“I don’t see it,” he said.
“They probably have someplace in there where she stays at night,” Jay said, pointing to a sort of cave opening in the back wall.
Doug stared at the cave. A light breeze tickled his skin and made him shiver—a by-product of being so low on blood, he thought. After a feeding he could barely feel temperature at all. Suddenly his ears pricked at an unexpected sound.
“‘What the world…needs now,’” sang Jay.
“Wait, shh. Someone’s coming.”
“I can’t hear—”
“Dammit,” whispered Doug. “Hide.”
Jay lurched in one direction, jerked back, lurched in another, tripped for no reason. He finally made it through a gauntlet of invisible obstacles and crouched behind a water fountain shaped like a hippopotamus throwing up.
Doug scrambled over the railing and found a ten-foot drop into the panda yard. He hung by locked and aching fingertips from the top of the wall as a night watchman ambled into view.
Nothing to see, Doug thought at the watchman. Just walk on by…
The night watchman sat down on a bench with his back to the panda pen.
Son of a— thought Doug, as his grip failed and he tumbled noiselessly onto the lush grass below. He paused and listened. Jay was okay. The man above was unwrapping food and singing something in a mumbly hum, something about life being a highway. He sounded like he might be a while.
The yard behind Doug was still pandaless and quiet. He hurried, hunched, through the grass, past a thicket of bamboo, a pond, and stopped at the mouth of the cave Jay had pointed out before. It had a gate, but the gate was unlocked, designed only to keep pandas in, he supposed, not vampires out. It opened with a high squeal that Doug was pretty sure only he could hear. He, and any dogs nearby. And maybe pandas. He really wished now that he knew more about pandas.
Once inside, Doug got a good look at the panda and had to admit he’d been worrying too much. It appeared to be asleep. It appeared, actually, to be just a huge stuffed toy, the kind stepdads buy for their stepkids when they’re overcompensating. The illusion was supported by a rubber pig, which probably squeaked, nestled beside it on the straw bed. And a plastic xylophone hanging from the bars of a narrow window. And a big pink ball that had settled where the bare concrete floor sloped downward to a drain. It was like the toy department of a prison.
The floor curved up into the walls, one of which was nearly hidden behind a wide fan of bamboo stalks. The floor was painted bright white. All in all, the whole space wasn’t any larger than a two-car garage. It smelled the way a garage would smell if you left a bear inside it too long.
Doug breathed through his mouth and tiptoed over to the panda, its body slowly inflating and deflating like a fur balloon.
He realized, suddenly, that there was a significant difference between this panda and the cows back home. With the cows, it was easy to sniff out a vein, break the skin, take care of business. Here, he could imagine biting down and getting only a mouthful of hair.
He leaned over the animal, fangs bared, his hesitant hands hovering clawlike in the air, lacking only a black cape and high collar to finish the picture. Then a faint whirr from above caught his attention. Light glinted off a single lens, a glassy eye in the corner that motored slowly upward to look from panda to Doug.
Is that a camera? thought Doug.
The camera angled down again, past the panda, square on the rubber pig toy, and Doug wondered, Is that really a rubber pig toy?
He stepped around the panda and crouched on his hands and knees in front of the thing. It wasn’t a toy. It was some kind of animal. It looked like a naked rat.
What the hell IS that?
3
THE MAGIC KINGDOM
“OW. OW. OW,” said Doug from under his white plastic poncho.
“It’s only a little farther,” said Jay.
“Ow. Why would anyone want to live in a place this sunny? Is it leaving marks?”
Doug imagined what a pretty picture he made—zinc oxide on his nose, his cheeks greased with SPF 80. A small crack in the left lens of his spare glasses. Jay bent over to look under Doug’s hood.
“No. You’re just kind of red.”
“Ow.”
“Does it hurt?” asked Jay.
“What have I been saying for the past eight blocks?”
“It’s only a little farther,” said Jay.
“Actually, that’s what you’ve been saying for the past eight blocks.”
