coming-out party. It’s hard being a debutante with this.” Her thick tail swished on the floor. I hadn’t noticed it before. It was an ugly gray, thick and mottled, and there were stiff bristles sticking out of it.
I turned and started putting the rest of my things into my suitcase. She looked so forlorn it made me uncomfortable.
“They’re studying me,” she said, “just like they were studying you.”
“God, I hope not,” I replied, looking over my shoulder. “They’ve been pounding the crap outta me.”
She gave me a wan smile. “No,” she said. “I don’t have a power like yours. You know, you’re prettier in person.”
I laughed. “Whoa, Non Sequitur Girl, er, Woman.”
“I mean, I guess you’re different than you looked on TV.”
“You mean I’m not as fat now.” I shoved the last of my clothes into my bag. “Yeah, I just bubbled the hell outta the test room. I’m leaving, and I don’t want to be as recognizable when I head back to New York.”
She shoved her hands into her pockets and looked unhappy. “I guess this means you’re not going to spend any time with the other patients.”
“I didn’t know anyone wanted to see me,” I said. “They’ve pretty much kept me in the dark about everything except for the whole, ‘Let’s see what we can throw at Bubbles this time.’ ”
Niobe looked even more morose at this. “Yeah,” she said. “They treat us like rats in a cage.”
“Look,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of time before my flight—if they even have enough fuel to get off the runway today. Why don’t I come and meet whomever you want me to meet?”
“You’d do that?” My God, her eyes were so sad.
“Sure, let me grab my things.”
“Is it cool being a part of the Committee?” Niobe asked as we sped along the silent corridor in a BICC golf cart.
“I guess,” I said. “I mean, it’s great being a part of something that’s supposed to be doing good, but sometimes . . . sometimes it’s hard.”
There was a faint whiff of burning flesh. I glanced around, but there was nothing but smooth, unblemished wall flashing by.
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“But you get to do a lot of other cool things, too.”
“True. I got to go to the Academy Awards and the VMAs, and they had a parade for us at Disneyland after that mess in Egypt. So that was okay. But doing press junkets, not so great.”
The cart slowed as Niobe lifted her foot from the pedal and looked at me. “But isn’t it fun having them ask you questions and then they actually pay attention to you?”
“Yeah . . . not so much,” I replied. “When we got back from Egypt they sent us out on a goodwill tour. It was pretty hellish. Not because of the people who wanted to meet us—they were almost always cool.” Except for the woman who threw pig’s blood on me and called me a murderer, I thought. “But that press stuff is less than thrilling. Trust me, no fun at all.”
We sped up. “Oh,” Niobe said. “I just thought that after American Hero and being on the Committee that your life would be, you know, perfect.”
“I don’t think life’s ever perfect.”
“It was pretty perfect when Tiffani got knocked off AH.” She gave me a sly smile.
I smiled back. “Yeah, that was kinda perfect.”
“Have you seen any of the promos for the new season of AH?” Niobe asked. She sounded excited.
“Yeah,” I said. “They wanted me to do some teasers, but I was out of the country when they were shooting.”
“What do you think of the new aces?”
“I think they have no idea what they’re getting themselves into.”
Being an ace, sometimes you forget that other people who get the virus aren’t so fortunate. Everyone knows that the virus kills, but people forget that it also maims.
Niobe led me through a pair of swinging doors into the children’s ward. There were bright mobiles, stuffed animals, and posters on the walls. Some of the girls had wrapped their IV stands in beads and Mylar stickers. At least I think they were girls. This was the place where they put the sickest kids—the ones the wild card virus had not transformed, but had crippled.
“We have a special guest today,” Niobe said. “She was a contestant on American Hero and she’s now a member of the Committee: the Amazing Bubbles!”
There wasn’t thunderous applause, but I hadn’t expected any. I’d done my share of hospital appearances in the last year. From Walter Reed to Beth Israel they were mostly the same—sick people who just wanted anything normal in their lives again. Even seeing an ace in person seemed normal. After all, I’d been on the TV in their living rooms.
Niobe led me to bed after bed. In one, a boy lay wrapped in a plaid robe. He was indigo. He looked like Violet Beauregarde after that unfortunate gum incident. We passed another bed where a child floated above the covers like a balloon. Balloon Girl gave a little wave as we went by. It was obvious that Niobe liked all these children and they liked her. But at one bed, she stopped and began laughing before she could introduce me.
Sitting in the middle of the bed was a tiny boy. He was perfectly proportioned with a shock of black hair. As I watched, his features began to change. It was like watching a live-action version of computer morphing.
His hair grew longer until it came to his waist. His features changed, became more feminine. Then I realized: he looked like Cher.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s just wrong.”
Niobe giggled. “Watch this.”
The boy’s body began to bulge, arms and legs expanding as if there were balloons in them.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “The Michelin Man?”
Niobe and the boy started laughing together and I realized that this was one of Niobe’s children. I knew she was psychically linked to them, but that was about all I knew about her power. She’d been pretty closemouthed about it. When she stopped giggling and could speak again, she said, “This is Xerxes.”
