Inside Straight, Page 3

  “Don’t worry about the camera,” the interviewer said. “They just want to see how you come across through the lens. Just pretend it’s not there.”

  She was much prettier than the flunky, dressed a little sexy, and willing, it was clear, to flirt a little if that made you say something stupid or embarrassing for the viewing public. Jonathan liked her immediately.

  “Right,” Jonathan said. The five-inch black glass eye stared at him. “Just like it’s only you and me.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “So. Let’s see. Could you tell me a little bit about why you want to be on American Hero?”

  “Well,” he said. “Have you ever heard of Paper Lion?”

  A little frown marred the interviewer’s otherwise perfect brow. “Wasn’t that the ace who—”

  “It’s a book,” Jonathan said. “By George Plimpton. Old George went into professional football back in the 60s. Wrote a book about it. I want to do something like that. But for one thing, football’s for the football fans. For another thing, it’s been done. And for a third, reality television is for our generation what sports were for our dads. It’s the entertainment that everyone follows.”

  “You want to… report on the show?”

  “It’s not that weird. A lot of guys get into office so they can have something to write in their memoirs,” Jonathan said. “I want to see what it’s all about. Understand it. Try to make some sense of the whole experience, and sure, write about it.”

  “That’s interesting,” the interviewer said, just as if it really had been. Jonathan was just getting warmed up. This was the sound bite fest he’d been practicing for weeks.

  “The thing is, all people really see when they see aces is what we can do, you know? What makes us weird. These little tricks we’ve got—flying, or turning into a snake or becoming invisible—they define us. It’s doesn’t matter what we do. It just matters what we are.

  “I want to be the journalist and essayist and political commentator who also happens to be an ace. Not the ace who writes. This is the perfect venue for that. Just getting on the show would be a huge step. It gives me the credentials to talk about what being an ace is. And what it isn’t. Does that make sense?”

  “It does, actually,” the interviewer said, and now he thought maybe she was just a little bit intrigued by him.

  One step closer, he thought. Only about a million to go.

  “Okay,” she said. “And Jonathan Hive? Is that right?”

  “Tipton-Clarke’s the legal last name. Hive’s a nom de guerre. Or plume. Or whatever.”

  “Right. Tipton-Clarke. And what exactly is your ace ability?”

  “I turn into bugs.”

  American Hero was the height of the reality television craze. Real aces were set up to backbite and scheme and show off for the pleasure of the viewing public. And it was hosted, just for that touch of street cred, by a famous celebrity ace—Peregrine. The prize: a lot of money, a lot of exposure, the chance to be a hero. The whole thing was as fake as caffeine-free diet pop.

  And yet…

  He’d woken before dawn in his generic little hotel room, surprised by how nervous he felt. He’d eaten breakfast in his room—rubbery eggs and bitter coffee—while he watched the news. Someone tied to Egyptian joker terrorists finally assassinated the Caliph, a Sri Lankan guy with a name no one could pronounce had been named the new UN Secretary-General, and a new diet promised to reduce him three dress sizes. He’d switched channels to an earnest young reporter interviewing a German ace named Lohengrin, who was making a publicity tour of the United States to support a new BMW motorcycle, and then given up. He dropped a quick note to the blog, just to keep his maybe two dozen readers up to speed, and headed out.

  The subway ride out to the field had been like going to a job interview. He kept thinking his way through what he was going to do, how to present himself, whether his clothes were going to lie too flat to crawl back into when he had to reform. He’d half-convinced himself that his trial was going to end with him stark naked. He could always pause, of course. Leave a band of unreclaimed bugs just to preserve modesty; like a bright green insect Speedo. Because that wouldn’t be creepy.

  Now, actually sitting on the benches the Hollywood people had put out for them and watching the lights and cameras and the milling, he was starting to feel a little less intimidated. He and the other contestants were in four rows of benches just inside the first-base foul line. The three judges—Topper, Digger Downs, and the Harlem Hammer—sat at a raised table more or less on the pitcher’s mound. The invisible mechanisms of television production—sound crew, cameras, make-up chairs, lousy buffet—were kept mostly between home plate and third base. The great expanse of the outfield was set aside for the aces to prove just how telegenic they were.

