Fitting In Read online

  Zargoza’s should still be open. Octavia made this thick drinking chocolate, what she said was European style, which bloomed on the tongue as rich as any wine. Robin could not afford two café visits in a day, but she’d given him the pastry and coffee free this morning, and it wasn’t like he could afford anything in this city on a teacher’s salary. Chocolate might not justify God’s ways to man in any lasting sense, but it did fine over short distances.

  He’d just turned off Roosevelt when he saw the crowd, and the police lights.

  His ever-unhelpful hero brain salted panic with analysis as he ran toward the crowd. No flames, that was a good start. No ambulance, either: probably also good. Unless it was so bad they’d told the ambulance not to hurry.

  He stretched his legs fourteen feet high and lurched over the crowd’s heads with a single teetering stride. His legs sprang back to more-or-less normal with that trademark rubber-band snap, and sent him sprawling to the sidewalk in front of Zargoza’s, one hand on asphalt, the other in a pile of broken glass.

  He sat up and shook the glass off. Most of it fell away, but one long triangular shard had actually pierced him, and when he pulled it from his palm the pale hydraulic fluid he had instead of blood these days leaked out and congealed into a translucent lump. It hurt, but he didn’t care at first. The shard of glass was covered in trailing gold leaf filigree, and printed with the lower corner of a Z.

  The shop was dark. Slivers of the gleaming 1927 window hung from the frame like broken teeth. Most of the glass lay shattered on the ground.

  “Sir! Sir, I’ll have to ask you to step back.”

  He looked past the policewoman to Octavia, who stood, shaking, blanket around her shoulders, beside another cop. Doughboys huddled against her ankles, flaking in the chill. Jan, the photographer from before, was offering Octavia a cup of something hot, but Octavia hadn’t noticed—because she had seen Robin, and, in spite of the broken window, in spite of everything, she looked relieved.

  “It’s okay,” he told the cop. “I’m a friend.”

  * * *

  Heroes tended to meet people on very bad days. Though Robin never told the magazines, that was one of the reasons he quit—he wanted to help people before things got so bad you needed powers to do it.

  Octavia held herself together better than most. Robin and Jan talked her into a cab, doughboys clustered in her lap, and rode with her to her building, which would have been twenty minutes’ walk away. She made it up five flights of stairs and through her triple-locked door into a sidewalk rescue chair whose ragged upholstery she’d covered with a knit blanket, before she started crying. Robin touched her shoulder. She did not seem to notice. He shot Jan a what-should-we-do-now look, but she raised her hands, search me, and retreated to Octavia’s postage stamp kitchen to start a kettle boiling. Robin looked around the cramped apartment, every surface that wasn’t a counter covered in bright cloth, and after some doily-displacing scramble, found a box of Kleenex wearing what seemed to be a specially knit wool jumper. Octavia took a tissue, blew her nose, and said, “Thank you,” and, “I’m just so angry!”

  He hadn’t expected the last word, so the reply he’d had ready, “It’s okay,” sounded wrong. The doughboys glared at him, confused. “I mean. It’s not.”

  “No! It’s not. It is not okay.” She pronounced every word distinctly. “My great-grandfather bought that window. What is even happening to this city? Mama Z got robbed a couple times in the eighties when things were really bad, but they’re supposed to be better now, and the last two months—what’s wrong with people?”

  He thought of Mikhail, and of the crowd. “Did you see who did it?”

  “Some kids in tracksuits and masks. Not jokers that I could tell, but you can’t always.” Her hands were dry and their dough-skin was cracking. She reached without looking for a moisturizer jar among the plants on the side table, unscrewed the lid, and massaged the white cream into her palms. “I bet they’re the ones who spray painted my shop two weeks ago—all those horrible words, I was up all night cleaning them off. Maybe they blew out the tires on my delivery truck, too. Detective McTate—thank you, Jan—he said they’ve had reports of people lingering around. Loitering. The police always think people are loitering in Jokertown, but…” She sipped her tea instead of finishing her sentence. Robin looked from her to Jan, who’d crossed her arms and leaned back against the overstuffed sofa. She still wore her sunglasses.

  “You know it’s not kids,” Jan said.

