The Indifference League (11 page)

“Why don't you leave her alone,” Mr. Nice Guy says. “You know she's a vegetarian.”

“I eat some meat now,” Hippie Avenger says, shrugging.

“You do?” Mr. Nice Guy gasps.

“Yeah. Sometimes.”

“She was anemic,” The Statistician says. “Her body needed the iron. And the protein, too.”

“Oh,” says Mr. Nice Guy, visibly hurt.
He's
the one who listens
to the women talk about their problems,
not
The Statistician.

“Listen,” Hippie Avenger says to The Statistician, “if you cook up any sausages made from free-range chicken, I'll be first in line, okay?”

“I'll go into town and get some for you tomorrow,” The Statistician says. “Nobody should have to go without sausage.”

“Believe me,” Hippie Avenger says. “I've gone, like,
way
too long without it.”

“I know what you mean,” mutters The Statistician, as he slides the bratwurst into the soft inside of a bakery bun lubricated with mustard.

Oh my God!
Hippie Avenger thinks. “
I've gone way too long without it.”
Like, was I being flirty with The Statistician?

Then, an even crazier thought
: “Nobody should have to go without sausage.” Was he being flirty with me?

She decides that this is impossible.
The Statistician? Flirty? Come on. He's all brain, no feelings. There's a reason they called him The Android.

Still, her arousal response has a hair-trigger these days, and this maybe-but-probably-not flirtation is enough to stir that familiar warm, aching, tugging feeling inside her.
Nobody should go without sausage, indeed.
The Purple Pal will be seeing some action tonight.

“
I
can go into town and get some organic meat for you,” Mr. Nice Guy says. “I know a little butcher shop out on one of the concession roads.”

“Thanks,” Hippie Avenger says, patting his shoulder. “That's sweet of you.”

“So then,” The Statistician says, waving the blackened bratwurst in its bun, “who wants to eat this tube full of chemicals, fat, hormones, and antibiotics?”

“I'll take it,” says SuperKen, from his wheelchair. “They feed us worse stuff than that in the Forces.”

“My hero,” SuperBarbie says, fetching the sausage for him. “I'll bet you're hungry, poor thing. It's been a tiring day for you, with all that driving and everything. Maybe we should go get some sleep now.”

SuperBarbie gives SuperKen a subtle look, the type of expression that The Statistician never gets from Time Bomb, but that he may have just received from Hippie Avenger. But probably not. It was likely just the shifting light from the fire deceiving his eyes, combined with his desperate libido playing tricks on his brain. It was probably nothing.

SuperKen munches on the bratwurst and winks at The Statistician as SuperBarbie wheels him around the fire and toward the cottage.

Mr. Nice Guy glances conspicuously at his Super G Digital Athletic Chronometer, which reads 11:11 p.m. He stretches, yawns, and says, “Well, it's late. I think I'll turn in, too.” He turns to Hippie Avenger, who is wearing an expression similar to the one demonstrated by SuperBarbie, and he says, “Care to join me?”

“That's okay, dude. I think I'll stay out here for a while.”

“Oh,” he says. “Okay.”

He slumps toward the cottage, sighing after every third step.

After Hippie Avenger hears the cottage door bang shut behind Mr. Nice Guy, she slides her lawn chair a bit closer to The Statistician's.

“So, you work with numbers, right? So, like, what's your favourite number?”

The Statistician laughs. “I don't have a favourite number,” he says. “Numbers are numbers. One number isn't better than another. A number is only a word or symbol, or a combination of words or symbols, used in counting or in noting a total, or a particular symbol assigned to an object so as to designate its place in a series, or …”

“My favourite number is seven,” she interrupts. “When I was a little kid and I was learning to draw my numbers, seven was my favourite. And it still is.”

“Why? Why is seven better than, say, thirty-one, or sixty-one, or ninety-seven, or one-hundred-thirty-one, or …”

He continues naming every seventh prime number after seven until she interrupts him again.

“I was only a little kid. I only knew the numbers between one and ten. And just the primary and secondary colours, too. Red, yellow, blue. Orange, green, purple.”

The Statistician almost says, “The correct scientific term is
violet
,” but he stops himself.

“Purple is still my favourite colour. I coloured skies blue and grass green and the sun yellow like I was supposed to, but any time there was a choice, I coloured it purple. Flowers, cars, clothing, houses, all purple. I had boxes of crayons with barely used red and oranges, but the purples were all worn down to stubs. And seven was my favourite number to draw. My parents' refrigerator was covered in pages of purple sevens stuck up with random letter and number-shaped magnets.”

She pauses.

“Do you want to know why I liked sevens so much?”

“Indeed.” He really does want to know.

“Because seven was the number you could make the most choices about. You could draw it with clean, straight lines. You could draw it with a little arch in its back.”

She unconsciously leans forward, pushes her chest out a little, shakes her hair behind her shoulders.

“You could put a little horizontal line through the middle, to give it some girth. Or you could put a serif on the bottom to anchor it to the ground. Or a little overhang on top, like a tin cottage roof. You had the freedom do any, or some, or none of these things.”

She settles against the frayed back of the lawn chair.

“And no one would tell you that it wasn't right.”

Hippie Avenger stares up into the sky. There is a slender break in the shell of cloud overhead, through which a few of the brighter stars shine.

“Pretty, eh?” The Statistician says. “Light from stars that might already be dead.”

“Might they maybe still be alive?” she wonders.

“Possibly,” he says. “Mathematically speaking, though, it's likely that …” he stops himself.

She says, “They're still alive to us, I guess.”

“I guess,” he agrees.

