A Once Crowded Sky (15 page)

“If I were you, I’d find Pen and get him to protect you. He’s the only one who can save you, the two of you could save each other.”

“What the hell’re you saying?” Soldier asks, his voice low.

Prophetier leans into Soldier, whispers in his ear, “You’re weak. You’re broken. It’s why you did what you did. All those poor villains.”

Soldier’s hand goes to his gun. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did you think you could kill enough to stop it from coming back? I don’t know, maybe you were always just shooting the dirt.”

Soldier’s in the box, shoved into a black cage too small to stand in, and every time you sit and fade, let your eyes droop so you can embrace a bit of that safe dark, even a shade—some Korean nut whacks the side and wakes you up. All that. Over this nothing of a man. Goddamnit.

“You don’t get what you’re talking about,” Soldier says as he steps back and looks Prophetier in the eye. “Damnit, you were there with all of us. You ain’t got access to the future no more. You’re no different than me or anyone else. We’re all the same now.”

“No, I don’t think so. There’s always Pen. Pen can save us. But you have to help him, that’s your role.”

“I’ve been helping!” Soldier shouts. “What do you think I’ve been doing?”

“Isn’t it time you made up for what you did? After all those poor men you killed, isn’t it time you came back, Soldier?”

Soldier flicks his fingers at the back of the trigger. “I’m tired of hearing this. I’ve warned you, and I’m tired. You got your own issues, that’s fine. We all lost something. But don’t put them in my place.”

“Soldier, don’t you get it yet? You save him. He saves us. We all come back. The powers. The game. All of it. It’s all coming back. Jesus, how thick are you?”

Prophetier waits for an answer that ain’t coming. Finally, after a mild shrug, he turns his back to the older man and walks through the field, toward the medical complex. When he’s about twenty feet out, Soldier draws and fires, two quick shots that crack the air, triggering a spurt of screams from the rescue workers around them.

Soldier’s fingers tremble, and he drops California.

“I knew you’d miss, hero,” Prophetier shouts from not all that far off. “Did you?” And he continues his walk, until his slim figure becomes a line half-sunk into the horizon.

Soldier peels off his glasses and throws them to the dirt. They land next to the gun, and Soldier stares down at the pair for a while. Eventually, Soldier steps on the glasses, breaking them into the ground, and he goes back to the hospital, looking to help where he can.

The Prophetier Origin Special #1 of 2

We are the word undrawn.

Prophetier walks away from Soldier. He walks through a field of destruction and death, a world waiting to be saved. He is smiling, joyously, excitedly smiling, as if he’s accomplished something and he now has time to reflect on how he got here, how he can get back.

Years ago, a boy loses his parents and draws a circle, releasing a stream of light. At first the stream seems endlessly powerful; there’s even an arrogance to its shine, a conquering presumption pulsing from the dirt, launching into the sky. Soon though, as we all must, the light
falters in its climb and begins to arch before finally tumbling down, crashing onto the edges of the scratched circle, splashing upward again and crashing down again, forming a fountain of color cascading out of the ground.

The boy reaches his hand out toward the stream and withdraws it immediately; the light burns him. The boy cradles his poor, hurt arm and tries not to cry.

Now in the once unsoiled light, thousands and thousands of sparks begin to play, dust clouding and swishing through the refulgent spout. Each tiny dot floating in the fountain sparkles with its own power as if the night’s infinite stars had been unveiled in the light of day. It’s all beautiful and bright, and the boy squints into the fountain, trying to isolate one shard of detritus among the flowing many.

It’s not easy, but eventually his eye catches a stray spark, and he’s able to fix it in his vision, force its figure not to be blurred by perpetual movement and instead to settle into its true form, a distinct shape formed from lines of pencil and ink, filled with millions of dots of color. The glimmering particle in the glimmering fountain becomes a glimmering picture, becomes the sketch of a man frozen against the sky; no, not frozen, but not moving either, but rather posed between movements, in the midst of flight. Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face, soars at the heart of the fountain.

And though this image falls quickly back into its origin, another spark soon escapes and is drawn into the boy’s sight, is again revealed to be a picture; however, this time the image has been divided into several parts: each ordered segment showing Ultimate in a slightly different pose so that it appears almost as if he’s moving, no, flying across the solid-colored background, his arms extended, his fingers folded into fists—and again it’s gone, and again the boy’s alone, and again another spark rises, becomes a page split into sections, panels showing Ultimate battling some ominously pink-clad villain, and beside Ultimate stands a boy no more than twelve years old, displayed with his foot jutted forward, his fist stretched out, and above PenUltimate, written in a small, white circle, are the words
Time to feel our metal!

The boy giggles and waits for the next, and when it comes, he hopes it will hurry away and soon invite another and another and another until a pattern graciously presents itself—all those heroes and all those villains
clunking and clanging, crunching and crashing—and so he waits for another and another and another.

This goes on, and though the boy grows and does what all boys must do, he returns time and again to the circle in the ground and the fountain of light that spurts from its center. Week upon year, year upon week, the boy passes his life separating dust from dust until the isolated shine in the isolated light on the isolated field becomes another page in a long, long story.