  Octavia blew her nose long and loud, and handed the crumpled tissue to one of her doughboys. They tossed the ball of paper from one to the other to the trash can hidden under the spider plant. She laughed. “Maybe they just don’t like me. They liked Mama, but I’m not Mama.”

  Seated mute across from her, Robin remembered the urgency with which Octavia had said, It takes time. Had she been talking to herself as much as to him? Absurd. People loved Octavia. Mrs. Blaine in the history department, who’d moved to Jokertown when she grew gills forty years ago, always said how happy she was Octavia was following in her grandmother’s footsteps. Though now it occurred to him to think more closely, Mrs. Blaine had sounded surprised. “It’s not you,” he said. “It’s them. And it’s not even them, probably. The attacks on your business, Mikhail trying to buy you out—it’s too close for coincidence.”

  “Exactly,” Jan said. She stood up and started to pace, gesturing wildly. “There’s a dark truth at the bottom of this. Wheels within wheels. But we’ll drag the skeleton out of the closet.”

  “Really?” Octavia looked shocked but relieved. Robin had seen that effect before. People didn’t like to think that the world might just hurt them for no reason, but the suggestion of conspiracy could coat disasters with an oil slick of order.

  He stretched out his hand to take Octavia’s wrist. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Mikhail’s trying to push you away from your shop. Don’t worry, though. Whatever’s happening, we’ll find out, and stop it.” He glanced up to Jan, who shrugged, sure.

  “I can’t ask you to do that for me,” Octavia said.

  “You’re not asking.”

  She put down the tea and hugged him. Doughboys rained from her lap at the sudden movement, and landed with a somersault on the rug. “Robin. Jan. Thank you. But it’s dangerous. It means so much that you’d offer, but really, I mean, shouldn’t you go to the police?”

  “I already told them what I think,” Jan said. “They might listen, or not. Either way, they have their own idea, which is that a joker gang is running around picking on small business owners. Cops look for cop-sized solutions to cop-sized problems. If we push them on it, maybe they’ll run in a few XD students who just happen to be hanging around school at night. Robin, how many of your kids do you think could get arrested without being booked for resisting? How many of their families can afford bail?”

  Robin hadn’t even thought of that part. Some guidance counselor he was.

  “Besides,” Jan said. “Robin’s a hero. We’ll be fine.”

  * * *

  Jan walked fast. She was inches shorter than Robin, but he still had to stretch his legs and quicken his step to match her pace. “Look, Jan—”

  “Jan Chang.” She turned, grabbed his hand, and squeezed without breaking stride. Her handshake gave him a tingling static feeling even through her gloves. “And you’re Robin Ruttiger. I watched your show before I blew up my television. Got halfway through. Did you win?”

  “What? No.”

  “Glad to have you on board anyway.” She stepped off the sidewalk, still walking backward, just as the light turned green. He shot out his arm into a long rubber rope to pull her back, but the oncoming cab squealed to a stop inches from her leg. Jan glanced at Robin’s arm over her glasses, intrigued, while the cabbie cursed. “That was nice of you.” She turned to face front and kept walking.

  “I think we’re on the same page about what’s going on here, with Octavia’s shop and with the tracksuits and with
Mikhail, but I want to be sure.”

  “Yeah.” She walked through a cordon into a street festival that had closed off a block of Mulberry. Kids clustered around a fried dough stand; a cold but enthusiastic band of Brooklynesque young people with strange facial hair played polka music. Robin waved to a man he recognized selling arepas. “It’s reptoids,” Jan said. “Obviously.”

  “What? What’s a reptoid?”

  “Secret lizard inhabitants of the counter-Earth. Or possibly they occupy our own planet’s hollow core. I’m not sure yet. I’ve been tracking them for a while. They infiltrate surface society with their mind control and shape-shifting powers.”

  “What? I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “Of course not. Do you think ancient superintelligent shape-shifting mind-control lizard monsters would be so bad at this that you would know about them?”

  He frowned. "Is this where you start talking about the Rothschilds? Because if so, I can solve this case on my own, thanks."

