Page 5 of Antihero

Still he refused to break his code.

He was hauled before a grand jury, ordered to spill details of his secret training, to betray his mentor, to bear outsize responsibility for the transgressions of the system that had broken and remade him in its own image.

Still he refused to break his code.

He was sentenced.

They fetched him from the concrete box. He was marched, chains ghostily clanking, to an antiseptic room with a one-way mirror, sterile lighting, and moppable white tiles. A doctor awaited and a warden and a man of supposed faith. An array of lenses readied to stream his fate to the world.

He was placed upon the cushioned table, ankles bound, arms strapped to the cross’s horizontal, spread angel-like. They slid a needle into the femoral vein of his left thigh.

The syringes were lined up, one, two, three, automated so no human hand would have to bear responsibility for the final push.

They asked him for any last words.

Still he refused to break his code.

He turned his head as the first syringe depressed. He watched the blue liquid inch through the clear plastic line and enter his leg.

He felt fire in the meat of his thigh and then radiating through his arteries.

Flayed open, bared to the world, he closed his eyes—

—and awakened.

Floating several feet above the floor of his penthouse condo on the twenty-first story of the Castle Heights Residential Tower. Atop a mattress that was in turn set atop a metal slab that was propelled upward by powerful neodymium rare-earth magnets and tethered by steel cables. A push-pull mirroring the endless battle in his battle-weary heart.

The battle to be the brutal thing of darkness he was.

And to remain human.

For a long time he breathed the dark air of earliest morning, wisps of the dream catching in his mind. That windowless box. A towering bench so high he’d seen only the façade of dark wood and no judge above. The many-eyed stare of the lenses, windows to the world, watching greedily as the syringes sank to push their poison into his blood.

He took it in, all the poison of the world.

He took it.

And then he arose.

3The Parity of All Thoughts

A mother with children.

That’s who you look for first.

The second choice is a couple with kids.

Third: a woman, alone.

You need to pay attention for when it starts to happen.

Rich taste of copper. That’s how it begins for me. Then the taste turns into colors and colors into taste, which sounds completely weird but when it happens it makes perfect sense. Dark greens swirl into cobalt and indigo, and then needles sparkle through my brain, a brilliant ticklish pain, and then my thoughts go horizontal, all of them perfectly equal and weightless. The fanged premonition that this will finally be the time I won’t come out of it holds the same non-weight in my mind as the gum stuck to the subway seat across from me. The parity of all thoughts is a delirious release.

And right after that? It takes me out.

As the train rolls and rattles me through the intestines of Manhattan, I clutch the laminated oversize index card to my belly. I have it looped around my neck already and I’ve used yarn for the lanyard instead of string since string almost choked me out once when it caught around my throat. Now I make sure there’s plenty of extra yarn for a loose fit.

In my not-terrible handwriting, the first line on the index card reads: