Big Superhero Action (14 page)

For thirty seconds he played with the air parabolas. “The Customizers…that’s on hiatus. Chase Juniper is what we’re doing now. We go to Quebec, we watch Kieran Aspen. We monitor communications. When Chase shows up we take him.”

I
t felt infinite. It was a drug. UFB streaked after the sun with infinite power.

You soared for miles off one burst of energy.

You landed in ocean and kept going, hit the ocean floor, arched your back, propelled yourself all the way to surface, broke surface, kept going for miles more.

The fourth time around Earth he started getting it.

Slip outside the source you had to walk.

The source had specific locations.

Parts of China.

Parts of Greenland.

Parts of the Atlantic Ocean.

Parts of North America.

One part of North America was the core. The power radiated from there.

The sun watched.

He was following the sun along Earth’s orbit.

He was traveling along alien graffiti.

The graffiti was alive.

The graffiti was not alive.

They had a language that lived life spans.

They had a language in which each word used ceased to exist.

They had words that could only be used once.

They had words that were never used no matter how many times they were used.

They became the other spoken to.

They became the opposite of the other spoken to.

He destroyed everything in his path.

He built everything in his path.

He was translating the sun.

He translated stars.

Planets are the dominant life form in this solar system.

Cities are the dominant life form on this planet.

M
an Mafia had a long bloody origin story.

The Palm Springs, California area had a high concentration of Indian gambling. Tribes in the Palm Springs area included the Morongo Band of Mission Indians and the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians. Another Palm Springs area tribe, the Penado-Yanez Band of Ontiveros Indians, was awarded a $15 million judgment against the federal government. With help from legislation introduced by Representative Sonny Bono, the tribe purchased non-Indian replacement land where they constructed a gambling casino near Rancho Mirage, an exclusive, upscale community 10 miles east of Palm Springs whose residents once included former President Gerald Ford.

The Penado-Yanez Band of Ontiveros Indians existed mostly on a computer, naming the chief a man of ambiguous ethnicity named Floyd Gama. Floyd Gama had spent thirty years being ambiguous, forging backgrounds and identities. Some of them were underwater; Hurricane Katrina had made him at least 90K. 9/11 was a gold mine that still turned up the color, so far at two million. Floyd Gama had been at it so long, he had identities that were lost in the system, one of them doing ten years in Folsom.

Floyd Gama groomed his son Floyd Jr. to assume the chiefdom of the tribe. Floyd Jr. had been halfway to an MBA when he was sidetracked by the porn industry. He switched to a film major. Then dropped out. He started an adult film production company. He began to style himself as some kind of hip-hop gangsta porn king, now went by “Floyd G” He surrounded himself with thugs. He bought a strip club in L.A.

Floyd Gama blamed too many gangster movies, too many rap videos, wanted him in a suit helping run the casino. Floyd G said Larry Flynt did both the skin and the casino business. This was synergy. Floyd Gama went along, put millions into Floyd G’s adult empire. Floyd G convinced his father that this was the way to diversify.

Vincent Gama had spent 20 years inside taking the rap for a murder his brother Floyd had committed, the whole time Floyd promising him to make good on his blood loyalty. Then his brother Floyd got rich in Palm Springs as a fake Indian.

The Gama brothers had the same Lebanese face that could fake Indian. Vincent was younger but looked older, had snow-white hair oiled heavily and combed back.

More than once Floyd said: “I don’t see how you did what you did for me.”

Vincent Gama answered, “Blood.”

“Even for blood.”

“Fuck it. I did the time, you made the money. If you did the time, we wouldn’t have made the money.”

“True.”

“So here we are.”

The real reason Vincent Gama had been willing to take a 20- year rap for his brother was his own private realization that he was better off in prison for much of his adult life. He was possessed by a 4000 year old spirit named Ra. Ra told him to murder prostitutes. Ra wanted blood sacrifice requiring him to saw off their heads, drink their blood and bathe in their blood.

