I looked up from my book, graphic novel, book, to see an older guy, looming over my table, staring at the back cover. I couldn’t tell what he was looking at exactly... the plot summary, the press quotes, the authors’ photos...? He made me a little uncomfortable, if I’m being honest. Not in a creepy way. More in an, “oh crap, do I owe this guy money?!” kind of way. He was huge, and his face had a permanent scowl carved in it. I imagined that he used to be a cop, or a corrections officer... something that required him to intimidate people with one glance... and I instantly felt sorry for anyone who had ever pissed him off. I half-smiled, and asked him if he liked comics or superheroes. “A few of ‘em. But mostly, they’re a bunch of ego-maniacal bastards.” That’s funny.
He sat down and slid my coffee to the edge of the table to make room for his big leather jacket. “There’s no seats in here. Too damn crowded. You don’t mind, do you?” I did, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to say so, not to this guy. He continued ranting. “These coffee shops... they make it seem like you can read a book and relax, but all this noise and coming and going... They’ve got this crappy music blaring all day long, and that cutesy doorbell clanging every two damn seconds. There’s no way any human being could get through a Dr. Seuss book in here without developing a migraine.” I think I giggled. He looked me in the eyes, and again, I felt uncomfortable. I set my book down and silently wondered if my laugh was too high-pitched, or too giggly. Judging by the look on his face, he seemed to think that it was too much of something.
He stared at his thumb and forefinger, and rubbed them together methodically. Back and forth, back and forth. His hands were calloused and covered in scars of various sizes and shapes. I looked around the room as if there was something in this generic-as-possible coffee shop that interested me. Oh look, the new NPR holiday music collection is on sale... A minute later, the guy gestured to my book, and I tentatively passed it over to him. He paged through it and chuckled quietly. He got about three and a half quarters of the way into it and stopped. He stared at one particular page for what felt like three solid minutes. A waitress asked me if I wanted a refill on my coffee. I told her I was leaving soon.
The old guy shook his head and groaned. “Bunch of crap.” He looked up at me. “You paid money for this?” Now had this guy been a normal human being with a smile on his face, I might have considered giving him a reply that bordered on honesty... I might have said that it’s rude to plop yourself down at a stranger’s table and insult their reading material. However, when a guy like this, or rather, a guy this size, says your book sucks, you mumble something that sounds like “okay” and you hope to god his drink comes soon and that he ordered it “to go.”
He clapped the book closed and slid it back over to me. I picked it up and looked at the front cover. “Meririm: Lord of the Night... the Ultimate Collection.” The bulging piles of muscles on Meririm and the stringy, form-fitting almost-but-not-quite clothing on Vanth, his female counterpart... all of this struck me in a different way than it had five... no... six years ago when I picked the book up off the shelf in that underground comic store on South Street. For some reason, the artwork no longer seemed like nuanced surrealism, or bold, yet understated. It suddenly seemed very over the top; exploitative. It seemed cartoonish.
The guy shrugged. “I guess I’ve got to remind myself, it’s not journalism. They’re just trying to sell copies.” I nodded as I shoved the book into my shoulderbag. I said something about how it’s sort of cathartic to read graphic novels, that it’s a good way to tune out and shut down for a while. He cut me off. “Look, there will be plenty of time to ‘shut down’ when you hit a certain age. And then you’ll be wishing you could plug back in, but it’ll be too late. You won’t be able to keep up. Listen to me, buddy, don’t do that to yourself. Run yourself a little ragged.”
For some reason, I tried to defend myself to this cranky old stranger. For some reason, I told him that I was burning the candle at both ends as the manager of a discount electronics accessories store. For some reason, he laughed. “You need to burn that candle on all sides. Take some chances and build up a healthy history of mistakes. Just learn to apologize. It’s easy. All you gotta do is mean it, and be willing to fix whatever you screwed up.” I tried to say something particularly poignant about being considerate and asking for permission before forgiveness but he just kept on going as if I had said nothing. “I’ve seen a lot of good and bad ones go, kid, and I can tell you, it’s better to burn out and drop dead from stress or a heart attack a few years ahead of time than to get abandoned in a nursing home by the people you love, waiting for cancer or dementia or bed sores, or an infection to beat all the other possible diseases to the punch.”
