Xx: Chapter 9

Xx: Chapter 9

As a moderate degree of soap-opera quality drama unfolded between Roxanne and the rest of the world, Susan was out exploring the city. Evangeline had instructed her, that morning, to go and see Lloyd for some inital training, but his door was locked and she dared not venture inside. The place emenated a smell of piss anyhow.

Cities, as a general rule, were new to her. She’d been to London twice in her life—once to see the Lion King down in the West End, and once to go to some distant relative’s memorial service.

Both occasions had been a misrepresentation of cities in general: one was full of glitz and glamour and dancing animals, the other was full of solemn adults and a regrettable trip up to the Putney Crematorium, but she hadn’t turned off them. Every city in the world was, as far as she could see it, infinitely better than Queenford, except for possibly Glasgow. New York was among the best.

“What’s the matter with Glasgow?” she wondered aloud.
Lots of things, as it happens. Lots of things.
“Like what?”
It was clear and apparent, that despite working in a second-hand bookshop, Susan had never read anything by Irvine Welsh. Granted, the most recent book in that shop was a 1952 reprinting of a cookbook written in 1918, but that is neither here nor there.

Manhattan was an open book, full of the largely familiar, but vaguely disconcerting culture of the United States. People looked basically the same, bundled in their peacoats and scarves, and they discussed the same inane set of things (albeit in their bizarre North-Eastern drawl), but it felt different. The way the air rushed down to the pit of your lungs was fundamentally not the same; a feeling of trespassing on someone else’s land, of interfering forcefully in another human ecosystem. Also, there were more fat people.

She decided to go to look in the window of Saks Fifth Avenue. She had barely enough money for lunch, but one doesn’t go to such places to shop. No, the goal of going into an insanely overpriced store is one of two things: one, to appear rich and perhaps moderately successful; two, to study the rich and moderately successful people so that their habits might, to some avail, be copied. The only problem with this is that, on the average day, about eighty percent of the people are copying each other’s own false wealth. Things can get a little complicated.

“I’m not copying anyone.” Susan said, rather louder than she’d expected.
“Well, neither am I,” replied an anxious-looking woman, peering out from behind a row of peasant-style shirts, in cream or eggshell or bone or whatever it’s called these days. She had very large eyes.
“You have very large eyes,” Susan commented, astutely. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“You have very red hair,” the woman replied, ignoring the previous statement. She twisted idly at one of her one of her own tight curls with a well-buffed fingernail. She was black, but not the American kind—she was very dark, seemingly plucked right out of Addis Abbaba and still wide-eyed from the experience. “Do you colour it?”

Their inane conversation went on for several minutes, decidedly staying away from their slight sense of acquaintance. They passed the time cheerily, as they spoke in the manner of women talking the way that men think they do, about clothing, shoes, and what colour lip gloss best accentuated their toenail polish. Had Evangeline walked in, she would have been appauled. Roxanne would have been somewhere between perplexed and confused as fuck. Lloyd probably would have continued masturbating.

But instead of any of those people arriving, which would have been messy on all accounts, they were approached by none other than the insatiable Vincent Grace. He’d been lurking around the store for the past twenty minutes, following his unfruitful encounter with Roxanne, trying to see if Madam Josephine had really skipped town. She was known to occasionally just go undercover for a few days, to live out of the limelight (and, of course, to spend her money on needlessly expensive jewelery or toilet brushes or something.) That wouldn’t be much of a story, but people would want to know about...

“Holy fuck,” He said, in his most eloquent of ways. “Silver Comet! Is that actually you? Like, I’d heard the rumours about last night, but I never for a moment believed they were true...”
“They’re mostly true,” she said, running a mental list of possible things he might have been talking about. “Or, I think they’re mostly true. Which ones did you mean?”

Without skipping a beat, Vince ennumerated the rumours that he had, in fact, heard about last night: that several of the harpy girls had gotten in a rather intense catfight over who spilled a cosmopolitian over whose dress, which ended in blood; that Evangeline had terrorized William, the poor man-fish/fish man; that law enforcement agencies had been required between the hours of two and four in the morning and that police officers had been killed; and that their new boss, Gerald, was still missing, having ventured off the facilities with no fewer than six transsexual prostitutes.

“True, slightly true, false—they were actually ambulance technicians, plus he didn’t actually die, he just had a heart attack... And probably true. I actually wasn’t around to see this new boss of ours,” she said, gazing off into middle distance. “Needless to say that I had issues of my own to deal with.”

Most of those issues began with cocaine and ended with a fat Texan.
“Wait,” Susan said, having listened to the narration very carefully, “You’re Eloise, aren’t you?”
“In the flesh. Who are you, exactly? I saw you covered in vomit yesterday, and there wasn’t much of a question as to whose vomit it was.” Eloise smirked a little, “And I thought she’d gone off Engine Oil.”

She had to think for a moment as to what to who she was, in the greater context of things. She was a new recruit to an agency of people with vaguely disconcerting abilities, of which she’d managed to unsettle the vicious and more that slightly abusive boss. She was hearing voices. She had no idea what the fuck it was she was actually supposed to be doing in New York, and things were growing odder and more manic every day. So, she said what she knew was true: “I’m Susan.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Susan. This is Vince—he’s a reporter and occasionally a dick.”
“Only when it counts,” he replied with a wink. “And it often does.”

Susan tried to think of situations that might apply to that statement—in the bakery, trying to buy a second-hand computer, impressing a potential employer—but nothing seemed to quite match with the image of someone behaving like a phallus. Well, maybe the last one, but...

