Mending the Moon (7 page)

Obviously, this creates some boundary issues. His phone rings at all hours with pleas for assistance. Strangers knock on his door to ask for help for themselves, their families, their communities. Although his mother's patents have made him as wealthy as Bruce Wayne, he is constantly turning down inappropriate gifts: offers from grateful beneficiaries of his services to pay his mortgage, free wheelchair vans, even bags of groceries that appear mysteriously on his doorstep. He doggedly diverts these resources to places that need them more than he does: food banks, struggling community hospitals and nursing homes, young married couples with young children trying to keep their homes in the midst of layoffs and foreclosures.

He also routinely turns down offers of lucrative endorsements. The purveyors of products and services as diverse as housing developments, closet-organizer systems, and air-traffic-control software eagerly clamor to use his name. “We are champions of order,” the CEO of a company selling high-tech litter boxes once told him, “protecting the floors and noses of our customers from unwanted intrusion by cat waste, and we believe we are doing your work.”

“Good,” said Cosmos, who—even more emphatically than he shed his spandex suit—has long since shed the pseudo-Shakespearian diction of the first webzine. “Wonderful. That's great, really. Keep doing my work. But, you know, everybody should be champions of order, or at least part of the anti-Entropy resistance—that's what I do, bub, try to make everybody else a champion of order—and I don't need the money, and I just don't want my picture on a litter box. I don't even like cats, much, although maybe it's just because I've never lived with any. Sorry.”

In the frame, he looks drawn, exhausted, with rumpled hair and bags under his eyes. In this issue, he has just had to fire his sister's home health-care aide, a minor imp of Entropy who tried to steal her medication for black-market resale. The agency has not yet sent a replacement, and so Cosmos has had to handle all of her care himself. He hasn't gotten much sleep. He's a little snappish.

Several issues later, Cosmos discovers that the litter box company has been using his name and likeness anyway. An attorney contacts him to find out if he wants to sue. He refuses. He's not a brand. He won't copyright his name or visage.

“But then anyone will be able to claim that they're doing your work!” the attorney protests.

“Well, if they are, good for them. I
want
everybody to be doing my work. If everybody were doing my work, I wouldn't have to do so much of it, and neither would the other people who are doing it but aren't getting enough help. If everybody were doing my work, we'd all be less burned out, you know?”

“Harummph!” snorts the attorney. “So if imitators sprang up claiming to be you, stealing your identity, that wouldn't bother you?”

“Stealing my identity? If they're stealing my Social Security number or Google password, sure, it bothers me. But imitators? I
want
people to imitate me. Have you been paying attention at
all
?
Any
of you? Imitating me is the entire
point
. I want more imitators than Elvis. I won't be happy until I have so many imitators that even
I
can't tell who I am anymore. Beware of non-imitations! Say, are you allergic to spandex?”

“Pardon?”

“I have a present for you,” Cosmos says, and sends him the box with the tights and cape in it. When the attorney calls to thank him, he tells Cosmos the ensemble doesn't fit. “Sure it does,” Cosmos says wearily. “It fits everybody. Try again. Just keep trying: you'll see.”

This sequence offers obvious opportunity for Christian exegesis, and clergy leapt on it, pointing out the correspondences between Cosmos's rhetoric and Jesus' love-your-neighbor commandment, identifying the attorney with the rich young lawyer in the Gospels. Jesus, like Cosmos, had to struggle to escape the needy multitudes and find time and space for himself.

But clergy—and therapists, teachers, health-care providers, social workers, and emergency personnel—relate to Cosmos quite aside from any theological subtext. They identify with his efforts to lead his own life in the midst of constant, urgent demands from others. They empathize with the fact that he can't go to dinner parties without the other guests telling him how chaos has struck their own lives, just as doctors can't attend social events without being treated to catalogs of symptoms. They feel in their own bones the pressure he faces, the fact that he always has to be on his best behavior, because he represents more than himself. If Cosmos disappoints or betrays his constituency, they will lose faith not just in him, but in everything he stands for.