I thanked him for the advice. He waved his hand. “Bah. You’re not listening.” he said. “But that’s okay, I wouldn’t listen when I was your age either.” I told him I was listening. “Never correct an elder” he told me. I apologized. “Don’t apologize” he added. I said I was confused.
“Look, I’m sure you think that I’m just busting your chops because you’re a 20-year-old kid reading a comic book.” I told him I was 32. He laughed and wiped a crumb off of the table. “In that case, I am busting your chops because you’re reading a comic book.” I picked up my coffee and grabbed my bag. I stood up and nodded to him.
“But I don’t care about any of that.” I’ll bet. “The big problem for me is that it’s just not accurate. Especially the last part.” Yeah, well, comic books aren’t supposed to be accurate. And this is a graphic novel. And, accurate to what? This is a first-run series. They’re purposely reinventing the canon. And what part, specifically, are we talking about anyway? “Near the end. Where Meririm hands his cape to Enoch. They’ve got him giving a speech about justice and entrusting honor to a new generation. It wasn’t like that at all. If you’re going to tell a story about a person... about someone that really lived, you should try as hard as you can to get it right, to capture what really happened. That book... it’s sensationalized nonsense. At least, that’s what I think, but maybe I’m just more of a simple guy.”
I sat back down, dropped my bag, and set my coffee down so hard that a few drops shot out over the top and onto the table. Something was off. Actually, many things were off. Two seconds ago, this guy was dismissing this book as a kid’s comic, but now he was pronouncing “Meririm” correctly (no one ever gets it right... it always comes out as “Miriam”), and wait... he knew a sub-character’s name? And... Really lived? He was talking like he KNEW Meririm. I had been so focused on this guy’s imposing size that I hadn’t taken the opportunity to see that he was insane. I felt foolish for having overlooked this fact. He grunted. “You kids... you don’t know your history. But that’s okay. I was the same way.”
I had all kinds of questions, but they were apparently locked behind my top lip which was caught in my teeth. I was squinting hard at this guy who was less than a foot from my face. He read my confusion. “Sorry, let me start over.” He offered a handshake. “I’m Rory Stewart. But, you can call me Enoch.” I wasn’t squinting anymore. My eyes had grown so big that they felt like they might slide right out of their sockets. “Shake my hand kid, be polite.” I shook hands while my hand was shaking. I asked for clarification. He meant THE Enoch? He did indeed. It all made sense now. His monstrous size. His penetrating stare. His lack of social graces. The scars on his hands, and the gash under his left eye. This man was one of the original Vigilantes. I wonder if he’d sign the book...
My mind was racing. I had to slow it down... I had evidence, but I needed unequivocal proof. I didn’t want to be rude, but how could I know he was really THE Enoch and not just some homeless loon? He pointed to the mark under his eye. “The Christmas Eve incident. Year’s escaping me. Missile silo in Delingha, China. There was this small group of extremists who operated in complete secrecy with no name, so we called them the ‘Anonimos’... oh, and they didn’t use any verbal or written communication... that was a bit of a strange thing. Anyhow, these ‘Anonimo’ fellas stormed the silo, held a launch crew hostage, and attempted to park a warhead or twelve in India’s backyard, which would have likely started World War III, and maybe IV, depending on European intervention timetables. Course, that was all just psychic conjecture from the Nostrassos Guild. I didn’t buy their predictions nine times out of ten, but, you never know, do you? You with me so far?” I nodded and muttered something that might have sounded like, “yeahIthinksokeepgoing.”
“There I was, pummeling away on three or four of these mute ninja bastards, and one of them grabbed a civilian technician and threatened to slit her throat if I didn’t let up on his buddies. At least that’s what I think he was trying to tell me... the lack of communication was really challenging to work with. So, naturally, I peg the guy to a wall with a throwing knife, and the tech lady runs at me and starts clawing at my face in sheer panic and shock. I calmed her down eventually, but not before she caught me with one of her dagger-sized paste-on fingernails.”
Huh. He could have read that from the book, except the last part. The book said that the hostage-taker shot at him, and he dodged the bullet. “Like I said, it ain’t journalism. They’re just trying to sell copies off of a shelf.” Fair enough. If I was the writer, I’d probably have punched that up a little myself. So, assuming that I were to believe he was the real deal... he had said that the scene where Enoch, or rather, he got the cape from Meririm was off base. How? He laughed, but I could tell it wasn’t because he thought my question was funny. There was a little anger in there. Maybe a lot. His posture relaxed a little, and he crossed his legs, knocking the table a little bit. I imagined that kind of thing happened to him pretty frequently.
