We watched Alan Greenspan and the Statue of Liberty for about an hour. They got tired of dancing after about twenty minutes and flew up to the roof of the Stock Exchange, where they dangled their fuzzy red legs over the edge and swung them like kids on a swing set. They talked, but no sound came out. At one point, they really got stuck into something. Lady Liberty flipped him off and hopped down to hang out with Integrity Protecting the Works of Man, but, as the figures decorating the Stock Exchange remained marble and not paint, they weren’t much company for her. Finally, Alan and Liberty started to fade and disperse, coming gently apart into thousands of tiny flecks of the paint I’d picked up for Jason at Art Mart on my lunch hour.
It took us a while to recover enough to talk about what the fuck just happened. Blah, blah, blah: did you see that/I can’t believe it/it’s impossible/did we get pranked/did we do all of the drugs and just forget that we did all of the drugs? All the while, my brain cheerfully munched popcorn and babbled away: I told you, we’re in a movie now. See, we even sound like movie people sound. We’re saying what movie people say. Everything is A-OK! Silly Samantha, the effects weren’t even that great.
“I made that happen,” Jason whispered. MacArthur the Genius Cat kneaded his lap plaintively. Make petting happen, please. “Somehow. Do you think I can do it again?”
We didn’t dare try it outside. The sun cannonballed obnoxiously through our windows. If it worked, everyone would see. He grabbed the smallest stencil from his “new” pile: a Roman-style double-headed imperial eagle in a Carolina Fried Chicken combo meal box with a side of fries. The fries had triggers and safeties and barrels: deep-fried assault weapons. Jason shook an Art Mart can of Yellow #455A Last Week’s Lemoncake and emerged urban media onto a patch of wall behind our refrigerator.
This refrigerator. Oh. I guess that’s what the New School kids call foreshadowing. Wow, it’s fucking easy to miss in real life!
Spray, blow, wait, peel. Nothing.
“You held out your hand toward it. To get the smudgy bit,” I reminded him.
“Oh, right! God, that feels lame.”
Jason held out his hand. He waggled his fingers like a bad stage magician in an effort to feel less stupid doing this stupid thing.
Slowly, the double-headed imperial eagle sloughed off the wall, still stuck in its Carolina Fried Chicken combo box. It plopped onto the dirty floor behind the refrigerator (this refrigerator), dragging the box behind it like a two-legged rescue dog dragging its little puppy wheelchair through the park. The imperial bird-monster looked up at us and squeaked soundlessly. A couple of gun-fries fell out of their bag as that weird tiny yellow latex mutant squeezed past us into the kitchen, firing useless puffs of anti–military industrial complex paint into the dust bunnies. MacArthur lost his fucking mind. He shrieked—apparently, cats can shriek—and reared up on his haunches. Our little guy thundered toward the combo box of (really, let’s be honest) muddled political messages. His paws scrabbled on the linoleum, flying out from under him with the excitement of the hunt, and thus, the Chris Farley of Abyssinians both pounced and fell on top of his prey. With a howl of triumph, MacArthur the Genius Cat chowed down on the symbol of the twelve-secret-herbs-and-spices might of Rome and Byzantium, ripping it in two and gobbling both halves up before we could yell no, no bad kitty don’t eat daddy’s magic paint golem thingy! We just stared at the Carolina Fried Carnage.
We figured out it was the button’s fault very scientifically. I said, “It’s that goddamned hipster anarchist shitbird,” and Jason agreed. “What is with you and eagles right now?”
The only other new thing in our life was MacArthur, and when we asked whether he gave Jason superpowers, he just showed us his very self-satisfied butthole and waddled off in search of fallen gun-fries. No man left behind. Plus, it didn’t work if Jason took the button off, and it didn’t work for me if I put the button on. We promptly got very drunk and giggly and busy making vaguely leftist spray-paint animated action figures, which went on for a week or so before the Avant Garde showed up to play Officer Exposition and drink the last of our beer.
