Bad: Chapter 24
"It's these little things, they can pull you under
Live your life filled with joy and thunder
Yeah, yeah we were altogether
Lost in our little lives"
- R.E.M.
"Where are you now?"
"Impossible to say."
"You mean you don't want to say."
"No, it's impossible." She leaned back to re-examine her surroundings, the tenseness of Jet's inquiry rupturing her natural acceptance of such uncertainty, an approach that seemed offensively contrary to most adults she encountered. "It has no name that Ed can figure."
"Is it just you there?"
"And Ein. And the birdy-birds."
"Kookaburras?"
"No, no. Kooky-burra is Edward's favorite bird, but these are not them."
Edward sighed. Jet didn't think he'd ever heard the young sprite produce such a mature sound.
It was late. Faye had wandered home a while ago, sans Spike. He'd attempted to discern just where the hell Spike thought he was going when his big moment was just twelve hours away, but Faye just shrugged and shuffled off to bed. He turned his attention back to Edward, feeling the familiar pinch of impotence and frustration.
He could see her face now. Their connection over the comm. units was nothing but silvery static, but Edward's homebrewed long-range portal was crystal clear, and suddenly there she was—her poppy red hair, her amber eyes. The sky behind her was an unending tapestry of indigo and ebon, pin-pricked with constellations that hung romantically in the desert night sky, which as all at once infinite and softly womblike. Her bones seemed to glow under her skin. A calm surfaced somewhere from deep inside—and it took him to a place he had not been in a very long time. A silent place where there was no pain.
"Do you have enough to eat?"
She nodded, and kept nodding as she explained how Ein helped her sniff out good stuff to eat. The vigorous nodding was making Jet anxious. He tried to change the subject.
"Where's your father?"
She stopped. Tiny shadows crept into the creases on her face.
"Father-person has gone on ahead."
The first boy Faye had ever liked was named Zach. They attended the same early learning school, a Montessori-style institution with an assemblage of well-lit rooms, painted in hues of soothing ocean blue and warm maize yellow, the shadows of deciduous trees with their big, crisp, wind-tossed leaves always flickering across the long stucco walls.
Zach was the only child of a well-regarded family. His father was a local legislator; his mother a pediatrician. He had dark red hair that was slicked and parted to the side, with a spirited dusting of freckles across his nose and cheeks. He was a year older than Faye and probably the only textbook gentleman on her list of beloveds. She had a crystal clear memory of a photo she once possessed of the two of them together, buried under heaps of others in an old hat box she had kept in her bedroom closet. He was six years old then, looking straight at the camera as instructed, his arm around her, tucking her shoulder against his torso; she was only five, staring up at him with an expression of soulful admiration that suggested an innocence soon to be lost.
After that was Samuel. He was blonde, athletic, and arrogant. Both Faye and her best friend Jen were taken with him, but it was Faye who had seen him first. She had taken notice of him the first week of school, found herself watching him with private eyes across their classroom. It was a bit of a sore spot, the thing with Jen. Back then Faye didn't like to compete, and Jen had that brazen youthful fearlessness that only children can possess without serious consequence. She even had the audacity to ask him to the sock hop in 3rd grade, and he had the audacity to accept. Alone in her bedroom, Faye cried all afternoon. Perhaps it was then that the dark seeds of her distrust of others were planted. It still stung to think of it, watching them slow-dance across the cloudy polyurethaned gymnasium floor (however awkward it may have been), and not thinking about her at all.
The list of her great loves was not quite so long as one might imagine. Truth be told, it contained far more limerent fantasies than it did satisfied realities. Still, it was a sacred list nevertheless—one she could recite completely and accurately at any given moment, something she did now and then lying in bed at night. Reviewing them in chronological order, Faye could see how each of her doomed romances had given birth to its immediate predecessor. Samuel was brash as Zach has been polite; David was reckless where Thomas was even-keeled. And each of them, all in some small way, had driven her to the doorstep of her most recent…affliction. Yes, Spike seemed to be the truest singular embodiment of all of her past struggles with mon objets d'amour.
When she'd first met him, she thought he was kind of a loser—a classless rube, with that messy hair and limp, threadbare suit. She'd forgotten all about how he let her cheat him out of all of his winnings at her blackjack table—being too preoccupied with how callously and gleefully he and Jet had chained her to a goddamn toilet to recognize just how much both his cunning and misfortune reflected her own.
Upon their second meeting, her estimation of him became more or less what she found to be a generally accurate passing assessment of Spike—an unlucky, reckless cowboy whose arrogance and misplaced sense of honor kept him penniless and always chasing it.
