Universal Monsters XXI
Space started pulling at the stuffing in the planetarium chairs with two fingers, like getting the yellow foam out of them one fiber at a time was the only thing in the world worth doing, and he took enough time off talking that we pretty much all assumed the story was over. It was a good story, not as funny as maybe some of us would have liked, some of us might have added a chase scene in act two, but it had girls and exploding asteroids and it was an excellent story we all agreed, but it was time to be over. The sun had set dozens of times, Mars had dragged Phobos and Deimos along its elliptical orbit at least twice and the daylight was coming on. But after what seemed like an hour, when his seat wasn’t really something that could properly be described as a seat any longer, he spoke again. I mean, none of us are seatologists, but by the time he started up again what he was sitting on was something else.
“The thing about being the guy that bends a planet is you’ll never get to touch it,” Space said. “Even if you live out the fifty years of slingshotting hell and salvation at the fucking thing, even if you live that fifty years, never a guarantee even in a world without vampires, you still have to let shit settle. For hundreds of years the entire planet has to calm the fuck down before you can go anywhere near it. It won’t thank you for what you’ve done. You only ever made it better. It was useless and wasted and just spinning in the dark until you got there but it won’t thank you. It will hate you. And you’ll never get near it.”
Brinkmire finished a cup of tea drunk from that simple ceramic mug that he smuggled out of MGD 64 and held the teabag up to his mouth before realizing that he didn’t really need to eat it anymore. He smiled maybe for the first time in his life and dropped the bag back into his cup where it landed with a squish and a thud, and he said, “Why didn’t you get away with it? A guy like you, as clever as you, feet smarter than the smartest cop in the world I’d imagine, how did you get caught?”
“I didn’t,” Space said. No one understood what the hell that meant in this context but at least half of us pretended we did. Some of us pretended because we didn’t want to seem daft, most of us did it just so he would finally stop talking but Brinkmire, who really should have switched his brew to Sleepytime hours back kept on.
“How’s that? You are here, aren’t you? I mean, I don’t want to get into a whole Cartesian thing about the nature of existence and if we’re just brains bubbling in a thing. I just mean, you are here. Were there. Prison. MGD You got caught.”
“I turned myself in.”
Someone asked, “Why?” Might have been Brinkmire or it might have been anyone else.
Space answered, “Because I’ll never get to touch Mars. My Mars. The Mars into which I breathed all life. But the people who live there damn sure better know who I am. What I did. They better name, at the very least, the capital city after me. Maybe the whole damn planet. The Statue of Liberty that welcomes immigrants to that whole new world will be a statue of me. I turned myself in because when I do something I sign my name.”
Lucian snarled, “Ego.”
“Yeah,” Space agreed.
“Is she smarter than you?”
“The Statue of Liberty?”
“The girl. The girl you bent.”
“No.”
“As smart as you?”
“No.”
“Then why the hell would you trade her for you?”
Space raised his eyebrows and shrugged just a hint of a shrug and said, “That’s just about the only question I’ve ever thought was hard.”
And then, whether he meant for it to be or not, the story was over for sure. Because that’s when the ghosts walked in.
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