True Heroes (65 page)
“About what this time?”
“Drowning. He’s always drowning.”
Chapter 16
Caleb looked out the glass door to the crowd of cold wanderers and caught a glimpse of his small pack. He smiled and paid the cashier while taking his bag. ‘Did we remember everything?’
‘Your collar. I think you left it in the freezer.’
‘It’s winter. I thought you liked winter?’
‘I do. Almost as much as you enjoy slaving.’
‘Better put a coat on with all the ice you’re throwing at me.’
Power smiled inside his mind. ‘Your wit must have indoor heating.’
Caleb expertly weaved from across the street to the smiling and waving bunch on the bench. The area around them was both simple and intriguing; the cement floor of the small walking shelter was blotched with black, white, and brown tiles with small chess pieces chiseled into each clear square that opaquely revealed the people walking under the raised platform. The elegant structure above them was a rotundly fragmented mirror with clouded trim along the end of the never-moving reflector. There were two benches that sat across from one another in the elliptically shaped structure with the tunnel beneath having clay red bricks along it sides. Caleb looked up and smiled at the name melted into the outside, faded green metal: ‘The Everybody Circle.’
Everyone smiled as he approached, and Alice quickly sprang against the metal side of the bench to give him the required sitting room. He handed her the small bag, which was nearly shredded by the seven hands seeking single contents in the wide variety. Caleb gently meandered his own hand around the small pint of ice cream and a plastic spoon. “You got ice cream?”
He ripped open the top. “Yes sir.”
Alice lowered her hot chocolate from her lips. “What kind?”
“Vanilla.”
He looked around and noticed the sideways stares of everyone, and the instantaneous ones of a small group of children walking by. “Why vanilla?”
“I like vanilla.”
Alice half-smiled and looked over at their sitters. “I never told you about David and Mr. Dyllo did I?”
“I don’t think it ever crossed your mind to.”
She gently pushed his arm and smiled. “They went to school together, at least for a few years. Dyllo went to his alma mater after that, but David always looked up to him. He used to tell me all kinds of advice they shared with each other.”
“They were like symbiotic mentors then?”
Joy leaned forward. “What’s that mean?”
Benny sat up straight. “The man shared between them was their son to begin, but to end in the field?”
Caleb smiled over his shoulder. “Surely and truly. And it means that they were basically feeding each other ideas to refine one another. They’re in the perfect fields to pull it off.”
“Dyllo was never in the military. I think that’s when they lost contact with one another for a while. It made him sad.”
“Which is where you came in? Well, came more in?”
“How’d you know? I never told you that. I never even hinted at that.”
“I know you a little bit.”
“You guys just met,” Joy injected.
Caleb nodded a few times. “I know certain parts of her personality already.”
He shoveled a spoon of vanilla onto his tongue and used his power to instantly melt away the tiny glacier. Power kept its focus up. ‘Alice is swooning at you and mumbling. Ask her to walk off a bridge. Let’s see if she follows.’ Caleb ate another larger bite and ignored the quip. ‘Joy’s scathing your skin with her heated stare.’
‘If I leaned over and kissed Alice right now, the BTUs would go up even more I bet.’
‘Why would you say that? Your cruelty is nowhere near my level.’ Power was quiet for only a moment. ‘You’re wit, on the other hand, is too off-hand to be scathing.’
‘I admit it was a stretch.’
‘Why do you allow Joy to stay around you?’
‘What would you have me do?’
‘The truth: you’re supposed specialty.’
‘What truth?’
‘You’re with Alice.’
‘She knows that.’
‘And yet she’s still jealous and radiates hatred for her.’
‘You want me to tell her how to feel?’
‘To show her why she’s feeling the wrong thing.’
‘What’s the right thing to feel?’
‘Lethargic.’
‘Like you?’
‘It works for me.’
‘But not for her. You can’t have an absolute truth for an emotional reaction to the truth. I told her the truth of the matter. How she manipulates that truth into a rational response is nothing I can control, nor would I choose to’
Alice took her glove off and lain it on Caleb’s leg with the palm facing upwards from within the blue and green, translatory patterning. Her movements drew no attention as she carefully slid her hand down his arm and between his fingers. She continually did this; her eyes focused on every finger as she examined and cradled them individually. Her whispers were even quieter than usual with some part of her mind attempting to conceal what it couldn’t constrain. Caleb covered one eye in an opaque blue curtain and watched the sparks snap and burst along every length their skin ran. They settled as he removed his monocle, and a spoonful of vanilla shot up between them. Her mouth quickly covered the small white plastic end and a smile broke out. “I like vanilla too.”
