The Flux (6 page)

He glared at Paul. “The fact that you do not realize how bad things are, Paul, shows me
exactly
how ill-suited you are for this job.”

Paul squirmed. “It’s one bad fight. But catching ’mancers is what I do. We’ll get there.”

“And if your job was to
catch
’mancers, I would be reassured.”

“My job
is
to catch ’mancers. That’s right on the paperwork.”

“No.” David shook his head. “Your job is to make the mayor look good. Which you do by making New York’s citizenry feel safe. You have failed at that job, time and time again.”

“…you’re telling me that I’m a figurehead?”

“No. Though that
is
why we appointed you to the job – a man without a scrap of political savvy who nevertheless made headlines. Imani assured me you could pick up the skill of
making connections
.”

Paul winced. He’d disliked lying to City Hall, assuring everyone how bad ’mancers were, how he took great satisfaction in tracking those universe-warping bastards down. So he’d skipped the meet-‘n’-greets, hoping sheer efficiency would keep him in the role.

“But no,” David continued. “We’ve gone almost eighteen months with no ’mancers.
After
Anathema promised we’d have a tide of magicked-up freaks storming our bastions. You could have claimed credit, told the news of the horrible things that would have happened had not Mr Paulos Costa Tsabo scared the ’mancers away. But no! You expressed bafflement –
repeated
bafflement – that Anathema’s dire predictions weren’t coming true. You asked for more funding to investigate this strange quiescence. Truth be told, you sounded a little
disappointed
more ’mancers hadn’t arrived.”

Paul
had
been disappointed. Anathema had told him all sorts of ’mancers would be popping up all across New York. That’s why he’d taken the job, even though he’d known the politics would be interminable: as the first responder to any ’mancer incident, he’d planned to shunt the helpful ’mancers off to safer places, playing a sort of Oskar Schindler.

Paul had anticipated moral dilemmas, sorting out which ’mancers were worth saving.

What he hadn’t anticipated was no ’mancers at all. None.

“Don’t you think it’s a
little
odd?” Paul asked, leaning forward. “
No
’mancer activity for eighteen months? In a city
this
size? Not so much as a single bookiemancer? Hell, Los Angeles averages ten ’mancer incidents a year, Chicago twenty–”

“And we are
safe
, Paul!” David spread his hands. “That’s
good
news! Why couldn’t you tell the media that was the result of your fine preventative work?”

“Because it’s not true?”

“How do you
know
it’s not true? Maybe they’re terrified of your manly presence. Christ, Paul, I’m not asking you to lie, I’m just asking for good
spin
.”

“You know I don’t like talking to the media, David.”

“Yeah, well, that’s

a strange allergy for someone who’s in fucking
politics
.”

“Politics,” Paul shot back, “often stops shit from getting done.”

A cold silence.

David reached for a glass of water with the aggrieved air of a man cutting Paul some major slack. It was all Paul could do not to remind David that
oh, yeah, remember how you slept with my wife while we were still
married
, and I haven’t brought that up even once
?

“It sounds,” Paul said stiffly, “Like you’d be happier if Lenny hadn’t gone after Psycho Mantis at all.”

“No.” David planted his index finger on the table’s dark-wood surface. “We should scour the city for
all
’mancy-related threats. Yet Psycho Mantis was not a risk
at the time
. Lenny didn’t scout the zone, and he endangered lives – all on an anonymous
tip
.”

Paul winced. David had a point.

“The media wants someone strung up,” David continued. “Lenny Pirrazzini seems like an excellent target. Well, him and – well, let’s say you suspend your five weakest officers without pay for a week, just to show the papers we’re taking it seriously. I expect Lenny’s resignation in time to make Monday’s headlines, and then you and I will discuss what, exactly, you are supposed to do as a Task Force Supervisor.”

“No.”

David tilted his head. “No?”

“Lenny’s cock-up is... it’s my fault as a manager. I should have been working more closely with SMASH, training my force in the newest anti-mancer tactics. I should have been riding Lenny’s ass; everyone knows he’s a hothead. And his men, they were... they were following orders.”

And
, Paul thought,
I don’t talk to SMASH because I’m worried they’ll figure out what I am. I don’t trade tactics with them because I don’t want our Task Force to be that good at capturing ’mancers. It’s unfair that the squad gets punished when I set up them up to fail
.

“Paul,” David said prissily, then paused, as if that one word should have been warning enough.

“I’ll reprimand Lenny. Officially. A month off, no pay. But the man doesn’t deserve to lose his job.”