The drive was uncontrollable. In the 1970s, the serial killer was hot and he was the hottest. In the Bicentennial L.A. summer of ‘76, he was knocking off a hooker every three weeks. The dragnet was out for him. The fear twisted his guts day and night, the paranoia made him insane. By the time he was up to ten dead, he knew he was one hooker away from the gas chamber. Then in 1980 Floyd offered him the deal to take the rap for the murders of two of Floyd’s rivals. Even doing 20 years, he was still ahead. It wasn’t that big a change anyway: first his father had ruled him, then Floyd, then Ra, now it was The System. In prison Ra went away. The need for blood subsided and he cooled to a homicidal numbness. There was peace.

The discovery of the next ultimate realization of his life came just two years into his sentence. Two years of zero Ra. Then he started having dreams of being back in L.A. In those dreams, he again felt the stirring of Ra. Vincent Gama realized that it wasn’t prison that made Ra go away. It was not being in L.A. Ra only possessed him when he was in L.A. It was the fucking city itself. He was in prison for nothing. He could’ve just fucking left town instead. He’d be a free man today and Floyd would be the one doing time. And now he had the next eighteen years to live with that fact.

Getting out of prison after 20 years was like having a surgeon finally remove the anus from his forehead so he could go back to shitting from his ass. Now his brother was a fake Indian and he summoned Vincent. Lunch, he said, but there was a job behind it.

Floyd said, “I found Little Floyd ENRON-ing the tribe through systematic accounting fraud for about two million.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. That little prick. He diversified me out of two million.”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“What else am I gonna do? I’m not going to prison. Do you want to go back to prison?”

“No.”

“What else am I gonna do?”

“You do what you gotta do.”

Floyd had the will to drop the hammer on his own son. Business was business. Floyd would have his brother hit too if it ever came to that. Vincent Gama respected that. He could never drop the hammer on Floyd only because it would have made his stretch go to waste. He would’ve taken a nuclear warhead for Floyd rather than let those twenty years go to waste.

He drove up to L.A. Twenty years later, it looked like even more like being in the joint with Mexicans everywhere, nothing but fucking
cholos
, even the chicks covered with tattoos. But Ra was still there tingling in the homicidal part of his brain stem.

In a black track suit he walked into Floyd G’s strip club on La Cienega.

Floyd G said, “Yo, Uncle G? Wzzzup, Tonto?”

Uncle G’s hands raised twin .45s, blasted Floyd G in the face. The guns sounded like thunder, the thunder blowing away the bouncers like blood-spattered leaves. Then three strippers. The last was an escaping customer halfway through the door.

That night he fled east on Brutalia Air.

There he found his city.

The city vibrated up his feet. It flickered with a billion myths, cave drawings and magic. He stopped to hear the voices. They weren’t the same voices. It wasn’t his brain doing it outside his brain, it was from way outside his brain. It was like the city was in his head. The inexpressible vibrated under the city. But a man still had to eat.

In Brutalia the OSD and AXIS ran the town. He got meetings with OSD people, worked his up to Xoir, then to the man at the top, the leader, Dr. Playground. They interviewed him, quizzed him, tested him. He was accepted for recruitment. He joined the OSD.

One night he had dreams of himself as a Kinner & Membert lab monkey put inside a test tunnel. They exposed him to flashing green rays that transformed him into a self-cloning freak.

The next day he woke up in a lab.

He was thirty years younger.

He could change his face.

He could clone himself.

He got it. Reality had ceased to be real. But it was working for him.

For the first year he only had sex with his clones. It didn’t seem homosexual. If there was such a thing as good homosexuality, this was it.

He only left Brutalia again to fly to Palm Springs to shoot Floyd Gama dead then collect his ashes. That began the collection that made him a walking cemetery.

This time he left Brutalia to fly to Quebec. The superpowers stayed in Brutalia. They flew aboard an OSD Gulfstream 6, him and Dr. Playground. Outside Brutalia, Vincent Gama was a white-haired old fuck again. Outside the Limit, Dr. Playground was Simon Stranko, an ordinary looking middle-aged guy in a dark suit. He wore glasses. His hair was thinning from a high forehead. He stayed on top of his laptop taking in the data Xoir sent from the OSD satellite hacking stream. The stream could only be worked inside the Brutalia Limit but you could send, transmit, text it outside using the non-super technology that worked outside the Limit. But outside The Limit, without exoframes, they were just two guys subject to real world rules, capable of being outnumbered or outgunned.

