Just Keep Doing What You're Doing

It is time for the guilty pleasure of the day. You have collapsed, inert and bandaged, under your blankets in the massive bed under the corrugated plastic skylights. Today’s case was one of the easier ones: just a matter of muscling through the security, abseiling down the high-rise with the hostage clinging to your chest and sitting with her outside the building until her parents arrived. At least, that’s what you told me, and I always know when you’re lying. When you’ve burst through a door and seen something that will rake your dreams over the coals for the next week, you don’t want to talk when you get home.

I have commandeered the media station for my own multisensory entertainment. Normally, this fly’s-eye battery of screens is what I use to keep an eye on the progress of our investments and, unofficially, on you. It is time to switch off the smaller side monitors and tan myself to a bleached shade of corpse in the light of the main screen. I fold myself into the armchair, slip on my Bluetooth headphones, take a congratulatory slug of my Corpse Reviver #2 and press ‘play’. The first thing that always strikes me is how much younger you look, even from a distance. Even through the crappy mud resolution of the eye-in-the-sky cameras. It doesn’t matter; I can still see your broad-timbered frame sitting on the pavement, with your arm draped over the girl’s shoulder. Just sitting there. I had to learn the details of what the girl had been through from the news report and the subsequent trial, but there you are, being there and dense and physical and powerful for her, when she needs a superhero the most. We still get letters from that girl, sometimes. She’s been selected for her regional track team. Who would have thought that being saved from reasonably certain death by a teenager with legendary core strength would turn you on to fitness? I would have loved to follow you to the gym and get buff, but my bones do that al dente spaghetti thing whenever they come within grunting distance of a barbell.

Here you are, crouching over her like a human shield even though the only people left around her were journalists and police officers. Maybe that was the point you were making. You flit in and out of view in the roving beams of the helicopters’ spotlights. Part of me is jealous of all that drama, I have to admit. Not that our own first encounter was exactly drama-free. I was just walking, head down, the only thing on my mind getting home and rehearsing my piano scores. I didn’t even notice the school’s four chunkiest bullies until they coalesced from out of the shadows under the bridge between the campus and the student accommodation. Once I knew that they had had their teeth set on me, I played it like a bear attack: lie still, play dead, hope they lose interest. As it turned out, you broke four of their ribs before they had the chance to lose interest. I wish I hadn’t flinched when you put your arm around me but my body was still in fight-or-flight mode and I was dizzily zonked out on the adrenaline. I did hear your calm, warm voice cut through the pain like a medic snipping through my cast: ‘Emergency room, or beers?’. I wasn’t about to spend hours jittering and trembling in the emergency room for someone to give me a couple of aspirins and send me home when I could be enjoying a beer with such a refined essence of a man.

It was the sliver of late that belongs to drunkards and the homeless when we hit the diner. The fact that you looked as though you had just been dragged backwards through a construction site didn’t prevent us getting a table; if anything, it seemed to help. The waitresses pretended to slap dust off of you as an excuse to bounce their palms off your pecs. I just stood behind you, simmering and not daring. We were ushered to a booth with a view out over the main street, and I remember sitting there and breathing and urging my pummelled body to stop shaking. My feeble attempts to order a milkshake were brushed aside by a wave of your hand. ‘If you’re going the milkshake route, at least order a grown-up one’, was your irresistible toxic masculine argument. Five minutes later, I was sitting opposite you and wolfing down a vanilla milkshake with a dangerous amount of bourbon in it. After the first few mouthfuls, all I could see was your muscles relax and smooth out under the influence of the whiskey you had pounded and the beer that you were casually sipping. You clearly did not care whether anyone thought we were on a date and that only made me want you more. You drove me home afterwards, ever the perfect gentleman.

***

The sunlight screaming its way through the skylights is not making my head feel any less delicate. Given the option right now, I would pull the covers over my head and not emerge until it was a socially acceptable time to order pizza. That option is not available today, because your taxes need filing. This clearly calls for drastic measures. I flop out of my bed, in the opposite corner of the warehouse to yours, and summon myself back to sentience with the crackle of sausages and bacon and the steam of coffee. When you wander into the kitchen with a quizzical look on your big, dopey, mussed-up face, I tell you that this is an emergency mid-week fry-up in light of your exertions the previous day.

We sit in the breakfast nook and eat looking out over the street traffic below. This is the non-stick coating of the world; it is all most people ever see of it. They could peel off the coating, like twitching neurotics picking at a scab, but they are happy with their germ-free little lives. One night, about a year ago, you came home so late that I was about to call the police and ask if you were still with them. You asked if we had any beer, in a voice that said you didn’t want to drink alone, so we sat in the armchairs and drank beer in the middle of the night until our vision was soggy. The lights were off but I could make out the industrial block of your head staring at the ceiling. All you could murmur about was how beautiful she was. She was filthy and skeletal when you found her in that brownstone basement, shackled and trembling so hard that her jaws were locked shut, but you talked about her as if she were the next darling of Hollywood. I get a neon smear of clarity as I remember how I chose to let you talk yourself to sleep instead of fetching us another beer each. Another beer would have taken me down that unlit and treacherous path, the one that has tattooed itself into my dreams, where I head to the most dangerous part of town and hope to be kidnapped so that you can rescue me again. Reheat those old thrills. Sometimes I dream of dressing like a woman, to make myself a juicier prey and to make my captors even angrier when they tear off my clothes and discover the truth. Look at you, tucking into your bacon and coffee without a care in the world. You don’t love yourself; you don’t hate yourself. You’ve never even thought about it one way or the other.

My phone pings. It is a greasily polite enquiry from the largest newspaper in town for an interview with you, about your ‘creative use of public finances’ as part of your campaign to bring order to the city. Exactly the sort of question I could fend off in a five-minute TV interview and by publishing your tax returns for the past five years. I know what that would mean, though. I’ve known ever since I saw it happen to you: endless weasels in cheap suits rummaging through your trash, turning up on your doorstep at unshowered and unshaven hours of the morning, and cowardly pestering phone calls to distant members of your family. I fire off a civilized but icy response from the accounting firm of Trender & Co., the convenient legal fiction we created so that I could hide behind it and go about my business in peace. I’ve always liked the idea that you were your own firm, your own brand, your own one-man army. Besides, if I start making TV appearances, I’ll get vacuumed up into the whole saviour lifestyle and, even worse, I’ll have to share you with other people. At some point today, a call is bound to come in that someone is being held hostage at the Central Bank, or that there’s a bomb threat at the opera, or that someone is laughing down the phone at the idea of releasing poison gas in the subway. That will be your cue to stuff and wriggle your way into your Kevlar but somehow still-fashionable outfit and boil away the shadows as the flame of justice in this town. Until you get back, probably scorched and almost certainly bruised but not even faintly disillusioned, I’ll be submitting your tax returns. Just try not to destroy quite so much public property this time.