“
Someone’s
going to.”

“No,” Paul said, digging in. “We had one major goof-up against a very cunning opponent. But we got some more information on this ‘King of New York’ fellow. The papers are making this look bad, that’s their job, but… it’s not a rout.”

“Paul,” David repeated. “I’m here with orders from His Fucking Honor himself. I don’t have a lot of love for you. You spoil your fucking kid, and I have to clean up the mess. You make my wife neurotic that she’s a bad mother. And if I, a man personally authorized by the greatest fucking power in New York City, tells you heads will roll, then you fire Lenny Pirrazzini and suspend some officers… or you turn in your resignation right. Fucking. Now.”

Oh, we’ve gone personal, have we?
Paul thought.

“I will not.” Paul got up from the table. “I’m not going to sacrifice good men so we can lie to the newspapers. This will pass. And when it passes, we will have a stronger and more diligent Task Force, and you will thank me for not caving in to simple politics.”

O
f course they fired him
.

O
n Sunday night
, just in time to make Monday’s headlines, the mayor proudly announced David Giabatta would be taking over the Task Force.

The man who’d stolen Paul’s wife now had Paul’s old job.

Paul decided to allow himself precisely four days of self-pity, ending when Imani dropped Aliyah off at his apartment on Thursday. He took to it with gusto.

Of course, Paul’s “gusto” consisted of managing the tiny details that went with being freshly unemployed. He called up the firm that held his unemployment insurance – not Samaritan Mutual – to ensure that everything was handled. He cut back on all his unnecessary expenses, canceling his cable and renegotiating his cell phone plan; paying for both his and Valentine’s side-by-side apartments would be tricky on sixty percent of his old salary, even with the rent-controlled deal he’d gotten. He compiled a list of potential future employers, ranked them by potential, culling a sub-list of people to call come Friday morning.

His former employer Samaritan Mutual was conspicuously not on that list.

And all the while he did not shower, he did not shave, he did not sleep. He did not change the bandage on his ever-bleeding left arm. He ignored all incoming calls. (Though he did send a text to his drug overlord Oscar saying “We’ll talk soon” before locking his phone away in a drawer. Thankfully, the King either had no ability, or no interest, to track Paul down when he wasn’t brewing Flex.)

Occasionally Paul would take the Scotch down from his liquor shelf and weigh the bottle in his hands, imagining precisely how drunk he could get given the number of ounces of alcohol compared to his own meager body weight.

Then he would put it back, and make some more lists.

And at 4:35 Tuesday afternoon, when Paul was happily lost in comparing Internet service provider plans, there came the videogame
chunk-chunk-chunk
noise of Aliyah teleporting into her bedroom.

Paul felt the surge of bad luck lunge after Aliyah – a dangerous surge, one that indicated Aliyah had done magic she felt conflicted about. He grabbed for his legal pad, scribbled a notification of legal guardian status onto it; the surge changed course and slammed into him with such force that the Scotch tumbled off the shelf.

The flux squeezed in all around him; it was like being shoved into a closet full of rubber balls, a soft probing from every angle, asking
What could go wrong? What could go wrong?
And Paul, unprepared for this, didn’t have a good answer. He could normally hold his flux for a day or two until he could direct it towards some bad luck he was prepared for – but this wave hit him when he was already distracted by worries about incoming bills, bad credit ratings, what would happen to the men on the Task Force–

The flux wriggled away, leaving Paul to wonder what whammy he’d triggered.

He pushed himself away from the desk, feeling shamed. Aliyah shouldn’t see him like this – covered in sweaty stubble, clothes in shambles, stinking of freshly splashed Scotch. Paul buttoned his stained shirt, trying to regain some semblance of authority.

He stormed into Aliyah’s bedroom. “
Aliyah Rebecca Tsabo-Dawson!
” he bellowed, in his best angry dad voice. “You do
not
do ’mancy without warning Daddy!”

Aliyah sat on her bed, surrounded by three suitcases; she must have teleported them in with her. She gazed up at her father, unruffled.

“Valentine’s in the maze,” she said.

Oh crap.

He had forgotten about Valentine.

T
he door
to Valentine’s apartment had been transformed into a flat sticker pasted onto the wall, an image of a door so lifelike that Paul was fooled until his key skidded off the hole-less lock. It was one of Valentine’s standard-issue privacy tricks; there were plenty of unopenable doors-as-scenery in videogames.

“All right,” he told Aliyah. “Get us in.”