Not the whole Avant Garde. They don’t all live in this dimension. See, the universe is kind of like a shitty apartment building. All the dimensions nice and separate and doing their own dimensional thing, only the walls are thin and the insulation is garbage and the roof leaks, so sometimes you can hear everyone else screwing and practicing bass and yelling about who forgot to take out the trash. Some people have the super’s key ring and can just go rummage around in other people’s stuff whenever they want. Some people are shut-ins.
Look at me analogizing like it’s normal to know this stuff!
Anyway, Still Life and Greyscale came to lock us down, knocking at the door like FBI agents when they were all of six months older than us, considerably less employed, super invested in playing twin minotaur mages on an MMO called Warlock and Key: The Online Adventure, and called Simon and Nina.
Simon clapped his hands and said, “Let’s all have a drink. We’ll all need a drink.”
I didn’t move to get drinks. Because A, I’m not your waitress, guy; B, don’t invite yourself into my booze, thanks; and C, Simon was in black and white. Like an old photo. Just sucked dry of color. Other than that, he looked like a normal twentysomething, a little sweaty, a little too big for the weddings-and-funerals suit he’d obviously felt the occasion deserved, but normal. Just desaturated. Greyscale. Nina looked like the human version of one of those insta-vintage photo filters. She dressed like she’d walked off the set of a 1970s kids’ show: rainbow-striped shirt, suspenders, pink jeans, green-rimmed glasses, puffy black braids. Like she was gonna teach me about phonics in a minute.
I like Nina now. She keeps chickens because she likes them better than people, and for whatever reason, her powers don’t work on chickens. My hands are tied behind my back but I can feel the brown eggs she dropped off last week resting in their carton. I asked her once:
“How come you play that computer game all the time if you have superpowers in real life? Isn’t it boring? I wouldn’t touch a game about filling out grant applications and freelancing for the AP, you know?”
Nina Batista petted my cat and whispered, “In the game, if I lose, nothing bad happens.”
The situation was this: there were, in fact, such things as dimensions and cosmic battles and what amounts to magic even if it isn’t technically magic. Superpowers existed. Superheroes existed. Supervillains definitely existed. Some of these powers didn’t come from a person but from objects that sort of chose a person. The Avant Garde was a group of people who had these objects, and now Jason had one too. Nina Batista and Simon Stewart were Still Life and Greyscale. Jason would meet the Pointillist, Bauhaus, Turpentine, and Zeitgeist in due time.
“It’s not really a button,” Nina explained shyly, nodding toward the zombie eagle on Jason’s coat. “It just looks like one in this reality. It’s . . . a semi-sentient energy nexus embodying the power of one of the Seven Eidolons of Artifice, who live in the Imago Dimension. Godlike beings of pure emotion that feed on the vibrations created by all human art. We are their avatars. We fight for freedom and goodness on this plane of existence. Does that make any sense at all?”
Jason and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Sure,” we said at the same time. “We grew up watching Star Trek, so . . .”
“Yeah, that doesn’t even sound that weird,” Jason finished for me.
Apparently, Jason’s button was the sigil of the Chaotic White Eidolon. Simon won the Voracious Red Eidolon’s cuff links in a Big Claw machine when he was twelve, and Nina stole a bracelet from a bodega in eleventh grade that turned out to belong to the Pacific Violet Eidolon. Whoops. Jason explained about the neo-imperial combo box and Alan Greenspan and the alien tentacle lizard CEO and the Civil War soldier with a smartphone and all the rest of our one-hour photos.
“What . . . what can you guys do?” he ventured.
“Shapeshift,” said Simon.
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“Freeze time,” said Nina.
“Cool,” said Jason.
A classic awkward silence descended. I snapped a picture. Couldn’t help it. It’s stuck on the outside of this refrigerator with a MOMA magnet.
Simon pinched his cuff links and pixelated into a black-and-white tabby cat. He trotted over to MacArthur, hoping the cat would be easier to talk to than humans. MacArthur smacked him in the face with one meaty paw and yawned.
