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The kick-me dog bounced around the backyard like a floppy old mop looking for a place to shit. Alan smoked by the back gate and watched the chocolate seal rag-doll cat sit on a bare patch of the overgrown walk next to him. It observed the freedom of the world beyond as something both curious and detestable.
“You got it good here, old boy.”
The feline ignored him with an apathy only possible for its species.
The air harbored a humid nip that numbed his chin and ears. Katelyn had taken everyone’s photograph for new IDs. She cut his hair in front of her kitchen sink, and he shaved for the first time in a decade, revealing the inevitable double chin of middle age and a crease around his mouth he didn’t remember.
His adventures in not smoking resulted in failure. Here I am, at it again. He took a deep drag that burned his lungs, let it out slowly, and imagined he was blowing fire into the frozen air.
Bridger and Nash, who were not targets of a nationwide manhunt, had gone out to look for posters. Their plan was to check the places White Owl might advertise: pizza parlors, shopping malls, arcades, and skate parks.
Gwen, Alan, the Greta, and the boys were confined to the house and yard. The Greta, taciturn as the kitchen table where she sat, watched Francis vegetate in front of the television with Ty. Her head would track his small trips to the kitchen for a drink or a snack, now and then lifting her hand a centimeter off the tabletop as if she desired to touch him. Francis would notice her uncomfortably with a timid wave or nod of his head. Ty was less gracious. “Why don’t y’all talk?” he’d said directly to her. When she ignored him, he said, “How about I pull off your mask?”
The boys had grown quickly and fiercely close, like identical twins, each delineating a different side of the coin. Francis possessed a serene stillness that affected Ty, who could be a firecracker. Ty spoke for the both of them. When he was hungry, Francis was hungry. When he was bored, Francis was bored. If he went to the kitchen, he would pull Francis along. If it was Francis who went to the kitchen, Ty would watch him to make sure everything was smooth sailing. Sometimes, he’d even go as far as the entrance to the living room and wait for his return, which was celebrated with a bouncy enthusiasm. Both boys were deeply engaged in the latest season of the teenage fantasy series, Eternal Love.
Alan detested the franchise, though it would be social death in their cloistered company to admit it.
The story, about as deep as a mud puddle, told of a boy who falls in love with a girl during the pyramid times in ancient Egypt. Stealing a riff from Shakespeare, the star-crossed lovers were from warring families, forcing them to carry on their affair in secret while their kinfolk died around them. At one point, the boy is at a party in a tomb of an ancient and forgotten sorcerer when he becomes separated from his friends and stumbles into the wrong chamber, disturbing the wizard’s rest and fulfilling a prophecy due to his virtue and his love.
The powerful mage awakens, and after a long battle of wits, the boy is victorious. Enraged, the wizard uses a loophole and curses his rival.
Lo! The sun will rise and the sun will set,
And you’ll outlive the withered stars above.
Your eyes will see thy friends fade into death,
Held in your prison of eternal love.
He stays young while his girlfriend grows up, marries his best buddy, has a child, and in the first season’s finale is gruesomely murdered by an emissary of the wizard.
The boy, crushed by grief, cannot find death in his immortal bondage. He knows he cannot continue in his line—they’re already questioning his youthful looks—so he fakes his death and banishes himself from his homeland. Only to return in disguise when the daughter (played by the same actress) is of the age when he first loved her mother. And so begins Eternal Love, the first drama franchise to surpass a trillion dollars.
Now, it’s season four. A sensational and controversial cast change has almost eclipsed the presidential election. In the story, four thousand years have passed since that fateful night in the wizard’s tomb. She—the direct lineage of his first and true love and (queer plot twist from Season 3) carrier of the “Soul Spark”—is now the daughter of a wealthy and buffoonish merchant. Her mother died during childbirth, and her father has married a sadistic woman with a son who lusts after the beautiful girl.
The Hero, Jonathan Winters, played by climate refugee and international heartthrob Go Min Sung (also the co-lead singer—next to superstar idol Woo Chang Wook, of the same talent agency, and the first actor to play Jonathan Winters—of the boyband series namesake, E.L.), is an apprentice blacksmith working in her father’s stables where he—having perfected his craft for nearly four millennia—creates for her the most exquisite jewelry. This, he keeps a pining secret until one day, after fighting off a groping stepbrother, she stumbles, ravished and sobbing, into his workshop cubby behind the stables.
How many times has he lost her and found her again? It’s been a millennium since the tragedy of season three (AKA: the gay season), and finally, the Soul Spark has guided him here. When he sees her, it’s like falling in love for the first time. Though on the outside he’s a tender youth, on the inside he’s as ancient as the sibyl, and he has made an oath that he will never interfere, never again be seduced by that infernal curse. But God, she is beautiful…
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It was a hack job of clichés, overwrought tropes, impossible plot twists, and bad lines, but the kids loved it, and they would pay anything to get more of it.
Four years in, the show had become a worldwide phenomenon. The teen idols were rolling in hundreds of millions of dollars, full of their own real-life drama and scandal. Merchandising and affiliations were everywhere: a clothing line, backpacks and lunch boxes, fast food endorsements, toys, an admittedly bad VR game, and a music group sensation that monopolized the charts. It was fucking pandemonium.
Alan had never watched an entire season, but it was so pervasive in the daily zeitgeist that the story lines and hackneyed reveals sunk in through osmosis.
Francis and Ty were hooked; it was like cocaine candy to their adolescent minds.