Once he had her figured out, Spike didn't seem to pay her too much mind either, which was somewhat refreshing considering how often she ended up on the receiving end of someone's covetous gaze. For a time, they regarded each other with casual familiarity, alternately disdainful and flirtatious, but ultimately artless and without much pretense.
But what she did not realize then was that this absence of male attention, this connection that was formed without the usual coquettish guile and lustful underpinings had lulled her into a false sense of security. The result, she realized far too late, was a total lack of defensive action on her part. It was something that was almost immediately present in her relationships with most men, and but with Spike, she had left herself completely unguarded.
She noticed it first when he'd donned his trench coat and come to her rescue (but not to rescue her) the time she'd been abducted by Vicious. He was a different person then. She could feel it the moment she heard his voice echo through that cold, abandoned cathedral. That day she saw darkness, she saw rage, she saw a man who was not afraid to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight. And of all the unsettling oddities she had borne witness to in her years of space-age wayfaring, down in the muck of the seediest gutters all the way up to the highest summits of bourgeois excess, what she had seen in him that day ranked among the most disquieting. This was a fractured man, and a dangerous one, too.
In a given set of circumstances, Faye found most men would show themselves to be spineless, simple, and lacking in any real constitution. But not Spike. It was clear he had been far closer to the edge than he cared to let on, and if it had unnerved him, he really didn't show it. Faye found that sad somehow, and intriguing and ultimately endearing.
She didn't realize any of this at the time, of course. It all amounted to nothing greater than a single puff of smoke in a dim room. She could not have known then, as she helped wrap him in a thousand yards of bandages and watched over him as he slept that these mild impulses were only the beginning, a small yet emblematic representation of what was to come. Much as that wispy brume of smoke would soon churn itself into a suffocating black cloud, so too would her passive watchfulness morph into an overpowering urge to save Spike from himself, to pull him back from the brink, at the risk of pain, of humiliation, of rejection.
He'd made her pathetic—a sullen, broken-hearted eight year-old, standing against the bleachers in bobby socks and a poodle skirt, ready to burst into tears at the thought of suffering this torture even a second longer.
And he'd done what she feared most—rejected her and walked away. She assumed that would be the end of it, but here he was now, attempting to unring a bell that he had busted right off the goddamn wall. It was too much. Her thoughts and feelings were all muddied up. And she was frightened. She could admit that much. She wanted to leave and be done with it, and never have to think about it again. It felt good, having only herself to look after. She craved it, practically salivated over the thought of roaming free. She just had to get this money thing squared away. That was her ticket out for good.
Or so she thought.
Jet had gotten a call at 5:00am this morning from that mustachioed guy he knew at the ISSP, letting him know that Spike had been arrested for starting a barfight. Jet was still awake when the call came in—a dutiful guardian, haloed in porchlight, drowning in silent distress. She herself been lying awake in bed, the door of her room left open a crack. How many times had they tread this path together? At least a dozen that she could recall, but it felt like a thousand.
By 6:00am she was showered, dressed, and ready get down to business. She'd need to make sure Meltzer knew. She already had a few leads on bounties for the day. They were all light on funds, and Spike's bail was sure to be a pretty penny.
She strapped her Glock to her thigh and lit a cigarette, watching her reflection in the shadowy void of her vanity mirror. She wasn't going anywhere. She knew that now, that she had been kidding herself, thinking she could ever leave here by choice. She smiled gently, admonishing herself for being so goddamn simple, for feeling such warmth at the very thought of that stupid lunkhead. Her stupid lunkhead.
Spike had done the impossible. He'd outplayed Poker Alice. She had to acknowledge this victory, and move forward in defeat.
She snubbed out the butt in her crystal ashtray, pulled on her sheepskin bomber.
If she quit the game now, how could she ever hope to win again?
"Name?"
"Spike Spiegel."
"Date of Birth?"
"June 26th, 2044."
"Occupation?"
"Bounty hunter."
Lester chuckled.
"What?"
"Nothing. Go stand against the wall over there."
Spike sidled up to the height marker, making no effort to straighten his posture. Lester moved behind the camera.
"It's just, for a group of people whose sole occupation is to put other people behind bars, a lot of you manage to end up here yourselves. I always wondered why that is. Here's the birdie."
A bright flash hit him. This was it, he thought. He'd be lucky if he ever stepped foot outside of here as a free man again. Years later, he got a glimpse of this very mugshot, and he recalled with perfect clarity these thoughts passing through his mind. At the time it was happening, he didn't feel much of anything at all. But seeing the photograph itself, so many years after it was taken, he was astonished by all of the things he could read in his own expression. It was masked to be sure, as was his way, but still, in his slightly widened eyes and the bright youthfulness of his skin, not yet creased by time's unrelenting strain, there was a vulnerable flicker of total helplessness.
"Turn to the left. Now the right. Alright," Lester said, "you're all done."