  Which, you could say, varied.

  Take, for instance, the poor bastard whose turn it was at present. He had his arms stretched dramatically toward the small, puffy clouds, and had for several seconds, as his determined look edged a little toward desperate.

  “What are we waiting for?” Jonathan whispered.

  “Big storm,” the guy beside him—a deeply annoying speedster by the name of Joe Twitch—muttered back. “Maybe a tornado.”

  “Ah.”

  They waited. The alleged ace shouted and curled his fingers into claws, projecting his will out to the wide bowl of sky. The other aces who had made it through the interview were sitting on folding chairs far enough away to be safe if anything did happen. The morning air smelled of gasoline and cut grass. Joe Twitch stood up and sat back down about thirty times in a minute and a half.

  “Hey,” Jonathan said. “That cloud up there. The long one with the thin bit in the middle?”

  “Yeah?” Joe Twitch replied.

  “Looks kind of like a fish, if you squint a little.”

  “Huh,” Twitch said. And then, “Cool.”

  The public address system whined. The Harlem Hammer was going to put the poor fucker out of his misery. Jonathan was half sorry to see the guy go. Only half.

  “Mr. Stormbringer?” the Harlem Hammer said. “Really, Mr. Stormbringer, thank you very much for coming. If you could just…”

  “The darkness! It comes!” Stormbringer said in sepulchral tones. “The storm shall break!”

  An embarrassed silence fell.

  “You know,” Jonathan said, “if we wait long enough, it’s bound to rain. You know? Eventually.”

  “Mr. Stormbringer,” the Harlem Hammer tried again, while behind him Digger Downs pantomimed striking a gong. “If you could … ah… John? Could you take Mr. Stormbringer to the Green Room, please?”

  The vaguely familiar blond guy detached himself from the clot of technicians and walked, clipboard in hand, to escort the man out of the stadium. Jonathan squinted, trying to place him—café-au-lait skin, a little epicanthic folding around the eyes, blond hair out of a bottle.

  “Aw, man,” he said.

  “What?” Twitch demanded.

  Jonathan gestured toward the blond with his chin. “That’s John Fortune,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “John Fortune. He was on the cover of Time a while back. Pulled the black queen, but everyone thought it was an ace. There was this whole, weird religious thing about him being the antichrist or the new messiah or something.”

  “The one Fortunato died trying to fix up?”

  “Yeah, he’s Fortunato’s kid. And Peregrine’s.”

  Joe Twitch was silent for a moment. The only thing that seemed to slow him down was trying to think. Jonathan wondered if he could buy the guy a book of sudoku puzzles.

  “Peregrine’s producing the show,” Twitch said.

  “Yup.”

  “So that poor fucker’s working for his mom?”

  “How the mighty have fallen,” Jonathan said dismissively. A new ace was taking the field—an older guy, skinny, with what appeared to be huge chrome boots, a brown leather jacket, and a ’40s-era pilot’s he
lmet, with straps that hung at the sides of his face like a beagle’s ears.

  “Thank you,” the Harlem Hammer said. “And you are?”

  “Jetman!” the new guy announced, rising up on the little cones of fire that appeared at the soles of his boots. He struck a heroic pose. “I am the man Jetboy would have been.”

  “Oh good Christ,” Jonathan muttered. “That was sixty years ago. Let the poor fucker die, can’t you?”

  Apparently, he couldn’t.

  Of the constant stream of wannabes presenting themselves to the world, Mr. Stormbringer had been the worst so far, but the guy who called himself the Crooner hadn’t managed to do much either. And Jonathan’s personal opinion was that Hell’s Cook—a thick-necked man who could heat up skillets by looking at them—was really more deuce than ace, but at least he was a good showman.

  And there had been some decent ones, too. Jonathan’s benchmate, Joe Twitch, had made a pretty good showing and also managed to be so abrasive it was clear he’d be a good engine of petty social drama. The six-five bear, Matryoshka—who split into two five-eight bears when you hit him, and then four five-footers, and so on, apparently until you stopped hitting him—had been decent. The eleven-year-old girl carrying her stuffed dragon had seemed like a sad joke until she made the toy into a fifty-foot, fire-breathing, scales-as-armor version of itself. She’d also had a bag of other little stuffed toys. Even Digger Downs had dropped his comments about wild card daycare. Jonathan was willing to put even money she’d make the cut.

