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“You know what.”
“I don’t!” Will whispered. “Honestly, I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.” Reasonably, he didn’t. Such a thing was so far outside the realm of things that happened in the real world, least of all to him. At the same time, some part of him thought that he might know. But fear had taught him the best thing to do with that secret knowledge was bury it.
Those instincts had kept him safe. Kept him alive, on nights when he had the sudden, urgent intuition that a man he had got too close to could turn on him, that somebody who hated himself would channel that rage outward. Survival first. Happiness second.
What if, though? he thought. Good god, what if?
And once that question is uttered, it demands an answer.
“I’m asking you,” said Will, “to do it.”
Patrick inched closer. “Do what?” he asked, feigning innocence this time.
Oh no, Will thought. This man.
“Do,” he whispered, “the,” he leaned in, “thing.” When Patrick didn’t move away, he inclined even further, their faces a breath away from each other. A second passed, just long enough for Will to think he had made a terrible mistake, and panic began to bubble up inside him. “Wait—” he began, before Patrick’s mouth closed on his, and whatever words that may have been on his lips were gently brushed away.
Intermission
In 1855, an inventor in Birmingham by the name of Alexander Parkes sought to create a form of plastic capable of waterproofing his coat. Following his death, Parkes’s work was spirited away to America by another inventor, John Wesley Hyatt, where it would become known as celluloid, the basis for photographic film and a building block for the movie industry. Thousands of stories, billions of dollars, an incalculable number of hopes and dreams and broken hearts on either side of the screen, countless first kisses shared in the back row of a shadowy cinema, ideas begetting ideas like timelines branching in a multiverse, all tracing back to a workshop in a smoky industrial town on the other side of the planet.
One hundred and sixty years after a man created a substance capable of capturing the moving image, seventy years after a husband and wife dreamed of a man who could fly, two boys sit in a darkened room, hands reaching for each other in the shadows. On the screen, explosions and embraces play out via plastic and projected light, shadow puppets on the wall of a cave.
Fortune favors the brave, Patrick thinks, a common refrain of Captain Kismet, as he cups the back of Will’s neck to pull him closer.
This isn’t actually happening, thinks Will, feeling his body surrender under the other man’s touch.
Kissing in the back of a cinema, each tasting sugar and salt on the other’s lips, they could be anybody, any pair who walked in expecting one kind of story and ended up starting their own.
Act Two
A Spy in the House of Love
There are easier things in this life than being a drag queen, but I ain’t got no choice. Try as I may, I just can’t walk in flats.
Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song
Chapter 16
1949
It is an uncommonly quiet night in Park City, cloudless and serene, when the young man falls from the sky. He plunges like a comet toward the waiting earth, aglow in burning atmosphere—or is that strange vermilion light something else entirely?
“I love it,” said Charles, grabbing a pencil and beginning to sketch this new hero’s meteoric trajectory. Iris stood in the doorway, reading aloud from a sheaf of hastily typed pages, which she had already crisscrossed with notes and amendments.
Penny sees it through her telescope, all the way out at her father’s house in the country, and immediately telephones the one man she knows can be trusted to investigate this strange phenomenon. Richard Ranger, the pilot and war hero known to millions as Captain Kismet, jumps in his car and sets off in pursuit of the light, following its wake through the night sky. Whether this is a falling star or an invasion of some kind, he has vowed to keep the people of this city, of this country, of this planet, safe from harm. He tracks it all the way to a canyon just outside the city, where it plummets straight through a highway bridge and crash-lands fast and deep into the rock with a flash of blinding light.
“Are we sure this isn’t a little…Christlike?” Charles inquired. “He might as well be announced by a star.”
Iris shrugged. “This is America, Charles. People love Jesus. Not necessarily our people, but still. They’re mad for him.”
“True enough. Continue.”
Ranger approaches the crater with caution, and calls out:
“Greetings, stranger! If you be a friend, then welcome to Earth. If you be an enemy, allow me to introduce myself: I am the one they call Kismet. I am the protector of this world.”
“Trite, but dashing. I could positively swoon.”