They both look up for a long time. Gradually, like fluff-edged theatre curtains, the clouds part until almost the whole glittering sky is revealed.

“Eight,” The Statistician says.

“Hmm?”

“Eight,” he repeats. “My favourite number is eight.”

“I thought you didn't …”

“The infinity symbol is perfect for what it represents: a quantity without bound or end. It twists and turns in on itself forever. The set of real numbers is uncountably infinite,” he says, as if he is reciting ancient scripture from parchment. “That single, simple mathematical truth still fascinates me.”

He sighs.

Hippie Avenger actually heard The Statistician sigh.

“And,” he says, “if you draw it in one fluid motion, rather than two circles on top of each other like they tried to make me do it in school, an eight is like an infinity symbol rotated vertically.”

“Cool,” she says.

“Plus,” he adds, “when I was small they were fun to draw.”

“When were you ever small?” She is about to say something else, but she stops herself.

“What?” The Statistician says. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. You'll think it's stupid. You'll say it's a meaningless coincidence.”

“Try me.”

“Well,” she says, “my birthday is on the eighth of May.” She shrugs.

“Mine is December twenty-first,” he says. “Twenty-one is a multiple of seven.” Then, almost reflexively, he adds, “Not that this fact is statistically meaningful.” Then he turns his head to one side, and says, “But it is cool.”

“You called something
cool
,” she teases.

“Some things are.”

The Statistician smiles. Hippie Avenger can hear his breathing. It is slow and deep.

They both just stare up into space for a while.

“Hey,” Hippie Avenger says, “do you still get Friday afternoons off?”

“It's the main fringe benefit of being an untenured professor.”

“I noticed that
Star Wars
is playing next week at the rep theatre up the street from the gallery.”

“I thought you hated
Star Wars
,” he says. “I thought that was the one thing you had in common with my wife.”

“I don't hate
Star Wars
,” Hippie Avenger says, “I just never got around to seeing it. But I think I'd like to see it now.”

“It's a date, then,” The Statistician says, who is slightly embarrassed that his voice cracked like that when he said it.

“Cool,” says Hippie Avenger, whose eyes are rimmed with tears from the smoke from the fire.

FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE

“There are many questions to be asked. Here, in this Fortress of Solitude, we will try to find the answers together.”

—Jor-El, Superman's father, from
the movie
Superman Returns
, 2006

A
ll of the stars are hidden tonight, but the light of the moon, diffused through a thin, low layer of cloud, coats everything with a silvery glow, making the beam from the Norton Commando's headlamp almost unnecessary.

From her perch on the back of the motorcycle, The Stunner looks up into the sky. There is a slender break in the shell of cloud overhead, through which a few of the brighter stars shine, following them as they speed along this hard-topped back road.

“How much farther?” she calls out over the Norton's steady roar.

“We just passed the cottage,” The Drifter calls back.

“We just passed the cottage?” she echoes. “Why?”

“The sky is clearing,” he says, “And there's a place that I want you to see.”

The bike leans as they turn from the road and onto a narrow, stony path. The Drifter downshifts, and the engine howls as the Norton carries them up the steep trail. Leaves and needles brush their shoulders as they climb. The Stunner tightens her hold around The Drifter, clenches the seat between her thighs to keep from sliding off the back of the bike.

The Drifter cuts the engine as they reach the top. The brakes squeal as the Norton comes to a halt on a narrow finger of stone that juts out between the black expanse of water below and the opening sky above.

They dismount and set their helmets on the ground beside the bike, which radiates heat from the long ride. The Stunner unties her hair and shakes it loose around her shoulders. The Drifter pulls a blanket from a saddlebag, spreads it across the smooth stone at the edge of the promontory.

They sit atop the ragged blanket, shoulder to shoulder, and they both look up for a long time. The pinging and crackling sounds from the cooling engine eventually subside, and the wind drops from a whistle to a whisper to silence. Gradually, like fluff-edged theatre curtains, the clouds part until almost the whole glittering sky is revealed.

“Wow,” The Stunner finally says.

“I found this place once when I was out hiking by myself. I used to climb up here when I wanted to get away from everyone else,” The Drifter says. “This was my Fortress of Solitude.”

“Fortress of Solitude,” The Stunner repeats. “I like that.”

“Not my idea. It's the name of Superman's secret fortress in the Arctic, where all of the knowledge of Kryptonian civilization is stored in crystal form, and where …” he pauses. “Sorry. I was a bit of a comic-book geek when I was a kid.”

“Geeks become heroes, I think,” she says, running the tip of her index finger from The Drifter's rough, stubbled cheek to his chin, “with experience.”

The Drifter mirrors the gesture, tracing the smooth skin of her face with a calloused fingertip. Then he reaches into the front pocket of his jeans, opens his palm to reveal what he has removed: two small, smooth stones. One is shaped like a boomerang, slate-grey, cut through with slight, white parallel lines. The other is pink, flecked with metallic specks, almost perfectly round, except for a slight bump on one side.

“I found these on a beach in France, among millions of other stones. The tide had pushed them together just like this.”

The bump on the pink stone fits perfectly into the concave side of the slate-grey boomerang.

“They are from different places. They are made from different materials. And yet they are like two halves of a whole, like they were shaped and eroded and moved around by the forces of nature just so they could eventually fit together like this.”

He spreads his fingers, and says, “Take one.”

She hesitates.

“Which one?”

“Whichever one you want.”

Her fingers hover over his open palm.

“Is this supposed to mean something?”

He shrugs.

“Only if you want it to.”

She takes the pink stone from his open palm, closes her hand around it to preserve its warmth.

“Can we sleep out here tonight?”

“Won't you be cold?”

“You'll warm me,” she says.