He led Spike back over to the desk. "There anybody you want to call?"
"Not really."
"Nobody?"
"No."
"Not even a lawyer?"
"Especially not a lawyer."
"You aiming to get yourself stuck in here? They told me you started a barfight and I don't smell a single vapor comin' off you."
"Maybe I need break from what's going on out there."
Lester recuffed him and led him to a chicken-wire enclosure. Spike sat down tiredly on the ancient oak bench as Lester locked him inside. "They'll come take you over to the jail in a few hours. See how this feels for a little while before you decide to skip that phone call."
Spike leaned back, taking in the magnificent pre-dawn quiet of the precinct, the smell of cheap coffee and old paper. He looked down at stained golden wood of the bench, studying the years of abuse it had received at the hands of bored criminals. All the usual suspects were there: a carving that said 'life's a bitch then you die', one that said 'Gary was here' with the 'here' scratched out and replaced with 'queer.' Next to his hand, which had been resting beside him on the bench, there was one that said 'LIVE YOUR DREAM.' He ran his finger across each letter, feeling the deep, almost angry etching.
His head fell back against the fiberboard wall and he sighed. It was all so dramatic.
It was Edward's observation that adults inhabited a world of unending discontent. And from this observation she developed the theory that, along with the lengthening of limbs and the hollowing of cheeks, growing up also caused the human brain to split in two.
It was the perfect explanation for what she witnessed in her dealings with the adult world. Her father, for instance. He had asked her to come stay with him, to follow him and assist him with his work. He had sought her out. She had no recollection of him, would never have known where to begin looking. She had obliged and left behind the only home she'd ever really known, but now he was always disappearing, always leaving her behind.
The veracity of her theory was confirmed by the growing ambivalence in her own thoughts and actions. She was aging into adulthood, and at the same time had come to find her approach to the world was becoming more and more fractured. She might feel something, but choose not to express it. Or have the desire to do something, but find herself unable to move, with no clear sense of what was holding her back.
She had seen it in all of her Bebop crewmates, deep knots of unease smothered by nonchalant apathy, eventually forcing its way out in the form of vice. She thought they took themselves way too seriously—that if they'd just stop for a second they could see…see all of the things that she and Ein could see. But they're brains were broken. They were disconnected. From each other, themselves, the world.
The evolutionary purpose of this, she theorized, was to enhance one's ability to participate in deceit, of themselves and those around them. Adults had the ability to divorce the easier-to-stomach parts themselves from the more troubling ones, temporarily anyway, in a way that children simply were not capable of, and they seemed to consider this ability a necessary part of their survival amongst other adults. This she could not dispute, as she was not generally accustomed to living with other people, so she had to assume there was some truth to this.
Regardless, to her way of thinking, this brain-splitting was clearly a recent and not yet wholly perfected development. This process seemed to have a significant impact on the overall well-being of those who experienced it. All of this deceit seemed to exhaust and vex even the most fortified minds eventually. Only those who were truly cold and dead inside seemed capable of bearing it in the long term. Those were the scary adults.
Jet was not scary. He was the opposite of scary. As such, he was probably the most conflicted man she'd ever met. She saw it in him tonight. He was full of words, but none of them would come out.
She lay on her back in the cracked, barren basin of a dried up lake, Ein's warm head resting on her thigh. She was hoping if she tried hard enough, she could pinpoint the exact location of the Bebop in the night sky, but human eyes were pretty lousy overall. Robot eyes would be better much better for this kind of thing. Jet had a mechanical arm, so why couldn't she have mechanical eyes?
She noticed he rubbed his bald head with his steel arm when he was thinking. He did that a lot tonight. He tried explaining why they needed her help, but she didn't really wait to hear the details. If Jet asked for help, he got help. After that, he tried to talk about things. Little things. Like food and sleeping and all the rest. She didn't like to see him so worried.
"Edward must go soon! It's almost time for sleepy-sleeps."
He started and stopped. "Just be careful out there."
"Edward is fine. Edward has Ein and father-person and MacIn-person. Everything is fine for Edward." She smiled big and waved Ein's paw goodbye and closed the terminal, and everything was quiet and dark again.
She smiled at Ein. She thought to cry for moment, but wasn't in her. Instead, she took a very long walk in under the watchful eye of the silver moon, and laid out under the stars that she used to traverse.
"I figured I should call you. I thought you'd want to know."
"Thanks, Lester."
Miles hadn't even had a chance to shed his coat before he was called down to the city jail. He had to admit he'd been dreading this. He knew he had already crossed the Rubicon, that his career, his life, all he'd worked for would be destroyed if he were to turn back now. But this…this made it a total impossibility.
Once he met Spike Spiegel, his life would surely never be the same.