  "Ugh. I know we’ve just met, and trust me I understand where the question’s coming from, there’s a ton of anti-Semitism in the field of Secret-World-Men-Behind-the-Curtain Studies and it’s gross and evil and those of us who are really trying to save the world always need to be on watch against it. But please believe me, and do keep calling me on this if you think I’m screwing up: I’m not talking about racist scapegoat fantasies. I’m talking about real actual lizard people."

  He tried to follow her logic, and ended up feeling like a yoga victim. “I do think it’s Mikhail, though. He wants the shop. Real estate in Jokertown’s still cheaper than most other places in Manhattan, but not for long. He wants to get in while the getting’s good, but Octavia won’t sell. So he’s trying to force her out.”

  “Because,” Jan said as if spelling things out for a child, “his reptoid masters want to expand their secret network of mind-control broadcast stations. They’ve had trouble in New York because the real estate prices are so high. But Zargoza’s is a good target, and it’s located on a nexus of the geomantic power their technology requires.”

  Was she crazy? You weren’t supposed to call people crazy. But he was pretty sure none of the things she was saying were actually things. She seemed to be a friend of Octavia’s, and Jokertown was full of its own sort of people, but none of this seemed helpful. “Look, I’m not saying Mikhail’s a nice guy, but he really doesn’t seem the mind-control conspiracy type.”

  “Which is—”

  “—exactly why he’d make a perfect reptoid agent?” he suggested.

  She stopped, wheeled on him, and shifted her glasses down her nose. Her eyes were bright blue without pupils, and glowed softly from within. The little veins around her irises were blue, too, and pulsed. He tried not to look away. On the show, he always looked guilty when he was being judged. Blame it on the Catholicism. “I like you, Ruttiger. Even if you are a bit naïve.”

  She shouldered past two men selling watches onto Prince toward Bowery, then north. “All I’m saying is, we don’t need a more complicated explanation when we have a simpler one.”

  He didn’t need to see her eyes to tell she was rolling them. “What are you, William of Occam?”

  “No! I’m just trying to figure this thing out. If all the stuff you’re talking about was real, I mean, really really real, we’d have to plan for it. I don’t even know how you defend against, what were you saying, reptoid mind control.”

  Right on Houston, across the park, then south on Forsyth past the school. “Nobody’s sure. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Some people go for gemstones. I think leather insulates you. Their technology’s designed to exploit thin mammalian skins.”

  “But if it’s really just that Mikhail hired some thugs to intimidate Octavia into selling, then all we need to do is link Mikhail and the thugs.”

  “And if we go in unprepared, the reptoids will eat us for dinner. They do that, you know. I mean, I bet they don’t call it dinner, lizards would have a whole different way of thinking about meals. Slower metabolisms. But you get the idea.”

  She turned left onto Eldridge. Robin added up the turns in his head, frowned, and quickened his pace to walk beside her. “Couldn’t we have just crossed at Kenmare?”

  Jan raised one eyebrow. “God, Ruttiger, haven’t you ever shaken a tail before?”

  He hadn’t seen anyone, or at least, he didn’t think he had seen anyone. “Are we being followed?”

  “Not that I can see. But if they were good at their jobs, I couldn’t. So it’s better to assume. Come on. We’re almost there.”

  If not for the virus, this row of apartment buildings would have gone through at least two rounds of gentrification by now. The building on the corner was a broken-windowed mess; so was the next, though one of the tenants had tried to make it a bit more homey with the addition of a bright yellow welcome mat and fake plastic flowers. The tenant in question was wearing a Tommy Bahama shirt, and collecting his mail, and appeared to be a more or less ambulatory walrus. He waved. “Hi Jan!”

  “Hey Jube!” She stopped two doors down, in front of the most broken building on the street—chunks of brick missing from the façade, rusted iron on the rails. Little stone lions flanked the front steps. At least, one of them was a lion. The other was missing its head.

  “What we need,” Robin said, “is a—”

  “Stakeout,” Jan said at the same time as he did. “Exactly. Whether this is a random attack or reptoids or a conspiracy, someone might come back tonight to follow up. Maybe they’ll hold off until Mikhail can approach Octavia again—but if we’re lucky they’ll come and we can trace them back to their hideout. So we need gear, in case they’re ready for us. Or in case they’ve mobilized a short-range mind-control device. I’ve developed a range of anti-reptoid paraphernalia in collaboration with key researchers on the internet. It should keep us safe. I’ll be right back.”