It was the first day of Comic-Con International, a four-day event in San Diego and the largest comic book and pop-culture convention in America. A building like a shopping mall with fins housed acres of elaborate booths with Jumbo-Tron displays and life-size sculptures of superheroes and signings with actual comics artists and creators. All right next to game-playing stations where you could try out next year’s video games and talk to the programmers and then mosey over to the seller’s area with its hundreds upon hundreds of long boxes packed with hard-to-find-issues and action figures—but who has time for action figures when you have to rush to make the eleven o’clock panel discussion with the creator and stars of Nebula-Bravo followed by a nap-inducing lunch in the food courts where you were forced to eat soft pretzels and pizza because they didn’t sell anything else.
Doug was really going to miss the soft pretzels and pizza.
“Ow. I’m going to have to drink someone soon,” he told Jay, and realized he was slurring his speech. Was this what it felt like to be drunk? “I’ve got the shakes. And I was totally getting somewhere with that girl last night, too.”
“Sorry,” said Jay, for maybe the thirtieth time. Doug’s gut twisted. He hadn’t meant to squeeze another apology out of Jay. He hadn’t meant to give the impression that they’d only been thrown out of the party because of Jay’s monopoly of the hall bathroom, either, but somehow he had.
“What happened after the panda hit you?” asked Jay. “Can you remember now?”
“No. I can remember everything up to—Well, I noticed the camera, and it’s looking at me, and then it looks down at this little pink thing next to the panda, so I look, too, and it’s this tiny animal.”
“Baby Shuan Shuan,” said Jay. “You’re so lucky.”
“I feel lucky. So I’m looking down at this tiny hairless panda when I hear footsteps, and a door bursts in, and these uniformed guys with metal poles start tasering me. And you know what doesn’t work when people are tasering you? It’s shouting ‘Stop tasering me.’ If they’re tasering you already, they won’t stop because you ask them to.”
“No,” said Jay.
“The Tasers aren’t working so well on me, maybe because I’m a vampire, but they really, really hurt, so I back up, trying to get away from the guards, and I guess I get too close to Baby Ching Chong because that’s when the panda punches me in the head.”
“Yeah.”
“Then there’s a scene missing, because the next thing I know I’m back out in the zoo, in the bushes, without any clothes on. So you gotta figure that’s one hell of a missing scene.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then I go to find you, but you’re not where I left you—”
“I said we should meet by—”
“—but you are by the exit, and the exit is by the T-shirt stand, so I don’t have to drive home naked. So that’s fine. Ow.”
Jay looked glum.
“We should have left money on the stand,” he said. “What we did…it was bad enough without stealing a T-shirt.”
Doug sighed. “Yeah.”
They crossed the train tracks to the convention center.
“But it was a stupid shirt,” Doug added. “They can’t expect anybody to actually pay for a shirt that says, ‘I (picture of an elephant) the San Diego Zoo.’ What does that even mean?”
“Oh, man,” said Jay. “Look at that line.”
Doug looked up, but his glasses went foggy from the smoke suddenly rising off his
cheeks.
“AAH! Dammit!”
“Sorry.”
It was still ten minutes until the doors opened, but they walked to the front of a grumbling line of fanboys, cosplayers, furries, goths, and a smattering of girlfriends that were there out of curiosity, or there to be supportive of their boyfriends, or maybe there because they had assumed they’d be a singularity—the only queen in the anthill, with all the power that implied. This last type was easy to spot, dressed in clothes so brazenly revealing they could pass for Halloween costumes. Doug knew there would be a lot of girls here who genuinely liked comics, too, though they never seemed to like the same kind he did. Still, it gave him hope that he’d eventually get lucky. He’d be at his local comic shop or maybe (why not?) even at this very convention. He and some beautiful girl would reach for the same back issue of Young X-Men at the same time. They’d have a laugh about it. They’d get to talking and discover they shared a great love of anime and customized action figures. Then they’d have sex on the fucking Batmobile or something.