“The comic book has Meririm handing me the cape after a knockdown drag-out brawl with Kane. That’s the first problem, but I’ll get to that. Anyway, Meririm stands over me; I’m kneeling, and it’s a lot like Arthur knighting Lancelot, or Moses holding the stone tablets... totally overblown, like he’s bestowing wisdom upon the ignorant. Never mind that I was a full foot taller than the guy, and I can’t remember a single time in my life when I kneeled in front of anyone. He makes this big speech, and they show me soaking it all in, like I needed a lecture on fighting injustice. I’d been working with the guy for fifteen years by this point... Believe me, I’d heard all of his shtick. Then, he takes off the cape and lays it in my arms, with him all backlit by the moon or a streetlamp or something, and walks off into the night.” Okay, so that’s what’s wrong. How did it actually go?
Enoch shook his head and stared at a knot in the table for a long while. I asked him again, figuring he hadn’t heard me. “Don’t do that, kid. I’m not that old. Not yet.” I leaned back and shrugged a little. No offense. He scratched his neck. “Kane had been dead for almost ten years by the time Kevin... sorry... Meririm... bagged it in, that’s for starters.” Dead? I thought Kane got locked up in Europe? He smiled, sorta. “Well... that may or may not have been what the press was led to believe. But, no, you don’t lock up a guy like Kane. He’d killed hundreds of people over the years, mostly civilians, some of them kids. You don’t take the chance that a guy like that will get out of the clink and do more harm just because you don’t want to violate some misguided moral code you got from a Sunday School teacher. You put him down like a rabid animal. Now, you don’t drag it out, otherwise you lose a little something. But you do what you have to. That’s what we did. That’s what I did. Kevin didn’t have the balls.”
I must have looked surprised, or a bit put off. He pointed to my coffee. I took a sip and thought about what he had told me. I imagined Enoch putting a gun to Kane’s head and pausing before he pulled the trigger. Maybe he used a knife. “That’s all beside the point. Kane was dead for years, like I said. But I guess the writers needed something to make the scene less... well, I’ll just say the reality was far more boring.” I found that hard to believe. He rolled his eyes.
“Kevin had dropped off the map for a few days. He did that now and again, it wasn’t a surprise. He’d get up in his head, and he’d just need some time alone to clear out some baggage. So, I was trying to cover the gap. I was picking up calls from the scanner and doing what I could. Usually Elyse, or uh... Vanth would help me out in times like that, but she wasn’t around either. Didn’t know why. I had just packed up a purse snatcher in some back alley near 69th street, and I get a call. It’s some beat cop. He tells me I better get to this address, and fast. It’s one of Kevin’s places. I ride over there.” Rode? Like on the shadowbike, rode? Enoch gives me a look. The same look I’ve gotten from comic book authors at signings. “Yeah. The ‘shadowbike.’”
His cappuccino finally arrived. The waitress set it down and smiled as fake a smile as anyone could imagine. She asked if we wanted anything else. “No thanks, sugar.” Enoch said. She asked if he wanted sugar. He shot her a look. She backed away. Notice I didn’t say “walked” away. Backed away. He pulled a flask from his jacket, and filled the cup to the brim. He looked at me, waiting for a reaction, I think. I pretended I didn’t notice, and apologized for mentioning the shadowbike. I explained that an ex had gotten a collector’s edition model of it for my birthday a few years ago. Enoch smiled. “Maybe if you didn’t collect model motorcycles, she wouldn’t be an ex.” I reminded him of where he left off with his story.
“Yeah, so I get to Kevin’s ‘safehouse,’ as he called it. I thought of it more as a place for him to dry out when he’d been drinking too much, or a place to get hammered when Elyse told him he’d been drinking too much. The cop that called me is there, and says Kevin’s been hitting the bottle pretty hard. One of the neighbors called because of some crashing noises. He wasn’t sure he could be left alone. I tell him to split, that I’ll keep an eye on him.”