  Jetman finished his presentation to polite applause, and the blond—John Fortune—appeared at Jonathan’s side.

  “Jonathan Hive?” Fortune asked.

  “That’s me.”

  “Okay, you’re up next. We’re going to be filming from cameras two and three,” he said, pointing at a couple of the many setups in the stadium. “The judges all have monitors up there, so if you have the choice, it’s better to play to the cameras than the people.”

  “Great,” Jonathan said, mentally remaking his presentation. “Okay, yeah. Thanks.”

  “No trouble,” Fortune said.

  “Any other advice?”

  Fortune looked serious for a moment. He was a good-looking kid, but maybe a little lost around the eyes.

  “You’re the guy who turns into wasps, right? Okay, the guy on camera two is really afraid of bees, so anything you want to do up close to the lens, go for camera three.”

  “And that one’s camera three?”

  “You got it,” Fortune said. Jonathan redid his routine again.

  “Cool. Thanks.”

  Jonathan took a deep breath, rose to his feet, and walked forward to the clear area that Jetman had vacated. Jonathan nodded to the judges, flashed a smile at the other aces, and stepped out of his loafers. The grass tickled the soles of his feet.

  “Anything you’d like to say? No? Well, then, when you’re ready,” Topper said.

  It felt like breathing in—the comfortable swelling of the chest and rib cage—but it didn’t stop. His body widened and became lighter; his field of vision slowly expanded. Distantly, he could feel his clothes drop through where his arms and legs had been. A couple bugs were tangled up in them, left behind like nail clippings.

  Jonathan rose up above the crowd, seeing them all at once through hundreds of thousands of compound eyes. Hearing their voices even over the hum of his wings. He had no particular form now, and the joy of flying, the freedom of his swarm-shaped body, thrilled and vibrated in him. He hadn’t really cut loose in days. He had to focus and think about his routine. He brought his multiform attention to bear on the crowd, picked a woman sitting in clear view of camera three who looked game, and sent a tendril of wasps to her. When they landed on her lap, he could see her stiffen, and then as he moved the tiny bodies to spell out words, relax slightly.

  It is okay. Do not be scared.

  He covered her in a bright green, crawling ball gown, then burst back up into the air and sped to the end of the stadium and back, circled around, and then it was time for the grand finale. It was hard to consciously form his body, and his kinesthetic sense was fairly rough, so he sent a couple wasps to sit on top of camera three and concentrated on the view through their eyes.

  Slowly, carefully, he adjusted the swarm into a smaller, tighter, angrily buzzing mass. When the insects were thick enough to block the daylight, he moved. It was like dancing and also like trying to balance a pencil. The swarm that was his flesh took shape—huge, floating, ill-formed letters. EAT AT JOE’S.

  He took the swarm back to his fallen clothes, the insects crawling into the spaces within the cloth and pushing gently out to allow another few wasps in and then more and more as the bugs congealed again into flesh. He was tired and exhilarated. He took a bow to the polite clapping. The judges asked a couple of questions—yes, the wasps could sting; there were around a hundred thousand wasps in the swarm; yes, if he flew through insecticide, he would get viciously ill. Digger Downs called him Bugsy, the Harlem Hammer asked about his blog (an extra couple thousand hits if that made it to the final cut), and it was over. He walked back to his seat on the benches.

  “Nice,” Joe Twitch said.

  Someone gently tapped Jonathan’s shoulder. The woman he’d volunteered for his demonstration. She looked different, now that he could only see her from one angle at a time.

  “Hey,” Jonathan said, smiling.

  “Hey.” She had a nice voice. Sexy. “Jonathan Hive? That’s what you call yourself? Well, Bugsy, if you ever try to feel me up like that again, I’ll kill you. Okay?”

  The woman’s hand vanished in a burst of concentrated flame like a blowtorch and then popped back. She smiled, eyes hard, nodded once, and went back to her seat.

  Jonathan turned back to Joe Twitch.

  “Oops,” Twitch said.

  “Yeah. Oops,” Jonathan agreed.