“Good.” Caleb smiled back at her as they formed a basket with their hands. “What do you guys think of Mr. Dyllo?”
“I think he was right on.”
Caleb looked towards Joy without turning his head.
“No way. He’s a complete idiot.”
Christopher and Caleb smiled at one another.
Benny placed his hands on Alice’s shoulders. “If it were true, the smoking cauldron of speech from which conjured malevolence flows so freely would seem to be the only spell ever worthy of a wizard’s wand.”
Andrea looked up and back to him. “But he’s wrong.” She looked towards Caleb. “Tell him, Caleb.”
Caleb stabbed the spoon into the hard treat and handed it to Alice. He licked and cleaned between his fingers while speaking. “My first instinct is to say he’s wrong, but he’s spent his entire life looking at this. That’s not to say he’s completely right, or even partially right, but you can’t dismiss it immediately. Look at these people. Mr. Dyllo would sit up on that mirror up there and see everybody going towards goals at their own pace, and maybe even hating anybody that stood in their way. Look at David though: he’d be beneath us in that tunnel, following one person’s feet until they left his sight, but he’d see everyone as a completely singular entity with an infinitely various reason for each and every one of them. None of us see the same thing. Not on a traditional level. Not on a rational level.”
Alice swallowed a large bite. “What do we see?”
“You guys see the ground mostly, but when you do look up, you see what your mind sees. We’re all too genetically crippled to see anything else.”
They all began revealing at length their various sights and scopes while Caleb’s power spiked away from his body. A weak distortion made its way around the circle with its eyes omniscient across its spread form. Caleb closed his eyes and saw from all the angles, during all the turns, and could sense the gravity of the space. He felt the crumple zone between each material entity shift and morph while the details embodied the homogenous relationship of space and time, and how the couplet ceased to matter. ‘This is what is seen.’
“Have you ever noticed how many times you say ‘I’ in a normal conversation?” Everyone stopped chattering as Caleb opened his eyes and looked back for a response. “Andrew, count how many times we say it starting now.”
Andrew nodded eagerly before Angela looked over towards Caleb’s ankles. “What’s that have to do with anything?”
“I’m curious, and I want to see what this means.”
Alice put the top back on the ice cream. “Care to share? Sharing is caring.”
“I do care, but I don’t share half-formed ideas.”
“Well, form them.”
He smirked and threw his arm around her shoulder. “I’m working on it.”
The tiniest of the group suddenly stood and spoke before them. “I see everybody as happy people.” ‘Her eye contact is brave, even forceful.’ “They’re just looking for another way to be happy.”
“So you agree with Dyllo?”
She looked heavily at Caleb. “No I didn’t say that.”
“Well, if they are looking for happiness and nothing else, then they are looking for their personal gain underneath all the smiles and laughs, which is what he was talking about.”
Her eye contact finally faltered. “I didn’t think of that.”
“That’s what I was saying about him. This guy’s been thinking his entire life about how people act and behave in situations. We’re not going to be able to disagree with him without thinking as hard and as far as he does.”
Alice leaned closer to him. “I don’t think I’m built for that.”
“Nor am I.”
“I’m not.”
“I’m not either.”
“You think you could?”
Alice moved in front of Caleb’s face to answer Angela. “He never said that. He’s just trying to help us.”
Angela looked away quickly. “I want him to. I think what David’s friends saying is sad and depressing. It can’t possibly be true.”
“Indeed and for true, it would seem the wit that is yours is not what is ours.”
Caleb whispered to Alice. “He pulls that out of thin air?”
“Awesome, right?”
“Kind of, yeah.” He raised his voice. “I know what you guys see is the depressing part. A lot of you guys have an outward focus, and him telling all of you that your focus revolves more around selfish desire than just observation is scary, I know. If we’re going to find a flaw in his logic, we’ve got to forget how angry it makes us.”
“Us?”
“You think it’s right for him to make you angry and me not care?”
‘This is what he was talking about.’
‘What do you mean?’
“You don’t have to care. You barely know us.”
‘Underneath your care, what is there?’
‘A desire to help.’
“That doesn’t matter, Chris.”
‘Why?’
“Why not?”
‘Because they need it.’
‘Why?’
“Because I know you guys are good people.”
‘Because they admit they can’t stand up to him.’
