tell me you’ve been asleep all this time.”
“Of course not.”
“Hey babe, if I didn’t know better I’d say you were jealous.”
“Of course not.”
“Republican or democrat?”
“Democrat.”
“Guess what I’ve got.”
“Oh great—I love that game.”
“What about them Yankees?”
“Yeah, fourth and three play on their thirty yard line with only forty seconds to go.”
The script included every correct response for the day’s exchanges between Yanda and himself. That evening he batted them back at Yanda and her face lit up. At first Terry loved seeing her believe this was him, but quickly became disgusted by her delight. Didn’t she value the genuine article at all? And this stuff was so drab, so uninspired. It took an effort for him not to add splashes of color. But he knew that upset people.
He traced the mail source to a complex in the city. He’d hoped this at least would be interesting—a Mount Weather-style bunker or Pinay cabal. But it was an unmanned factory emitting no light. The same beige streams of dialogue were continually recycled under grey stacks, the blind produce of identical codes, bound and labeled for delivery. There was neither sentience nor malevolence in this automation. Energy was neither created nor destroyed in writ so poor.
Examining the records, Terry learned that his own scripts were being delivered in error to a Telly Tantamount right in his town. He dropped by the guy’s house and was greeted at the door by a crazed, seething wreck, a jumpy cadaver with deodorant balls for eyes. “Told ya I don’t want any!” shrieked the guy, terrified. Terry’s heart went out to him.
“Telly? I know what you’ve been going through. Nothing connects? You’ve been getting scripts meant for me, man. Admin goof.”
The man stared. “I ... I don’t know what to say.” And Terry saw the relief flood him, pushing tears from his face.
Reading over some of the old scripts the man had given him, Terry ambled home. He was supposed to have said this stuff? It was insipid—false and impoverished. No wonder people were ashamed to admit they accepted it above their own spirit. He’d long suspected that if he ever discovered the nature of the game he would find it too dumb and unrewarding to play anyway. To be so hen-hearted? To live his life as stock footage? To guard forever against divergence into originality? To what end? And what would be left to him? By comparison his life of stress and concern thus far seemed a funky adventure.
And wasn’t he the lucky one. He felt an easy freedom, his limbs hanging light in his joints, while at the same time his heart bled with compassion for the folk he passed. Here he’d been suffering and all these were here too, without the born spark even to fight or tell it.
“Was it busy out?”
“Yanda,” he said, sitting down heavily and dropping the scripts aside. “Listen. I’m not really in any hurry to be illuminated. Heaven doesn’t tolerate cunning or wit. This grub in the head’s an inconvenience, I realize that, and I should probably say I’m sorry, though that’s just a guess on my part. But I want you to know. Despite your sentences being a barricade to truth. Despite your approval existing only for trifles. Despite your gargantuan efforts to bury yourself, deny your mind and cremate your courage. Despite your attempt to remove all distinguishing marks—I see you. You’re an angel, babe. Mad, soft around the edges, scared, and trying your damnedest with what you have. I love you down to the deepest atom. What do you say to that?”
TUSK
After a pert little heist one day Easy Fortezza felt unaccountably reluctant to remove his mask. It was the amiably layered face of an elephant. He wasn’t even meant to participate in such heists, let alone become transmogrified into a tusken behemoth during the procedure. Because he was a favorite nephew of Eddie Thermidor the gang boss, everyone indulged him. But when after a whole week he was still wearing the bonce, some of the house hoods had a sit-down about it. “So he’s got a attitude problem,” shrugged Larry Crocus, cracking his knuckles.
“Attitude,” grunted Moray.
“Maybe it’s a phase,” said Sam “Sam” Bleaker.
“Phase,” grunted Moray.
“You guys’ll be the death o’ me,” laughed Barry Nosedive.
“Death,” grunted Moray.
“I mean it’s not like he’s done any harm,” Nosedive continued. “Maybe he’s evolving under the pressure.”
“He poses the threat of a good example,” hissed Shiv, examining his knife.
“Sure. We’ll get a reputation.”
“Death,” grunted Moray.
“We can’t waste Fortezza,” stated Nosedive. “He’s good—irreplaceable.”
“He appears to have been effortlessly replaced by an elephant,” muttered Mr. Flak without inflection. He was a man who did not have to raise his voice as he cared little whether anyone heard him—and no-one ever did.
“This droopy mammal,” hissed Shiv, “cow-eyed and inscrutable, will kill us all.”
“The boss don’t even know Easy goes out on them installation pieces,” added Bleaker. “He finds out about this the lot of us’ll be found on an empty lot with our future round our ankles.”
“And our ears stuffed with mini veggies,” hissed Shiv.
“Let me talk to the boy,” muttered Mr. Flak. “He trusts me.”
No-one heard the older guy.
“Death,” grunted Moray.
Mr. Flak visited Easy’s apartment for a friendly chat on the matter of the boys’ decision to send him to the ivory yard. As he waited for Easy to show, the boys planted a bomb on each corner of the building in a deliberate deviation from mob intervention method. Only one went off, obliterating Mr. Flak and the apartment, and the feds suppressed knowledge of the others thinking it was another covert job gone sloppy. Thermidor clocked the mob style but concluded it was a rival gang—maybe Betty getting above her strata. Considering Easy and Mr. Flak were both dead of dispersion, he declared gang war.
Easy meanwhile went on the skitter deep underground in Beerlight City, too tired and tangled to retaliate. Had he offended, or been offended against? At what point had he diverged into this dumb fugitive routine? He knew that among those who suspected his survival he was banished. He wept tears thick as glue.
But he finally found he wasn’t alone regarding the masks. There was even a support group for crooks in just his situation. One night he was listening to one of his brother sufferers address the group. “My name’s Josh,” the brother was saying. “And I’ve been wearing Newt Gingrich’s face for ... three years now. Unlike many of you, I can never feel pride. But I’m resolved to live with the abuse, the scorn, the hatred—and live life as best I can. That’s all I have to say.” There was applause as Josh sat down. Easy later heard that a plastic surgeon had altered the mask to Boris Karloff by shortening the forehead.
But that evening as Josh sat down, Easy beheld a pale horse sitting to his right—the sleekest creature he’d ever seen. After the meeting she approached him. “You don’t need this any more than I do, tusker.”
“So why you here?”
“Ill will hunting. I’m Lady Miss V. Short for Voltaire—I run the Fist of Irony under Valentine Street. The meek are welcome to the earth, Easy.” The pony girl led him across town and down a stairwell to a basement entrance. She pointed out a light meter over the door to measure PVC gleam intensity and took him in.
The