  She vaulted over the railing, landed on the basement level, and forced the door open with her shoulder. A startled rooster—less startled than Robin felt seeing a rooster in Manhattan—ran outside, bucking protest. From within, Robin heard a curse, crashing paint cans, grinding glass, a heavy whuff of falling paper, a second curse, and two loud bangs he was reasonably certain weren’t gunshots. Jan Chang staggered out ten minutes later laden with duffel bags, slammed the door with her foot, and tossed one of the duffel bags to Robin. The weight started to bowl him over, but he shot one arm twenty feet up to wind around a lamppost and kept himself more or less afoot. Jan threw her own duffel over the rail onto the sidewalk, and vaulted after. “Great.”

  “What is this dump?” Robin’s arm did not want to unwind from the lamppost at first, but when he tugged harder it slipped free with a snap. “Secret hideout?”

  “More or less,” Jan said. “It’s my home. Come on. We have a stakeout.”

  * * *

  “What I don’t get,” Robin said later, in the car down the street and across from Zargoza’s Bakery, “is, if there really were lizard people with immense technological powers, why would they care about controlling our world? Why not just … do their own thing?”

  “Maybe they’re afraid.” She unscrewed her tea thermos lid and drank. She’d offered Robin some, but it tasted smoky and weird, which she claimed it was supposed to. Robin’s experience of tea was limited to Lipton and Lemon Zinger, so maybe she was right. “Maybe they think we might go to war if we discover them, and they don’t want to kill us. What I think is, they use humanity as a research experiment and nature preserve. They control us to keep us from realizing that there really is alien life out there in the cosmos.”

  “There is, though.”

  She laughed, and screwed the thermos cap on again.

  “No, seriously. Aliens made the wild card virus. Doctor Tachyon was an alien.”

  “Whose word do you have for that? An alien who just happens to look like a human being in Ren Faire garb wearing a silly hat? Come on, Ruttiger, I thought you w
ere smart. It’s obviously a psy-op. And look how effective! There are all these pictures of him standing right next to normal humans and you can’t tell the difference except for the hat, and you still think he was from Mars or whatever.”

  “There was an alien invasion back in eighty-six. The Swarm…”

  “That’s just what they want you to believe. Obviously the invasion was staged. They don’t even need rubber suits these days. They can do it all with computers, or with cards.”

  “But—wait. Why? Say your reptoids exist and really did want to use us as a nature preserve or whatever. Say they did want to keep us all to themselves. Why would they fake first contact, and an alien invasion, and an alien scientist living among us for fifty years? Why would they make it all up?”

  “To see how we’d react, of course. But I think they’ll change their experiment soon. Don’t be surprised if you start to forget the aliens.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s failed, you see. The reptoids didn’t learn what would really happen if we met whatever’s out there.” She pointed up with her thermos, past the windshield, past the streetlights, past the slate-gray sky. “Think about it. You believe everything they’ve told you. Tachyon, the virus, interstellar criminal syndicates, the whole line. You’ve been sitting here listening to me, convinced I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s okay. I get that a lot. But, just for a second, stop thinking about me, and consider what’s going on in your own head.”

  “Okay.” He knew he sounded skeptical.

  “You don’t actually believe we’ve met aliens.”

  “I do, though.”

  “You don’t. None of you do. I’ve seen you around the last few weeks, Ruttiger. You go to work every day, you get your coffee, you worry about your rent and your, I don’t know, do you call them students? You worry about whether that sweater vest goes with those shoes, and the size of your bank account. If you believed aliens were real, really really real—if you believed that up there beyond the sky there really were other beings from other worlds, vast and maybe incomprehensible but certainly different from us, and that all this horrible nonsense we have down here was just one tiny thread of a huge tapestry, how could you stay so small? How could any of us fight about taxes, about oil, about the price of credit default swaps or who our neighbor fucks or what words she says when she prays? How broken would someone have to be, to know all that and not to change her life?”