I didn’t know Meririm, or uh, Kevin, I guess, had a problem with drinking. Enoch grunted. “Everybody copes with the job one way or the other, and usually not in a healthy way. Drugs, sex, violence, drink, this one guy killed himself base jumping downtown. His thing was adrenaline.” Indicus. I remember when he died, even though I was really young... probably 8 or 9. I remember my elementary school teacher saying that he had been pushed by a criminal that he was tracking. Enoch snorted. “There was no one else around, at least no criminal. I can assure you. Indicus spent so much time chasing highs that he would forget to eat for days. He was all about marketing and getting noticed. I’m not sure if he ever caught a criminal, or helped out someone in need. But hey, the job... It’s not for everybody... and it sure as hell wasn’t for him.”
The crowd in the coffee house had started to thin out. The cutesy doorbell wasn’t ringing quite as much, and a couple of the staff members had started to chat with each other. I think Enoch became a little unsettled... worried that people might overhear what he was telling me. “I should probably go. My old lady will worry. I told her I was just going to the hardware store for a couple of screws. That was three hours ago, and I haven’t even gotten to the store yet.” I wanted to hear more, so I offered to walk with him. He hesitated for a second but then he nodded. He downed the rest of his drink, grabbed his giant jacket and put it on, nearly whacking some lady in the head as he did so. I dropped a couple bucks on the table, grabbed my bag, and we headed out to the street. It was quiet outside and only just cold enough to wear a jacket. We walked down the sidewalk as if we were walking through a small park, afraid that we might run out of room if we walked too fast.
“Long story short,” Enoch said, “that’s a laugh. All my stories are long. My wife tells me that all the time. Get to the point, Enoch. Get to the point.” It was fine with me if the story was long. I was enjoying it. “Good. But it’s almost over anyways. Kevin was in terrible shape. I had seen him pretty bad off before, but never as much as he was that night. He was crashed out on the floor in the corner of his kitchen, spinning a half a bottle of Jack in his hands. There were empties all over the room, and a few dishes and a TV dinner tray lying broken near the bedroom. He was mumbling something... I couldn’t really understand what he was saying, but I doubt it was anything important. I thought about trying to get him to stand up, maybe get him to a couch or his bed, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. He probably couldn’t have stood if he wanted to. So I did the next best thing. I grabbed the jack and downed the other half, then grabbed two beers out of the fridge and cracked ‘em open.” Wait a second. Enoch’s idea of a suicide watch included getting wasted with the person he was supposed to watch?
“If I had stood over him and told him to get up, he would have fought me. It wouldn’t have done any good, and I’d just be pissed off. So, the way I see it, if he wasn’t coming up to me, I was going down to him. He wasn’t down there because he was drinking, the drinking was just a symptom. Something had gotten to him. Usually, he’d pull himself out of his head trips, but this time I could tell something was different. I had to meet him at his level, so I started rambling about the guy I’d just tangled with before coming over. Kevin stared at me dead-eyed while I talked. His face was all red and swollen. He must have been crying for hours.”
It was hard to imagine Meririm, Lord of the Darkness, crying in a drunken stupor. “Well, it wasn’t something he mentioned at press conferences, I guess. Everybody’s got two or more sides, I’m sure you recognize that. A guy like Kevin has half a dozen. There’s the side he showed criminals, the side he showed the public, the way he was with Vanth, and then there was the part of him he let me see that night. The scared kid. The shaking, terrified weakling that gathers all the near-death experiences and horrors that a guy like that sees over the course of a career battling bad guys... and just takes ‘em on all at once. It’s like watching a nerdy kid get the crap kicked out of him by a football team. He doesn’t have a prayer, and he knows it, but he’s gotta walk down that same hallway, day after day, and deal with it.” I wondered... if Kevin had such a big problem, had he ever gotten help, like professional help?
“What would a guy like that do, go to a therapist? ‘Yeah, doc, I’m a wreck. I was just in hand-to-hand combat with a religious whackjob that threatened to blow up a pre-school because some ‘god’ told him to. If I had let him loose for even a second, I and twenty-five toddlers go to smithereens.’” Enoch rubbed his nose. “You can’t let stuff like that out to civilians... to anyone, really, except maybe another Vigilante, and they’re not usually much help because they’re dealing with their own stuff. That’s why he and Elyse lasted so long, I think. They were both able to tell each other this kind of thing, and I think that they were afraid that if they split up, other people might find out what they were really like, and by that point, it had all gotten too big and out of control. Entire cities and countries depended on some of us. You need somewhere, or someone, to help you let out some of the pressure. It’s crazy when I think about it.”