Look, I had to spend a lot of Takeout Tuesdays with the Avant Garde. The truth is, Simon and Nina are the only ones who have anything in common besides having picked up a piece of interdimensional anti-fashion at some point in their lives and ended up with a really specific, terrifying, world-shredding new hobby. The Pointillist and Bauhaus couldn’t even stand to look at each other. Meetings were like trying to make conversation at a middle-school dance.
It turned out Jason and I were entering a program already in progress. At least, Jason was. I guess I was just . . . the loyal viewership. There must be something in the water in New York. All the villain wannabes disembark at Port Authority and try to make it big. Just like everyone else. If you can destroy the world here, you can destroy it anywhere. Remember when the Arachnochancellor crowned himself Emperor of Chicago, time-shifted Lakeshore Drive into the colonial era, and mind-controlled pretty much the entire Midwest for the duration of the holiday shopping season? After Avast and the Unstoppable Id hit him in the head with Navy Pier, he gave that interview to the BBC from Sarkomand Sanatorium. He sat there whining into his iridescent exo-suit, Yeah, but I didn’t destroy New York. So, it barely even counts.
So, Jason Remarque became the seventh member of the Avant Garde, and out they went to play Whac-A-Mole with the city’s criminal element. The Pointillist was their big gun—he could reduce anything to its constituent atoms just by touching a truly hilarious pentagram choker straight out of a preteen goth’s regular rotation. With the cosmic power of his Class of 1977 UCLA ring missing its oversize sapphire, Zeitgeist could command people like puppets. Bauhaus could click a tongue piercing with pop-art yellow frowny faces on either end and summon a gang of huge geometric dark-matter blocks that defended her (and only her, unfortunately) like she was their own best baby. And Turpentine could take you right out of the timeline if she dragged on an e-cigarette with a glowing blue tip. Like you’d never been born. At first, Jason didn’t know how he could contribute. They seemed to have the bases covered. But soon enough, he was spraying up paint armies of presidents in clown suits, GMO zombie vegetables, mecha Disney princesses, and dinosaurs with gasoline nozzles instead of tiny, tiny arms.
You’d think with a roster like that, the Avant Garde would be unstoppable. But a lot of the Imago objects had changed hands lately, and almost everyone still had kinks to work out. Basically, every night turned into a live-action role-play of those endless Who Would Win in a Fight? arguments. They started small, the supervillain equivalent of back-alley muggers, small-timers who didn’t even have brand names or grand plans yet. And because none of them felt so hot about killing, they held back. Jason came home hungry and bloody and conflicted. And high as Lady Liberty on his own supply of adrenaline.
I kept on part-time at Art Mart, freelancing the occasional shot of a press conference or a Knicks game, writing other students’ theses. Before I knew it, I was our only income. Jason couldn’t work; he slept most of the day and ran with the Garde at night. I hadn’t taken a real picture in months. Just still lifes with current events and portraits of graduating seniors in pearl earrings. The darkroom slid back into being a bathroom again. I let my hair grow out—no more cash for relaxer or Lady Sings the Blues. MacArthur glared at me resentfully as he ate his dry food, remembering the halcyon days of Beef Bounty Feline Feast in a can. I was just lonely enough to create my own mage on Warlock and Key—a wombat necromancer named Marsupia with a very unrealistic strength stat. I started raiding with Simon and his minotaur, Sketlios the Earth Mage, when I couldn’t sleep and Jason snored away. Nina hardly ever logged on anymore, but she and I played KrissKrossWords! on our phones most days. Simon always hollered For honor and King Minos! into my damn headset when his minotaur charged some hapless gnome.
“I majored in Classics,” he said apologetically over the headset. “Minotaurs are Greek, did you know?”
I did.
Life turned into one of Nina’s bubbles of frozen time. The same day, repeating forever. Work, second work, home, eat, game, sleep.
“It’s a little bit fascist, don’t you think?” I said to Jason one night after he’d dragged himself home from a semi-successful round with some kind of plutonium elemental dude downtown. I couldn’t help it. I was in the middle of some freshman’s ethics midterm.
Jason looked up from his third bowl of Frosty Frogs, startled and hurt. “What the hell does that mean, Sam?”