I reached out so we could shake, and he slipped his tiny hand into mine. “It’s very nice to meet you,” he said. He sounded like Marvin the Martian.
“You should take that act on the road,” I said.
Niobe stopped laughing. I was baffled. I mean, I’m not the greatest joke teller in the world, but I didn’t think my comment had sucked all that bad: besides, as deuce powers went, Xerxes’s wasn’t a bad one.
“Uhm, I guess we should move along,” I said. “It was nice to meet you, too, Xerxes.”
Niobe led me to another bed. I wasn’t certain of this patient’s gender, so I decided to follow Niobe’s lead.
“This is Jenny,” she said. “Jenny’s card turned about a month ago. She isn’t sick, but she keeps expelling her internal organs when she gets too excited.”
“Hey, Jenny,” I said. “You’re not going to spew on me, are you?”
Niobe gave a little gasp, but Jenny laughed. Or kinda gurgled. “Usually people are too freaked out to say anything to me,” she said. “You know, I was rooting for Drummer Boy on American Hero.”
“I can see why,” I said. “He’s a musician and chicks dig musicians.” That was my polite response when people said anything about Drummer Boy. I still thought he was a massive douche even after Egypt.
“Would you sign my book?” One of her flippers shoved an autograph book across the bed.
I flipped through it. She had an astonishing number of famous people. She must have started it before her card turned. I found a blank page toward the back and scrawled my name and a dedication across it.
“There you go. I can give Drummer Boy a call and see if he can send you a signed picture. I mean, if you’d like that.”
“That would be so great!” Jenny said. “Oh, dear, I think you better stand back.”
Niobe and I moved back and, sure enough, Jenny hurled her innards. It was not only disgusting to look at, but the smell was awful.
“Okay, well, I think Bubbles has a flight to catch,” Niobe said.
The flight to New York had been about what I expected: long, boring, and way too crowded. (The less said about the flight from Carlsbad to El Paso the better. Terror in the skies.)
I was ready to get back home to Stuyvesant Town. It wasn’t in the hippest part of the city, but it felt like a real home to me. It was at Fourteenth Street and Avenue A. Lower East Side, but not quite trendy—yet.
The neighborhood was only just beginning to be gentrified. It still had lots of cheap clothing shops, good ethnic food (also cheap), and some great bookstores within walking distance. And the Stuyvesant Town complex remained what it had been designed for—middle-class housing.
Of course, I was living there illegally, subletting from a couple who had moved to Columbus after their baby was born. They’d wanted to be closer to the relatives, but hadn’t wanted to give up the idea of being New Yorkers. So we’d agreed that when they wanted to come back, I would vacate. That had been two years ago, so I felt pretty secure where I was—for now.
But I couldn’t get home from the airport without transportation, and today there were only a handful of cabs and a wicked-long line to get one.
I eventually found myself in the back of a makeshift cart being pulled by a joker. He was at least eleven feet tall, almost all of his height in his legs. It was weird as hell being dragged through NYC by daddy longlegs. I wondered where he got his pants tailored. At the Big and Tall Men’s Shop?
Traffic was almost nonexistent. But we still had to navigate around cars that had been abandoned by their owners. Bikes shot around us, the riders whooping at us as they went by. The buses were running, as there had been an executive order to keep them operating.
Things had been bad when I’d left, but they seemed worse now. There were boarded-up shops on almost every street. And the places that were open, mostly bodegas, had signs out with shocking prices on them.
The joker pulled over to the curb in front of my building and I paid in cash. Between the Committee stipend and the endorsement work I’d had over the last year, I was doing okay. Who knew letting a Volvo hit you could be so lucrative? And with commercials, I didn’t have to wonder if t
he rest of the people involved were going to be alive the next day.
I walked up to the fourth floor. Good for the muscles, I thought.
When I absorbed energy, I didn’t just get fat. My muscles got bigger, too. That much I’d figured out by myself. So I’d started training to give myself as much muscle as I could pack onto my frame. I was certainly more buff now, but my body type didn’t bulk up. I wanted to be more agile when I was fat. The muscles helped with that, too.
The air was stale in my apartment. I cranked open all the windows and turned on the ceiling fans. My mail was piled up on the table. Only in Stuyvesant Town would I have trusted a neighbor with the key to my apartment.
I pawed through the mail, pulling out the bills and fan mail, trashing the junk. Then I booted up my computer. There was a ridiculous amount of useless e-mail and one or two from Ink:
To:
[email protected] From:
[email protected] I know we talked this morning, but I miss you already. When you finally get done at BICC, we need to have a long, long conversation about your mouth and my clit. Or vice versa.
Honestly, a girl can only masturbate so much. . . .
Come home soon!
Your ever-changing girl toy,
Juliet
* * *
There were more e-mails from her, but you get the idea. And there was also one from Niobe.
To:
[email protected] From:
[email protected] Dear Michelle,
It was wonderful to finally meet you in person. I wish we’d had more time together, but I was so happy for the time you spared.
And I wanted to especially thank you for meeting the children. It meant the world to them. Xerxes thought you were funny and Jenny thought you were “very cool about the whole unswallowing thing.” (Her words, not mine.)