At one point Stranko looked at him.

He said, “I always wanted to find a way to use the mafia motif.”

“I like gangster movies. I’m a Godfather fan. First saw it in a movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard in 1972. I saw it then got a hooker on Sunset. I went to movies more back then. I’d go to a movie late then get a hooker afterward.”

“You’re really old, aren’t you?”

“Old as fuck.”

“Even now we don’t know that much about the real you.”

“I change details. That’s not something that’s new for me. I’m from a family of people who change details. So I change details. The way I see it, it’s like Whitey Bulger hiding in Santa Monica, California, there’s a time to not-be the same guy. Even if I still was the same guy there’s no point in being the same guy now.”

“Is that what you are, in hiding?”

“I’ve been in hiding since reform school.”

“Your history is longer than I know, is that it?”

“Maybe.”

“So is mine.”

“Longer than I know?”

“Longer than
I
know.”

“Okay.
Your
history.”

“Right.”

“Okay.”

Silence.

“How does the cloning thing work again?”

“KM was working on a science for soldiers to clone themselves on the war front. Like everything else, the science never made it to the military. We tested it on you. You’re the first person the test didn’t kill.”

“So that’s when I became Man Mafia.”

“When you survived I said
‘That’s our Hitler.
’”

“It wasn’t my decades of experience.”

“No.”

“Been thinking, Simon.”

“You’re calling me ‘Simon’ and
you’ve
been
thinking
. Should I be nervous?”

“Not at all, Simon. I’ve been thinking. Want to know what?”

“Tell me, Vincent.”

“Been wondering if you ever killed someone without an exoframe.”

“Are you saying I don’t look dangerous?”

“To be honest…you don’t.”

Stranko said, “Tell you what you’re thinking.”

“I just told you.”

“I’ll tell you your next thought then.”

“Fucking tell me my next fucking thought, Simon.”

“You’re thinking outside The Limit we’re just two guys. And if we’re just two guys it would be possible to take me out. And you’re thinking how and where and when to do it.”

The two men held the same stare for seconds, a look that bypassed guile. They were just two guys on a plane.

Gama said, “Maybe I am thinking that a little. But what would that get me? Everything I need is inside The Limit.”

“But if you could go back without me and take over…?”

Gama nodded. “…Be worth a thought-about or two.”

“Think you could run a city?”

“No?”

“Everybody can’t be the Godfather. Some people have to be the Sonny Corleone.”

“If you’re going to be in that movie,” Gama said, “don’t be the Sonny Corleone.”

He got up to stretch his legs. He found the attendant, ordered whiskey and soda. It came quickly. He ordered a second, returned to his seat.

“Looking forward to getting back to the city,” Gama said. “Hate being back in the real world like this. It makes my mouth dry. It makes my heart palpitate. It makes my cloaca clench like a fist.”

“What’s a
cloaca
?”

“That’s the word for a bird’s asshole.”

“I didn’t know there was a word for it.”

“Point is, I can’t take the real world. I’m fucking done with it.”

Stranko: “Is that what you think this is, the real world? The thing that makes people like us people like us is we never had the close relationship with so-called reality most people have. People who have that relationship don’t break laws. People like us, we create our own reality. So the difference isn’t as much for us because we force reality to its knees and throat-rape it. That’s what I live by.”

Simon Stranko turned back to his laptop.

W
ound tightly as last time, no couch for The Carousel, he talked on his feet pacing before her. The OSD/AXIS treaty created a neutrality zone where Xoir treated both Dr. Playground and The Carousel. Within that zone was a suspension of conflict. Any discussion of the conflict was off-limits. That either side invisibly kept trained on the other two sequences of tracking lasers liberated them from the opportunity for assassination. The logistics of that had kept their sessions to twice in six months.