  “You get that often?”

  “What? Death threats?”

  “Bugsy.”

  “Oh, that. Yeah.”

  Posted Today 12:18 pm

  AMERICAN HERO | EXCITED | “AMERICAN IDIOT”—GREEN DAY

  Well, it’s official. I’m in. It’s almost midnight, but this isn’t getting posted until tomorrow sometime. As part of the deal with the network, I’m letting a guy in the legal department vet my blog posts while I’m on the show. Everyone wave to Kenny! (Hi, Kenny!)

  [ED: Hi everyone—Kenny]

  I’ve just gotten back from the getting-to-know-all-about-you party with my teammates. Chateau Marmont. Very John Belushi-died-here Hollywood chic. All the contestants were present, and there’s twenty-eight of us, so grab your scorecards, kids. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

  I sat next to the Candle, whose ace powers appear to involve looking like his hair’s on fire, across from the fattest woman I’ve met in recent memory—the Amazing Bubbles. I’m told that she stores kinetic energy as fat, and was apparently dragged behind a Cadillac before coming to the party, because, oh, my, God. The only one bigger than her was a Southern Baptist preacher in a bariatric wheelchair who calls himself Holy Roller and weighs in at six-hundred-some pounds. Neither of them turn out to be on my team, so I’m just hoping some of the challenges we’re facing involve getting into an elevator.

  (On a personal note: Yes, Grandpa, Jetman made it on, and your cap lock key’s stuck again. Ask Gramma to fix it for you.)

  After serving us dinner and recording all our conversations and interviewing each of us separately, we got assigned to teams. It wasn’t quite the Sorting Hat, but it had some of that feel. Big ramp-up by Peregrine to each announcement, clapping, cheering, smiles—everyone has a drink, and then the next one up. By the end we were all pretty tipsy, so I imagine we made total assholes of ourselves, pouting and preening for the cameras. Frankly, I was too drunk to remember the details. I’ll just have to catch it when it broadcasts, same as the rest of you.

  I’ve been assigned to Hearts because God forbid the media ever do anythi
ng with the wild card virus that isn’t a pun. There are three other teams: Diamonds, Clubs, and Spades. We all hugged and learned and grew and pledged to work together as a team until it stops being convenient.

  Then we all piled into a limo and rode to our new secret lair. I shit you not. Secret lair.

  It’s an old mansion all tricked out to make Big Brother cream himself. Cameras everywhere but the bathrooms (and no bets that there aren’t a couple undocumented features there, too) and a little confessional where we get to gossip and backbite to our dearest, closest confidant: everyone in the freaking world.

  Let me introduce the contestants, Johnny. Team Hearts is:

  Drummer Boy—aka Michael Vogali. Yes, that Drummer Boy. Percussionist for Joker Plague, seven-foot ohmigod, six arms, more tattoos than a biker’s convention. He spent the whole dinner signing autographs and chatting up an ace who everyone called Pop Tart, but not to her face. Since I don’t listen to Joker Plague and I’m not a thirteen-year-old fangirl, I was unaware that he has six built-in tympanic regions on his chest. Yes, he is his own drum set.

  Wild Fox—aka Andrew Yamauchi. Nice enough fella. Apparently can do something with illusions that’s all very thematically appropriate if you know a lot more about Japanese mythology than I do. He’ll be easy to identify when you watch the show. He’s the one with the great big poofy fox tail. Seriously. He has a tail.

  Curveball—aka Kate Brandt. Nice-looking girl next door. Anything she throws, she can not only control in flight but detonate on impact. She was showing off a little at the dinner and wound up exploding a water pitcher with a grain of rice. She may have been just an ee-tinsey bit drunk. In all fairness, though, she’s pretty cute when she’s drunk.

  Earth Witch—aka Ana Cortez. Another of our carefully ethnically diverse team with, sex-appealwise, a lovely personality and great sense of humor, I’m sure. She can dig holes in the ground with her mind. Yes, I’m not making this up. One of our superheroes is a ditch digger of Mexican extraction. I’m not sure how this got by the Hollywood liberal politically correct establishment, but I think it’s funny as hell. No disrespect intended; some of my best friends are vicious racial stereotypes.