They walked back to Aliyah’s bedroom in Paul’s apartment next door. Aliyah unpacked her Nintendo DS from her suitcase – which, Paul noted, had all her favorite dolls from her mother’s house neatly arranged inside.

Before he could ask further questions, Aliyah plugged in the
Super Mario Bros
cartridge, flicked on the game, and curled up in Paul’s lap. She twisted her neck around to interrogate him.

“When was the last time you went in?” Aliyah asked.

“Last month,” Paul admitted.

“
Daddy
!” she cried. She’s
chastising
me
?
Paul wondered, amazed how easily Aliyah could trigger his guilt reflex. “What if you forget?”

“I’ve committed the levels to memory. I don’t forget.”

“Do you remember how to squash the turtles?”

Paul sighed. His daughter was a tiny drill sergeant when it came to videogames. “My reflexes aren’t as good as yours.”

“You take lead, Daddy.” Aliyah thrust the Nintendo DS into his hands. “You
always
have to be able to find us.”

Paul pursed his lips. She had a point.

He hit the start button.
Super Mario
started up; Paul felt the subtle tingle of Aliyah’s ’mancy connecting her world to Valentine’s.

Paul manipulated Mario through the opening level’s blocky cartoon world, his fingers feeling fat and clumsy. He’d never liked games, but Aliyah had insisted he master at least
one
videogame.

So over the past few years he’d dedicated an hour each evening to play
Super Mario
. It was like swimming laps in the pool for Paul’s physical rehab classes; a tedious, necessary task that brought him no joy.

Playing also involved a surprising amount of memorization, as the levels were packed with “hiddens,” as Aliyah called them – secret paths uncovered by breaking this particular block, or crouching in a certain pipe. Aliyah quizzed him on the hidden locations, even though getting to her secret area in Mario took one circuitous route.

Aliyah perched on his lap, vibrating with excitement as she shouted suggestions: “Jump now, Daddy! Don’t forget the bats! That bomb’s about to go off. YAY! You did it, Daddy, you did it!”

At the end of each level, she gave him her “princess’s reward”: she kissed his cheek. That was a better reward than any imaginary gold coin: seeing how thoroughly Aliyah was rooting for him.

He
liked
that she was better than him at this, that it took him hours to finish the game while she could have whipped through it in minutes. There had always been something immeasurably wild about his daughter – and where Imani had wanted to lock that rebellion down, Paul treasured Aliyah’s stormy enthusiasm. It made for rocky days as a parent, but he secretly adored how you couldn’t force her to do anything – you could only convince her to agree with you.

He gave her free rein because he saw how strong she’d be when she grew up. Society took all the traits that a kid needed to be a successful adult – independence, a questioning spirit, a ferocious drive to satisfy your own needs – and then quashed them relentlessly, so thoroughly suppressing those urges that some adults never figured out how to be happy again. Paul needed to protect Aliyah’s free spirit until the time it would serve her well.

So playing
Mario
with Aliyah, feeling her deftly thread her ’mancy into his videogame, hearing her cheer him on? He would never have chosen to have his daughter become a videogamemancer, but with her riding his shoulder as he played, he saw the raw joy she took in gaming – a joy she went out of her way to share with him.

It wasn’t enough for her to game; she needed him to see what she loved about it.

That good feeling lasted until he got to the lava levels.

Sweat prickled Paul’s face as he dropped onto a blackened stone platform. The screen, once the size of his palm, had inched open as wide as the far wall, a window through which he could walk. The graphics had upgraded themselves – finely detailed cartoon shapes, Mario himself a full-sized man made of Legos, the whirling fire traps turned three-dimensional.

The castle was dark, cavernous, saturated with death. Any single misstep could kill you. Paul wondered, not for the first time,
How could anyone relax under all this pressure?

Yet he could see from Aliyah’s smile how much she loved it. She was a magnet, drawn to danger.

The lava burbled, hissing pixelated holes in the living room carpet.

“Keep going, Daddy! Just a few more steps. You can do it!”

“Are you sure she’s on
this
level?”

“Auntie Valentine’s never anywhere else.”

And sure enough, through the gaping portal they’d opened up, Valentine stood on
Super Mario
’s final level – fighting Bowser on a tightrope suspended over a deadly volcano. Bowser hurled stone hammers at Valentine; Valentine dodged them. In the real world, plump Valentine got out of breath jogging down the street to Dunkin’ Donuts – but in this world, she was an acrobat, the twirling hammers whizzing by so close they ruffled her hair.