Helping professionals know from firsthand experience what a prison such expectations can be. They know the burden of fiduciary trust. And thus many of them, early in the life of the franchise, became as concerned about Cosmos as if he were flesh and blood, a friend or family member. Scores of them wrote letters to the CC Four, fretting about Cosmos's reluctance to ask for help with his own difficulties, cataloging his symptoms of stress, demanding that he get an unlisted number and disconnect his doorbell. “Give him a vacation!” more than one reader insisted. “He can't delegate any more than he does, because his entire mission's about delegation, but he needs a break from delegating. He needs to go on a trip where he isn't responsible for anybody but himself and doesn't have to worry about anything. That would be hard, of course, because of Charlie and Vanessa. But if you can't give him a vacation, for heaven's sake, can't you give the poor guy a friend? Somebody who knows his first name? Somebody he can hang with when he wants to drink beer and let his hair down?”

Thus Roger Cadwallader was born.

Roger is a librarian, another Champion of Order. He runs the Keyhole Community Library almost single-handedly, since most of the rest of the staff has been laid off in one or another budget emergency. Roger and Cosmos met when Cosmos went to the library to borrow some audiobooks for his father. Cosmos watched Roger, middle-aged and balding and spreading at the waist, explain the Dewey Decimal System to a visiting third-grade class. He could tell from Roger's smile and nod that Roger knew who he was. He was deeply grateful that Roger didn't say, “Hey, kids, look who's here! It's Comrade Cosmos!”

Roger treated Cosmos like any other patron. After they became friends, Cosmos learned about Roger's struggles to keep the library open, to maintain the funding he needs to acquire materials. He learned that Roger is a widower who nursed his wife through cancer, and is thus as intimately familiar with health-care snarls and insurance companies as Cosmos himself. He discovered that when his nerves are jangled, going to the library after hours to help Roger reshelve books—unasked, simply as an act of companionship—is just what he needs to regain his balance.

Roger does not know, and probably will never know, Cosmos's first name. Cosmos still has a listed phone number and a working doorbell. But now Cosmos also has a friend and sidekick, and often, in the deep silence of the library at night, after everything has been returned to its rightful place and the integrity of the Dewey Decimal System has been upheld, he and Roger sit behind the reference desk and share a beer.

 

5

The windshield wipers emit a steady squeak as Anna, William, and Percy drive back from the airport. The car's a Lexus, and it's last year's model. It shouldn't make infuriating noises. Anna makes a mental note to call the dealer tomorrow.

Her earlier panic and determination have dissolved into exhaustion and badly jangled nerves; from William's white knuckles on the steering wheel, she guesses he feels the same. Percy huddles in the backseat. He's hugging his backpack; his small duffel bag sits next to him. When Anna spotted him waiting for them at the curb, he looked as impossibly huge-eyed as a child. He hugged her more fiercely than he has in years.

“You're all right. You're safe,” she told him. “Oh, Percy, it must have been horrible.”

“Yeah.” He shivered. He didn't seem to want to meet her eyes; he was probably steeling himself for a barrage of questions. “Can I get into the car now? It's cold here, after Mexico.”

“So,” Anna says now, risking one question at least, “do you feel like talking about it?”

“Not yet,” William says firmly. “Not while I'm driving, please. Save that for home. Tell us about the vacation part. There must have been some fun, too. You were there five days before—”

“Yeah,” says Percy. “Well, you know, I swam every day. I went snorkeling, and I saw fish, but there are more in Hawai'i, and the water's clearer and warmer. But I saw sea lions and manta rays; that was pretty cool. And there were whales and dolphins. And the market there's awesome, Mom, you'd love it, it's right around the harbor with all the cruise boats and tour boats and stuff, all kinds of jewelry and pottery.” Even over the windshield wipers, she hears him swallow. “I was going to buy you something, but I was waiting until the last day, and then—”

“Percy,” she says. “For God's sake. You're home and you're all right. That's more precious to me than any souvenir.”

“Your mother bought you something,” William says. “A plane ticket. For tomorrow. Only then it turned out you were already on the plane.”