Gwen emerged from the basement, ceremoniously carrying a book from which she read like a schoolgirl.
The cat padded away upon her approach.
“Bum a smoke?” she asked.
He gave her one and lit it for her. They smoked in silence.
“So, you’re a psychiatrist?” she said at the halfway point of the cigarette.
“Psychologist.”
“Right, what’s the difference?”
“Drugs.”
“Do you have depression or something?” she said.
“Do you think I have depression?” he said.
“I do,” she said.
He shrugged and took a drag. His mental health had been evident to himself for a long time. For fourteen years. Since one discrete moment.
“Becky Madison… when she came into the station…” she didn’t finish.
The urge to put his fist through the small window in the garage was overwhelming. “And?” he said.
“If you want to talk, I’m here. No judgment.”
“Thank you.” What could he say that he’d not analyzed in his own head a million times?
“Do you mind if I talk?” she said.
“You can talk. It’s fine.”
“Francis needs you. And if you’re going to be fading in and out, and not clear…”
They passed a silence with a cigarette in which he loathed himself. The cat returned, as if on patrol, and sat in the spot at their feet where the snow had been trodden down. It glared out at the despicable freedom of the back alley.
“I’m sucking, aren’t I?”
She nodded. “There’s some shit going on, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I’ll get it together,” he said.
“Thank you. So, do you want to hear my plans?”
“Yes, I do, Deputy Wolf.”
“I think we should stay in this house and hunker down, just like we’ve been doing. We help Francis with his concert. In and out like a bank heist. We wait for things to cool off.”
“We need to get out of the country,” he said.
“That’s our best bet,” she agreed. “If we can get to Texas, we can get to Mexico. From there, we have options.”
“What about the Free City? There’re a hundred million people, most of them refugees. We could get lost in there forever.”
The screen door to the upstairs of the house opened, and Katelyn called to her little dog. The mop flopped around, barked at Alan and Gwen, then trotted to the house. The woman scooped up the little pooch, then shut and locked the door behind her.
“She invited me up for coffee this morning,” Gwen said.
“Oh yeah? And you lived to tell about it?”
“She’s scared. She’s a woman set in her ways, and our visit has severely disrupted her life. But she’s determined to help us. She knows about the hunters. The way she said it made it sound like a cult. They believe that if the Maji do their enchantments, it will destroy the Veil and usher in something called the Chaos.”
“Typical apocalyptic eschatology. Kind of like Pastor Tony and his followers.”
“Except for the shapeshifting and murderous tendencies,” said Gwen.
“I’m not convinced Pastor Tony doesn’t have murderous tendencies.”
Over another cigarette, Gwen summarized what Katelyn had told her.
“And that’s why they’re after Francis and Ty. Not just them, everyone who went to that concert.”
“It’s a holy war,” said Alan.
“More like a holy extermination,” Gwen said.
“So it’s genetic, being Maji?”
“Apparently, yes. They’ve always been around, living in secret. But there’s another way; if you had a parent that used a certain strain of the Escape drug.”
“Ty’s mom,” said Alan.
Gwen nodded, adding, “Katelyn said it was Lethe Vonnix who discovered the link between the Maji and Escape.”
“I should know that name?”
“Elvira. Remember on the dock at the Halloween gala?”
The inebriated night came back. At the time, he’d thought she was one of Becky’s spies. Had he not been so self-centered, he may have been able to avoid… “Fuck. I missed it. She was trying to warn us.”
“Her approach wasn’t exactly subtle,” said Gwen. “There’s another way. You go to a Francis Builds A Fire concert. That also gets you a Maji card.”
“We’re all Maji,” he said, remembering Francis’s words.
“Congrats, how do you feel?” she asked.
“I’m waiting for my magic powers to kick in. Hoping for invisibility,” he deadpanned.
Gwen did not smiled. “I think about that night all the time. I don’t know what I experienced, but I’m glad I did.”
He felt the urge to kiss her. Instead, he took a drag and, ignoring Katelyn’s rule, flicked his cigarette butt over the fence to vanish in the snow.
“I’m done drinking.”
It was Gwen who kissed him, quickly, blowing smoke between their faces. Despite the cold, her lips were warm. Her tongue played against his. She pulled back, and he touched her lips with the tips of his fingers.
It’s been fourteen years since…
“You kissed me,” he said.
“I have problems,” she said. “You should know that.”
This time, he kissed her, holding the small softness of her face in his palms, feeling her fiery hair through his fingers.
They lingered outside in the broad vastness of a gray daylight. He felt the world was entering an enduring winter; more snow and cold were coming. He didn’t risk thinking Gwen might choose to stay by him through it. It was too much to ask of her… of him… of fate. Just as it was too much to believe that he could be more to Francis than a shrink.
“I don’t know much. I can’t explain or rationalize anything,” said Gwen, “but what Francis gave me was… a gift…”
If to hear the music he needed to be a Maji, he would carry that burden. But it wasn’t a salvation for him, being able to hear Francis’s music. Haunting dreams still pursued him, not of lycanthropic beasts, but of a bone-deep freeze that came before he met the Maji. It was this Francis wanted to thaw. The shudder of inward recoil swept through him. The boy and the suffering were bound in an intimate dance. Of all the people in the world, Dr. Alan Smith, alone, deserved his psychic torment. The boy, a radiance in an icy waste, held a beauty too immense for Alan, who had accepted his pain, and he owed it, with interest.