“So, uhm, are you an Opti, then?” Vince asked, “If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”
“At the risk of sounding a bit dim,” she said, “I’m not exactly sure—“
This was met with the blankest of blank stares, for a moment, until they both burst out into ridiculous, elaborate gasps of laughter. Eloise clutched her gut, and Vince wiped tears from his eyes. They leaned on each other to keep from falling over. This went on for several uncomfortable minutes.

“I don’t understand what you guys find so funny, actually.”
“God, she’s fucking hilarious!” Vince howled. Eloise ageed:
“Keeping up a joke as ridiculous as that! You Brits, you’re so funny.”

Fruitlessly, Susan tried to explain that she had merely been hearing voices, and wasn’t that a mental illness and not an ability per se?, but to no avail. It was too humourous to suggest that someone who had super-human abilities would ever be in doubt that they actually possessed any.

I mean, these days one can hardly walk down a street without crashing into half a dozen “gifted” children, eleven failures who were just “too creative for traditional schooling” and eight prodigies, and that’s without even trying. In the eyes of the public, a normal, bog-standard, dull-as-dishwater person has become the exception and not the rule. Mediocrity has become a curse word, something to be feared. Everyone is excellent, or if not visibly excellent, then too brilliant to understand.
“That’s a bit of a cynical thing to say, isn’t it?” Susan said, pondering the ramifications of the statement.
“I wouldn’t call it cynical,” Eloise replied, “Sure, it’s a stereotype, but it’s a positive one, and also it’s based in logic and reason. British people are funny. You guys make much better movies, I think.”
Susan wasn’t exactly sure what they were talking about, but she thanked her anyway. It seemed the polite thing to do.

“We should go and get some coffee,” Vince suggested, scratching at his arm. He hadn’t had any in at least half an hour, which was far too long for his liking. “Generic Coffee Shop Number 944. I’ll buy.”
“That’s where the good pastries are,” Susan remembered. “Across the street from work.”
“You’re a sharp one,” He replied. OptiHumans always were, it seemed, especially the young ones...

Eloise proceeded to ignore this.
“I don’t drink coffee anymore,” she lamented, putting her shirt up on the counter to pay. She’d ultimately decided on eggshell, which had a certain whimsical richness that the others had lacked. Also it was cheaper. “Doctor said I shouldn’t get my heart rate up. I’ve got to recover, for a bit.”

“How long’ll that be?” Vince asked, scratching a little more vigorously. “’Cause, I mean...”
“Don’t worry, I’ll have a tea or something.”
“Oh, that’s a relief. Let’s go then, shall we?” And with that, he was already out the door and into the crowded street, pushing over elderly women and confused Europeans with matching scarves. Eloise and Susan followed behind, but not closely enough to be accused of aiding and abetting.

They arrived in the shop to note a regrettable lack of muffins and a queue that snaked lacksadaisically out of the door. The clientelle wasn’t the shop’s usual mixture of unethusiastic upper-middle class women and “ironic” hipsters, though—it was almost exclusively filled with twelve-year-old girls, Midnight Blossom dolls in tow. Some of them were even wearing the trademark silk mask and lolita style gown... All of them were shrieking like vultures, electrocuted.

“Oh, so you’re a fan of Evangeline?” Susan asked one, poking her in the shoulder.
“What are you, stupid?” She replied, smirking. “I’m a fan of Midnight Blossom. My second cousin’s evangelical, though. Dad says we’re not supposed to talk to them anymore.”

Vince twitched. The girl at the front of the line, who was easily wider than she was tall, was taking her sweet time in ordering her “soy milk no whip triple syrup shot strawberry mocha frappuccino with extra sprinkles no wait I think I’ll have it with whip but make sure it’s not dairy.” Upon receiving the drink, she took a sip and requested a new one, with four shots instead of three.

“Oy! Can we hurry this up?” He shouted. “Some of us will actually be ordering coffee and not dessert.”
“You can’t talk to her like that,” One of the girl’s mothers replied, looking up from her copy of OptiPeople magazine for the first time in fifteen minutes. “She’s a paying customer.”
“She’s a fucking fatass brat, is what she is.”
“Why, you—“

By that point, the little scuffle had escalated enough to be considered more interesting than overpriced milkshakes. The chatter ceased; all eyes were on the duel that would inevitably begin. Someone whistled. A lone tumbleweed rolled through the store.

“Could somebody please shut the door?” Susan asked. A nearby hipster apathetically obliged.
“Just who do you think you are,” the woman said, assuming her battle stance (fists clenched, mace at the ready) “To go calling little girls names? You’ll ruin her self-esteem! Her positive sense of self-worth!”
“Oh, come off it, you dumb bitch. Like you know the first thing about self-worth—you’re pushing forty and you still insist on wearing clothes that would embarass a teenage whore!”

Eloise decided that now would be an appropriate time to intervene.

“Hey, now,” She said, putting her hand on Vincent’s shoulder. “We’re not looking for a fight, Miss, he’s just a little on edge right now. We all have days like that, right? I’m sure you can relate.”
“No one asked you, bitch!” She snapped in return, taking off her oversized sunglasses.
“Nevertheless, I still think that—“ Eloise was unable to finish her sentence, due to a rather abrupt interruption from her opponent:

“Hey, aren’t you that lesbo nigger superhero who got hooked on crack?”
The last time someone dropped a bomb like that, it was outlawed by the United Nations.

For a moment, silence hung thick over the room, like mustard gas, swallowing everything, hemorraging the hearts and minds of all present. Incurable sores on innocent tongues... A disturbance in the tide of war.

“You’re going a little overboard with the military metaphors.” Susan whispered, as quietly as she could.
“Keep quiet, new recruit,” Eloise smiled, with all the sweetness of a well-oiled Glock 17MB. “You’re in for a little treat.”