And what an odd, wonderful story it is: told in lonely segments—page by page, panel by panel—it still forms one cogent whole, each picture becoming a window through which he can view the narrative from yet another angle. At first it was, as you’d expect, all confusingly befuddled, references to events he hadn’t seen, allusions to developments he’d never read; but with enough patience, he was rewarded by these allusions and references as they too came bubbling up in the stream. Soon he understood them all, and the tales took on more dimensions, more relevance, more beauty.

Obviously, he adores all the characters jousting about in their magnificently colored outfits. But he does admit to having favorites. He likes Strength’s stubborn attitude, and Doctor Speed’s loyalty, and DG’s flippancy. Oh, and Prophetier, he likes Prophetier, a minor player who lurks in the backgrounds of others’ stories, dark and smoked, directing these great heroes to their great destinies, using his mastery of the stories’ future and past to save them all.

And then, of course, there is PenUltimate. PenUltimate was a kid just like the boy, a misplaced kid found in a magical world—PenUltimate was his favorite favorite; he kind of had to be. Like the boy, Pen had lost both his parents in a horrible accident, but rather than be brought down by that random whip of fate, Pen was lifted up, yanked into the sky by The Man With The Metal Face, sent surfing through the clouds, defying the constraining laws of nature that randomly dictate a man can’t fly or a boy can’t come back.

PenUltimate! God, he’s so awesome!

But, God, it’s all so awesome! The light, the sparks, the pictures, the pages, the stories, the heroes, the unfiltered pulchritude of the myth revealed—all awesome, endless, endless, endless awesome!

Enamored of it all, the boy starts to record what he sees. It’s too
much, it goes on for too long, it’s all too incredible. It’s so different from everything else, so much simpler and better, and he needs to splash around in it and remember it and be part of it and write it, just write it as it goes streaking by, so that then he can hold the light in his hands and it will no longer burn and it will instead glow on the page as it does birthing from the dirt.

His attempts to photograph or film the images in the fountain all fail; reality seems too slow, too fixed to capture the stream of light. He even makes a sad try at drawing what he sees, but his talent lags far behind his ambition. So instead he translates this splendor into words, using a pen to scrawl down descriptions of the sparks into lined, spiral notebooks.

To organize it all, he records each spark as a “page,” each image in the spark as a separate “panel”; each sentence embedded in the spark is attributed to a speaker, or if there is no obvious speaker, it is simply marked as a “caption.” Occasionally, he gathers groups of pages together, dividing them into “issues.” Groups of issues seemingly told from the same point of view are then sequenced and given one grand title, with each issue in the sequence marked with its own number.

Thus spark by spark, page by page, panel by panel, scribbling and scribbling, the boy takes down the images that form from the light, creating a comic-book script, a world undrawn. And one of the images he records is as follows.

The Soldier of Freedom #522

The notebooks begin to pile on his parents’ shelves. Piles and piles collect in piles and piles around the house, each revealing some facet of the tale that better illuminates the latest illuminations pouring from the fountain of light.

Now, after many years spent looking upon this glorious shine, the boy began to change in such a way that even he, who spent every free hour recording repeat miracles, was left without words to describe, such a, well, a transhumanization, maybe, or something. Anyway, all he could do was marvel at how once he was the boy staring into the light, and years later he was the man in the overcoat, a lit cigarette pasted to his lips, a scowl scraping against his jaw, a shit-weary point of view itching through his entire body as he skulked away from the light, pulled in a drag, and eyed the flying beings overhead, the heroes who desperately needed his aid to face their latest astounding adventures.

Around him and above him, the players of the game were superimposed upon the always trivial world of the boy’s childhood. What was once such a lonely sky was now studded with angels of every color and intention. And they came together and fought and separated and came back again and fought again, and it was not in the stream, but it was up there, right there, and it did not burn when he reached out to it, it welcomed him as Prophetier, master of the stories, or at least owner of the piles and piles of notebooks that showed exactly where the story would go, precisely where he could direct it to extract the greatest dramatic payoff.

He read about Prophetier while he puffed on Prophetier’s cigarettes, reviewing how the man had used his unexplained knowledge of the stories’ ever-shifting momentum to influence and play the game. After a while, following the directions contained in the light, written in the books, Prophetier became the hero, eventually even linked up with PenUltimate—the real, in the flesh and wires PenUltimate!—helping him get through such a wondrous adventure.

And it went on for some time like that, the boy now playing the hero he’d first seen in those stunning sparks, fighting alongside all those once-frozen pictures now delightfully animated as they screeched across another cloudless sky toward another cowering villain. Every day he was drawn more and more into the core of the light, climbing the repeated circles of the stories to a pure, unmoved bliss, and it was all so wondrous, all of it, wondrous.

Given his state of unanticipated nirvana, one can imagine the boy’s reaction when he recorded the following scene flashing from the light.

The Prophetier Origin Special #1 of 2