“Well, basically, you’re a cop without any of the things that hold cops back. Warrants, lawyers, Internal Affairs, the Fourth Amendment. You just . . . go out and beat on people less powerful than you.” I typed, The protection against unreasonable search and seizure is the core of the American justice system . . .
“Bad people!”
I didn’t look up from my laptop. The Founding Fathers intended to protect all classes equally from the predatory nature of authoritarian government . . . “Maybe. But it’s not like you followed a chain of evidence to figure that out. It’s not like you have to report to someone every time you use your power. You just seek and destroy and no one tells you no. It’s like the Wild West, but you’re the only ones with guns.”
“Samantha, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” MacArthur yowled at the change in our tone. Mommy and Daddy were fighting and it made his stomach hurt. “You’re not out there with us; you don’t see what the bad guys can do, what they are. You don’t feel the . . . the compulsion of the Eidolons. They won’t stand for us staying in and playing video games in our PJs. You can’t comprehend the power they have. The power we have, the responsibility, the stakes. You’re just . . .”
I gritted my teeth. “I’m just the only thing standing between us and the landlord. I’m just the only one of the two of us still living in the real world and not playing the world’s most elaborate game of cowboys and Indians.” The Third Amendment prevents the quartering of soldiers in private homes without the consent of the owner . . .
“That’s not what I meant, baby.” He touched the eagle on his button honking The Wages of Sin Are Reaganomics reflexively, reassuring himself. I wasn’t sure which of us he was calling baby. “People love us . . .”
“People love you because you’re magic, and face it, Jay: you used to be all about giving authority the middle finger. Now, you are Authority, with a capital A. You don’t even paint for real anymore! All war, no art. And no Wall Street big shot has a tenth of the power you’ve got pinned to your fucking coat. You got a stencil for that?”
I shouldn’t have said it. I wouldn’t have, if I’d known that within a month, I’d be resting my head on a bag of kale while my vision slowly blurred and grew dark around the label on a tub of creamed honey. But I didn’t know. Because Jason hadn’t told me they’d moved on from pimply teenagers with super strength shaking down tourists. He wanted to protect me. Sad trombone. One time when we were juniors, Jason tagged the side of a posh day care center: an unvaccinated toddler playing with wooden blocks shaped like viruses—measles, whooping cough, smallpox—while his mother looked on in pride. Underneath, he’d written, IGNORANCE KILLS.
Doesn’t it just.
• • •
A man came into Art Mart just before Halloween, which is basically Christmas for art supply stores. I had no reason to think a single thing of it. He looked like one of those dipshits who come to a gallery show and buy the most expensive piece just because it’s the most expensive piece. He was the picture of a class war—early-middle-aged, fashionably bald, the kind of body you get from well-spoken steroids you can take home t
o Mother, dark suit, one of those peacocking shirt-and-tie combos: sapphire-blue button-down and a huge knot in his emerald paisley tie.
“Welcome to Art Mart, the one-stop shop for ghoulish bargains; how can I help you?”
The bald man looked me over. “Are you Samantha Dane?”
I blinked away a zombie haze of retail autopilot. “Yes?”
He snapped his fingers at me. “I know your work! The Gallery System Is a Noose Around the Neck of the Artist, right? I actually own Boomer Fucks Love It When You Shoot Black and White. It hangs right above my fireplace. What happened to you? So much promise.”
“Boomer fucks love it when you fail,” I quipped, as I have quipped many times before.
“Quite,” Baldy laughed, but it seemed like he was laughing because that’s what humans do when someone tells a joke, not because he thought I was particularly witty. He put one meaty mitt in his deep, dark pocket. “Well, Miss Dane, I’ll confess I did not come to buy orange construction paper or spooky stencils. I heard through my friend Professor Yates that you worked here, and I was just dying to meet you. I administer an endowment for young artists, and every morning, I look at the fire in my hearth and see your work and wonder, Damn, why doesn’t powerful, outsider art like that ever get the chance it deserves while the same boring Yosemite landscapes get calendars and coffee mugs and place mats on every table?”