“No cutting!” shouted Doctor Doom, or someone dressed just like him.
“That’s a really good Doctor Doom costume,” said Jay. “Look at those rivets.”
“Movie or comics version?” asked Doug.
“Comics.”
“Hold on,” said a large bald man whose costume was a simple black T-shirt that said his job (or name or personal motto) was Security. “Are you an exhibitor?”
“No—”
“Do you have an exhibitor’s badge?”
They didn’t.
“Back of the line, then.”
“My friend can’t stand out in the sun like that,” said Jay. “He has really sensitive skin. See?”
Jay lifted the hood of Doug’s poncho just slightly.
“Christ,” whispered the man. He lifted a walkie-talkie to his mouth. “This is Craig at D stop. I got a situation.”
The walkie-talkie squawked something only Craig could understand. He said, “Copy” and returned it to its holster, all the while staring fixedly at Jay.
“It’ll just be a minute.”
“Okay,” said Jay. “Thanks.”
Craig nodded. “So…he likes comics?”
“Yeah.”
“He speaks English, too,” said Doug.
Craig was joined by another big man in identical clothing, apart from a black baseball cap that said HEAD. Doug thought it seemed awfully literal.
The man said, “I’m head of security, boys.”
Oh.
“What’s the problem?”
“These two want in early,” said Craig, “on account of this kid can’t be out in the sun.”
“Oh, yeah,” said the head of security, looking under Doug’s poncho. “He’s got some kind of skin thing, right? They can wait in the lobby.”
“You’re not surprised?” said Craig.
“Surprised? Hell, no. This is the big comic book weekend. If the freakin’ boy in the bubble rolled up here, I wouldn’t be surprised. Hey, watch this.”
He called out to the queue. “Anyone lose an inhaler?”
About one in ten checked his pockets.
“See?” said Head, loud enough for anyone to hear. “Look at that lineup. It’s like all the kids picked last for every kickball game in America.”
“Hey, screw you!” shouted a boy in a Gorillaz T-shirt. “I’m on my high school swim team!”
“Ooh.” Head laughed. “Swim team.”
“We went to state last year! What’d you ever do, fat ass?!”
“Hey!” said Head. “Watch your mouth or I’ll watch it for ya!”
“He wants to watch your mouth,” said another boy.
“Yeah,” said a third attendee, one in his twenties, “because that is all he does, right? That’s his job. Watching things. Whereas this line is full of geniuses and software engineers.”
“Maybe I’ll hire you to watch my mansion someday, dick-pipe!” someone shouted.
“That’s it! Back of the line!” said Head.
“Maybe I’ll hire you to clean my pool!” said someone else.
“Back of the line! All of you!”
“Can we go in?” Jay asked Craig.
“Knock yourselves out,” said Craig.
In minutes they were in a zigzagging line of low curtains, and they slalomed through it, alone; right, left, right, toward a row of tables manned by seated, serious women. Each woman looked like she was someone’s least-favorite aunt. Each woman had something to bestow on Doug and Jay, and the two boys walked in procession and received each of their tokens in turn.
Marjorie gives the Guide to Programming, your companion to the kingdom that awaits.
Wendy grants to each an Official Badge, which Mustn’t Be Lost.
From Ellen comes the Bag of Holding, filled with buttons, key chains, and all manner of promos.
And from Madge, the Book of Coupons. A thirty-dollar value.
Then, part the thin gray curtains and step, if you’re ready, into the Great Hall and taste of all its—
“Jesus,” said Doug. “Look.”
Almost immediately a girl sauntered by dressed as Femininja—which is to say, in a black bikini with a sword.
“Huh,” said Jay.
“My spidey sense is tingling,” Doug whispered, and looked over at Jay, who possibly hadn’t heard him. He’d spent an afternoon several weeks ago thinking of funny comic book things to say when girls passed. He had a notebook full of them.