Anna feels her jaw clenching. Is he going to give her grief about the two hundred seventy dollars? Under the circumstances, that's spare change. “I'll try to cancel it,” she snaps. “I don't even remember if it's a refundable ticket. It probably isn't, but if I call—”

“I'm sorry,” Percy says. “I'll pay you back, Mom. I should have called you to say I was coming home, but it all happened so quickly.”

“Honey, it's okay.” William, eyebrows raised, shoots her a glance. Percy's never, ever, offered to reimburse them for anything before. Anna shrugs, mouths “shock.” People act oddly in crises.

“You hungry?” William asks, changing the subject. “We can stop to eat. There isn't much in the house.”

“Nah, I ate at the airport. I want to go home.”

No one says anything for the rest of the drive. When they get into the house, Bart trots up with a joyous bark to greet Percy, whose face brightens into a smile when he sees the dog. Bart jumps up, putting his paws on Percy's shoulders, and licks Percy's face.

“Bart,” William says, snapping his fingers, “down. Come on, Perse—you know better than to let him do that.”

“This once,” Anna says, “I think we can forgive it.”

“No bad habits. If he did that to my mother, she'd collapse under the weight.”

“He doesn't like your mother. He ignores her. Percy's his person.”

But Bart, obedient, is down on all fours again. Percy looks like he's about to cry. His eyes are red; his fingers tap a jittering rhythm against his thighs. “Sweetheart,” Anna says, “sit down. Let me make you some soup, anyway.”

“Not hungry, Mom.” But he sits on the couch, and seems to calm a little when the dog's head is pillowed in his lap.

“All right,” William says. “Now. Now, tell us about it.”

Percy looks down at the dog's ears. He starts running them through his fingers, but stops when Bart pulls away with a soft whimper of displeasure. “I—this morning I got up and went to the pool, but there were all these police outside one of the rooms, and then somebody said there'd been a murder, and I just—I wanted to come home. A bunch of us did. We all got a van to the airport and booked flights.”

“What did people at the resort say about the murder?” William's leaning forward, eyes narrowed. Sometimes Anna thinks he should have been a lawyer, not an art dealer. Does he have to probe? Right now, this minute, when Percy hasn't even been home for an hour? Can't he just let Percy say whatever he needs to say?

“Well, nobody knew much. Some lady, stabbed in her room, they said, and somebody said the place had been ransacked, robbed, but it was all rumors. I mean, the police weren't saying anything, which meant the resort people weren't, either.” He hugs himself, shivering; his foot's beating a tattoo against the carpet. “I don't want to think about it. I want to go to bed now.”

“All right,” William says, but he's frowning again, and Anna wonders how in the world Percy's going to sleep, with all that nervous energy. This isn't like him; he's usually a fairly calm kid. “We know you must be tired after the flight. It's good to have you home, Perse.”

Anna follows him into his room, garish posters be damned. She wants to sit with him while he falls asleep, the way she did when he was small, wants to stand guard over him to keep the monsters at bay. But he turns to her, face slack with exhaustion, holding his hands up as if to ward her off. “Mom. Do you mind?”

Stung, she steps back. The boy who hugged her so fiercely at the airport has vanished. “I—”

“I know you're glad I'm back. I'm glad I'm back. But I'd like some privacy.”

Anna tries to smile. “All right. Will you let the dog stay in here, though?”

To her relief, Percy nods. “Yeah. I'd like him to. I missed him.”

Anna sticks her head into the hallway and calls Bart, who lopes joyously toward the summons. Bart's ancestors hunted wolves, and Anna feels a primitive relief in the assurance that the animal will protect her child.

She finds William in the study, peering at the computer. He's still frowning. When he hears her walk into the room, he looks up. The frown dissolves, but his face remains grave. “Anna, I'm reading the news stories. AP, Reuters. They say no description of the killing has been released to the public: that cop thing of using the details to weed out suspects and false confessions.”

Percy's home. That's all that counts. She shakes her head. “So?”