She was topless.

And fighting with both arms clasped behind her back.

Paul had never gotten used to walking into Valentine’s apartment to find her walking around half-naked, though Valentine never minded. She
liked
clothes, changing outfits three times a day, but didn’t see a
need
for them, comfortable in her own stretchmarked skin. She was fifty pounds overweight, but those pounds accentuated her curves – curves that unnerved Paul. He was old-fashioned enough to believe you shouldn’t see someone naked unless you were at least a little in love with them, and Valentine was utterly not his type – so as always, he covered his eyes, censoring her with his fingers.

Valentine landed badly, wobbling on the tightrope. She almost let go of her wrists, which she clutched to keep her arms locked behind her spine – but with an effort of will, she struggled to find her balance without releasing her grip.

As she jerked away from one stone hammer, another smashed her in the face.

Valentine tumbled towards the lava – and everything froze.

“Restart,” Valentine muttered, her face pale as though in a fever dream. Her nose leaked blood.

Valentine upended herself from the lava, tumbling upwards in a reversal of gravity and time, landing on the rope. She landed on the far ledge, across from the switch that would send Bowser plunging into the lava.

Her breasts were bruised hammer-black.

This was what ’mancers did, when the world upset them; they retreated to their own reality, creating a safe place where they endlessly acted out fantasies of better worlds – except Valentine’s retreat was bloody and bitter.

Paul wondered how the flux didn’t kill her, but that was every ’mancer’s trick: though creating a lava pit with an animated villain would have destroyed Paul, Valentine believed in a videogame-based escape right down to the roots of her heart. So the universe didn’t complain too much, just as it didn’t give Paul too much guff for summoning apartment leases out of midair.

Valentine cracked her neck, then clasped her arms behind her back again and stepped out onto the tightrope.

“Valentine?” Aliyah called.

Valentine frowned at them, as if to ask,
What the hell are you doing here?
– and freed her hands. Her full balance regained, she darted across the rope in one smooth motion, tumbling under Bowser’s great horned feet, jamming her elbow into the switch before Bowser tossed his first hammer. The tightrope snapped, sending Bowser tumbling into the lava below.

Paul realized Valentine had been toying with Bowser, could have finished this whenever she desired.

She only relaxed when challenged.

Valentine panted, blood dripping from her nose onto her bare breasts, glaring maliciously at them.

“What do you want?”

Aliyah stepped forward, not quite entering the level. “You haven’t slept in three days, Auntie Valentine. I’m worried about you.”

“Are you
spying
on me?”

“I’m taking
care
of you,” Aliyah said, hurt.

Valentine choked on laughter. “Nobody cares for us. You’re too young to understand, and he–” She gestured violently in Paul’s direction “–He’s too naïve.”

“Too naïve for what?” Paul asked.

“You–” She wiped off her face, then massaged her temples. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I came here to stop
thinking
about this shit.”

“What shit?” Aliyah asked, then looked intensely guilty as Paul glared at her for swearing.

“You haven’t
done
this,” Valentine spat. “You don’t know what the end
looks
like. But me, I’ve been through it before: the bad luck piles up until you can’t recover. You lose your job, then you lose your home, then you lose your boyfriend, and... and...”

She scrubbed tears from her face.

“We’re gonna lose each other,” Valentine whispered. “One ’mancer’s flux load is bad enough. But three? God, Paul, these years with you and Aliyah have been the best years of my life. You don’t know what a balm it’s been, having friends, having a place to live, this
stability
…

“But you’ve lost your job,” she continued. “Now it’s just a matter of time. Eventually SMASH will take Aliyah, or you’ll die like Raphael, or… or something terrible. That’s how ’mancy works. And you gotta
brace
for that crash. You gotta start pushing stuff away, before…”

Her tears sizzled into the lava below. “Goddammit, Valentine DiGriz doesn’t
do
tears.”

“Does she hug little girls?” Aliyah asked.

“Always,” Valentine promised, stepping out from the lava-filled castle to embrace Aliyah with the fervor of a woman trying to freeze this moment in time forever. “Always.”

Valentine shook as she held Aliyah, trembling with – rage? Terror? Sadness? Paul couldn’t tell.

Paul was reluctant to join in, mainly because Valentine was topless, sweaty, and bleeding. But he drew in a breath and embraced them both.

After a long time, Valentine stopped trembling.

“…this isn’t the end,” Paul told her.

“You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you. You were alone when things were bad.”