The exhibit space on the ground floor was like three football fields of stands, booths, and tables, behind each of which was something to want, or someone to want, or someone to want to talk to. Directly in front of them now was the original captain’s chair from the set of Gastronauts, a book-brick bunker of manga and imported action figures in packages dashed with Japanese, and Lou Ferrigno.
“Why does everything look cooler with Japanese on it?” asked Doug.
“Huh?” Jay said absently.
They strode forward, slowly, deliberately, taking it all in—this goblin market at the nexus of all realities where a circa 1980s Iron Man and an original 1963 Iron Man and Naruto and Sherlock Holmes could all be waiting for the same bathroom. Would it convey the scale of the thing to know that there was a person who elected to dress as the Kool-Aid Man? Would it convey it better to know there were two?
“Look,” said Doug. “Those two Kool-Aid Men are fighting.”
“I don’t know what to do,” said Jay. “I don’t know what to do.”
“About what? The Kool-Aid Men?”
Jay shook his head. Then he motioned at the whole thing, at everything: the comics and the culture and the people pulling the first Kool-Aid Man off the second Kool-Aid Man.
“We’re going to walk around and look at things,” said Doug.
“But what things? Which ones? What if we don’t see all of them? What if we look at the wrong things?”
“Look. Calm down. We’re just going to get the lay of the land. We’re going to skim through the program and circle things. If someone tries to hand us something, we let them. If we pass a trivia quiz, we’re going to shout ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths!’ because that’s usually the answer. Are you going to be okay?”
Jay swallowed and nodded. The convention hall was filling with people. Someone in Spider-Man tights crouched near them and pointed with two web-slinging fingers.
“Hey, true believers!” he said. “The Marvel Entertainment Group is in booth six thirty!”
Doug gave a hesitant thumbs-up. “Thanks.”
“Thank you, Spider-Man,” said Jay.
Spider-Man leaped away and delivered his line again to a group of Japanese girls.
The two boys tunneled through the feedlot of warm bodies to visit every table and booth in turn. They got writers and artists to sign comics and a model dressed as Punching Judy to sign Doug’s arm. It would have been a good opportunity to say one of the funny comic-book lines he’d thought up (“You’r
e making me horny. You wouldn’t like me when I’m horny.”), but he couldn’t quite manage it. Punching Judy was getting dirty looks from the writer/illustrator of SuperBitch, who was talking to a local news crew from her adjoining booth.
“Superhero secret identities are like virginity,” she told the camera. “All these sweaty boys want to see the day when she gives it up, the day everyone knows her, but then after it’s gone, they’re disappointed. They want her to have a secret identity again.”
Doug supposed that was true. It was always this big euphoric event in a comic when the hero’s girlfriend or whoever learned his secret. Everybody wanted to read that story, but a year later the writers would probably give the girlfriend amnesia. You always wanted to put the cat back in the bag.
He’d blown his cover last night at that party, but Doug was going to be more careful from now on. He sort of wished he hadn’t even told Jay.
They watched the world premiere of a new movie trailer and then attended a ten thirty panel discussion with DC comics editors, where there was a prize: a light-up resin Green Lantern ring, one of only five thousand produced.
“Cool,” said Jay.
“Green Lantern’s gay,” said Doug.
The panel moderator flashed it off and on a couple of times. “Is that not awesome?” he said. “And the ring goes…to the audience member who has traveled the farthest to be here!”
“Philadelphia!” shouted Doug. A dozen other attendees shouted their hometowns, too. The ring went to a man from Belgium wearing a Tintin shirt.
“We don’t live in Philadelphia,” whispered Jay.
“We live in a suburb of Philadelphia. You think they know where Ardwynne is?”
“I know you thought that was it,” the moderator continued, “but it just so happens…yes, I think I may have another ring…for whomever’s traveled the farthest from within the United States?”
“Philadelphia!” Doug shouted again.
“Bangor!” shouted some kid from Bangor.
“Bangor is farthest!” said the moderator.
“No, it isn’t!” Doug protested. He got to his feet. “No, it isn’t. Not if you take into account the curvature of the Earth, which—”