A panhandler approached us. I could tell he was about to hit us up for money, but then he took a second look at Enoch, and kept walking. Enoch turned around, grabbed the guy by the shoulder, scaring the bejeezus out of him, and handed him a couple of bucks. “I miss that look of fear.” he said.
We continued down the sidewalk. “Where was I...?” Talking about Kevin’s drunken crash. “Oh, yeah. So after a while of me talking, Kevin just sorta snapped into something, or out of something. Hard to tell which. He started telling me this story about a fight we were in 9 or 10 years before that. Told it to me like I wasn’t there when it happened. But I didn’t stop him. Then he just kept telling me story after story, every one of which I’d heard a dozen times or more. And of course, the bad guys had gotten bigger with every telling. The heights that he could have fallen from had gotten higher. More civilians were at risk. Everything had grown over the years. He just kept telling them. It seemed to me like he was about to die, and his life was flashing before his eyes.” I asked if he really would have killed himself. Was that on his mind? If it was, could he could go through with it?
Enoch took a moment to answer. He jingled some change in his pocket. “In a way, I think he did kill himself. I guess I should say he killed a part of himself. After that night he never wore his cape again... the comic got that part right. Well, at least, he never wore his gear again. The cape was more just for ceremonies, photoshoots, and the like. But, him giving up the gear wasn’t some triumphant ritual, where he decided it was wiser to let the next generation take the reins. It was sad, empty, kinda pathetic, really. He felt old and useless. He maybe could have kept it going another couple of years, but if you’re starting to doubt yourself, well, you should probably just cut the line right there. You can’t fight crooks half-assed.” I didn’t think Kevin was that old if I was remembering correctly. “Late 40’s. Old enough.”
40 didn’t seem very old to me anymore. Twenty years ago, it seemed like a number almost impossible to conceive of, let alone reach. I was curious if some specific event had occurred that put Kevin in the dumps about his age. Had he gotten beaten in a fight, or almost beaten, or something like that? “No. Nothing so tidy. Not that I know of, anyway. He had been thinking about all of that nonsense for months, maybe even a year or two. He moved a little slower, I could tell. Took longer to recover. We weren’t working together as much by then, we’d gone our separate ways a couple of years before that. But, all the same, I had started to hang around more often outside of work. I was worried about him.”
I said that it was good that Kevin had Enoch around... that not everyone has someone like that to watch their back. “You’re right,” he said. “Not everyone has that. I don’t know if he ever appreciated that, but he was damn lucky to have a sidekick like me.” He laughed quietly. Walnut Street. We were less than a block from the hardware store. Enoch pulled back his sleeve and looked at his watch. “Wow. It’s later than I thought. Gotta get home to the old lady. She’s expecting me.” I don’t know why I noticed, but it occurred to me that Enoch wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. However, he had a pretty big indent behind his over-sized arthritic knuckle from where, I assumed, he used to wear one. He shoved his hands back in his pockets, stopped walking, and faced me.
I asked if something was wrong. “No. I just... I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this. Must be something about you that made me just spout off like a whiny teenager. I probably shouldn’t be telling anyone this. If it ever got out... a lot of people could be hurt.” He seemed very anxious all of the sudden. I wasn’t sure what to say. I reassured him that I wouldn’t tell anyone what he had told me... For a normal person, that might be hard, but for me... I’ve got no family to speak of, I’m not with anyone, and I work too much, so I don’t have too many friends... who would I tell? I jokingly blamed the whole situation on the book. The book had just brought it all back. It was just a dumb comic book, written by some schmucks trying to sell copies, like he had said before. “Yeah. You’re probably right.” I could tell he had to go, or at least wanted to go, so I asked him to finish telling me what happened with Kevin that night. He looked... no, he peered at me for a very uncomfortable minute or two. Then out of nowhere he just picked up as though he had never stopped talking... like he had told this story before.
“I could tell Kevin was done, that he was out of the game for good. There was no way I could let him go back out and get into trouble when he was thinking the way he was. I told him as much, but he kept arguing with me, kept saying he could hack it, if he just worked a little harder, or drank a little less. He told me that Elyse had left him, but that much I already knew.” He paused there for a while.
