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Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad and Good, but between Bad and Worse. —Joseph Brodsky
“Since when are you afraid of bodies?” “I’m not,” she snapped back, too fast and with all the force of someone used to being the younger sibling. Which she was. Just not Victor’s.
If he were in need of self-help, he would search for a thin, simple book, one whose shape mimicked its promise. But maybe some people needed more. Maybe some people scanned the shelves for the heftiest one, assuming that more pages meant more emotional or psychological
aid. He skimmed the words and smiled as he found another section to ink out.
Be lost. Give up. give In. in the end It would be better to surrender before you begin. be lost. Be lost And then you will not care if you are ever found.
“Perhaps … it is … in … our … best interest to … to surrender … to give up … rather than waste … words.”
“You must make time for that which matters,” he recited, “for that which defines you: your passion, your progress, your pen. Take it up, and write your own story.”
All Eli had to do was smile. All Victor had to do was lie. Both proved frighteningly effective.
He was like one of those pictures full of small errors, the kind you could only pick out by searching the image from every angle, and even then, a few always slipped by.
On the surface, Eli seemed perfectly normal, but now and then Victor would catch a crack, a sideways glance, a moment when his roommate’s face and his words, his look and his meaning, would not
line up. Those fleeting slices fascinated Victor. It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other’s skin. And their skin was always too dry, on the verge of crack...
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Eli’s smile didn’t falter. “An argument for the theoretical feasibility of the existence of ExtraOrdinary people, deriving
He was too busy trying to picture what Eli’s face would look like when he received their message. Trying to picture the shock, the anger, and threaded through it all, the fear. Fear because it could only mean one thing. Victor was out. Victor was free.
And Victor was coming for Eli—just as he’d promised he would. He sunk the shovel into the cold earth with a satisfying thud.
Fucking karma,
EO. ExtraOrdinary. He had heard of them, the way people hear about any phenomena, from believer sites and the occasional late-night exposé where “experts” analyze grainy footage of a man lifting a car or a woman engulfed in fire without burning. Hearing about EOs and believing in EOs were very different things, and he couldn’t tell by Eli’s tone which camp he fell into.
He couldn’t tell which camp Eli wanted him to fall into, either, which made answering infinitely harder.
“Well, when you wonder something,” said Eli, “doesn’t that mean part of you wants to believe in it? I think we want to prove things, in life, more than we want to disprove them. We want to believe.”
“Try to look at it like this. In comic books there are two ways a hero is made. Nature and nurture. You have Superman, who was born the way he was, and Spider-Man, who was made that way. You with me?”
Let’s say you manage to find an EO, so you’ve got the proof they do exist, the question becomes how. Are they born? Or are they made?”
Eli flashed him the kind of smile a cult leader would covet. “That’s the idea.”
“I don’t think you’re a bad person, Victor.” Victor kept digging. “It’s all a matter of perspective.”
“that when you take away a person’s fear of pain, you take away their fear of death? You make them, in their own eyes, immortal. Which of course they’re not, but what’s the saying? We are all immortal until proven otherwise?
Victor smelled pain the way a wolf smelled blood. Tuned to it.
“Why?” she asked. “You can’t kill him.” “That may be.” His fingers curled around the shovel. “But half the fun is trying.”
“But the problem is, trauma is such a vague word, right? It’s a whole blanket, really, and I needed to
isolate a thread. Millions of people are traumatized daily. Emotionally, physically, what-have-you. If even a fraction of them became ExtraOrdinary, they would compose a measurable percentage of the human population. And if that were the case EOs would be more than a thing in quotation marks, more than a hypothesis; they’d be an actuality. I knew there had to be something more specific.”
We talk about the power of will, we talk about mind over matter, but it’s not one over the other, it’s both at once.
Something small and dangerous was taking shape in Victor as Eli spoke. An idea. A way to twist Eli’s discovery into his, or at least, into theirs.
The air was crisp and he relished it as he rested his elbows on the frozen metal rail, clutching his drink, even though the ice made the glass cold enough to hurt his fingers. Not that he felt it.
The moments that define lives aren’t always obvious. They don’t always scream LEDGE, and nine times out of ten there’s no rope to duck under, no line to cross, no blood pact, no official letter on fancy paper. They aren’t always protracted, heavy with meaning. Between one sip and the next, Victor made the biggest mistake of his life, and it was made of nothing more than one line. Three small words. “I’ll go first.”
He wanted to be the proof. Without it, this was Eli’s monster, and he was merely the wall off which Eli bounced his ideas.
Fear of dying. Fear of Eli. Fear of everything that could happen. Fear of nothing happening. It was so sudden and so strong.
ExtraOrdinary. The word that started—ruined, changed—everything.
OUT of nothing came pain.
Eli would go by Ever instead of Cardale, because it sounded cooler, and in the comics heroes had important, often alliterative names.
“We all make mistakes,” she said, and he felt ill. He didn’t know if it was an aftereffect of the overdose, or just her prepackaged therapy.
Victor didn’t know what to say, so he said the most useless word in the world. “Sorry.”
It perplexed him, how someone about to play God could pray to Him, but it clearly didn’t bother his friend.
He wanted to hate Eli for his composure, had almost hoped—almost hoped—that it would be too much for him to bear. That he would break, give up, and Victor would help him out of the tub, and offer him a drink, and the two would sit and talk about their failed trials, and later, when it was a safe distance behind them, they would laugh about how they’d suffered for the sake of science.
Eli, who believed in God and had a monster inside just like Victor, but knew how to hide it better. Eli, who got away with everything, who had slipped into his life and stolen the girl and the top rank and the stupid holiday research grant. Eli, who, despite it all, meant something to Victor.
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He had asked to remain nameless, but nameless and anonymous are not the same, especially where papers are concerned, and there, below the article, was a picture.