How had he known? He didn’t say anything, but he pulled his hand out of his pocket and absent-mindedly rubbed his ring finger with his thumb. He coughed, deep and throaty, like an old man. “I knew. She was with someone else. Had been for a while. She was tired of his drinking. In fact, I may have played a part in convincing her to leave. She was afraid he wouldn’t be able to survive without her, and she was probably right, but that’s no way to go through life... being someone else’s crutch.” He stuffed his hand back in his pocket as a cold wind hit us both square in the face. It passed and he shivered a little. “It’s too damn cold out here.” I agreed.
“So, after a while, Kevin ran out of stories. He whined about Elyse for a bit, and I listened. A few hours later, when he stopped blubbering and started to sober up, I dragged him to the couch and told him what I was going to do.” Enoch’s eyes narrowed, and he folded his arms across his chest. “I told him that I was leaving, and I was taking his gear with me. His suit, his tools, his mask. All of it. I couldn’t let him go back out in that condition... in any condition... and I wasn’t going to. He was done. He started to cry, and I didn’t stop him. Then I did just what I said I was going to do. And then I left. That’s it.”
I must have looked like a little kid to Enoch at that moment. He had taken this story that I’d heard, read, re-read, and memorized for years, these characters, these heroes, that I’d come to view as... alive... fixed in history... immortal... and he had totally re-written all of it in just over an hour. I could never read “Meririm: Lord of the Night” the same way again. Hell, I probably could never read it again, period. It wasn’t just changed, it was gone. The story was over. I don’t know if I said anything to Enoch as I started to walk away. If I did, it must have come out as a mumble. I collided with a trash can a few yards away from where we had been standing. Without thinking, I pulled the comic book out of my bag and stuffed it in the trash. I started walking again. I wasn’t even sure where I was going.
I heard Enoch calling after me. He was calling me “kid.” He wanted me to stop, but for some reason, I pretended like I didn’t hear him. I just kept moving. I didn’t turn my head, or hesitate. I just kept walking. Then it dawned on me why he might be calling me. I heard him getting closer, more insistent. I started walking faster. So did he.
He sat down and slid my coffee to the edge of the table to make room for his big leather jacket. “There’s no seats in here. Too damn crowded. You don’t mind, do you?” I did, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to say so, not to this guy. He continued ranting. “These coffee shops... they make it seem like you can read a book and relax, but all this noise and coming and going... They’ve got this crappy music blaring all day long, and that cutesy doorbell clanging every two damn seconds. There’s no way any human being could get through a Dr. Seuss book in here without developing a migraine.” I think I giggled. He looked me in the eyes, and again, I felt uncomfortable. I set my book down and silently wondered if my laugh was too high-pitched, or too giggly. Judging by the look on his face, he seemed to think that it was too much of something.
He stared at his thumb and forefinger, and rubbed them together methodically. Back and forth, back and forth. His hands were calloused and covered in scars of various sizes and shapes. I looked around the room as if there was something in this generic-as-possible coffee shop that interested me. Oh look, the new NPR holiday music collection is on sale... A minute later, the guy gestured to my book, and I tentatively passed it over to him. He paged through it and chuckled quietly. He got about three and a half quarters of the way into it and stopped. He stared at one particular page for what felt like three solid minutes. A waitress asked me if I wanted a refill on my coffee. I told her I was leaving soon.
The old guy shook his head and groaned. “Bunch of crap.” He looked up at me. “You paid money for this?” Now had this guy been a normal human being with a smile on his face, I might have considered giving him a reply that bordered on honesty... I might have said that it’s rude to plop yourself down at a stranger’s table and insult their reading material. However, when a guy like this, or rather, a guy this size, says your book sucks, you mumble something that sounds like “okay” and you hope to god his drink comes soon and that he ordered it “to go.”
He clapped the book closed and slid it back over to me. I picked it up and looked at the front cover. “Meririm: Lord of the Night... the Ultimate Collection.” The bulging piles of muscles on Meririm and the stringy, form-fitting almost-but-not-quite clothing on Vanth, his female counterpart... all of this struck me in a different way than it had five... no... six years ago when I picked the book up off the shelf in that underground comic store on South Street. For some reason, the artwork no longer seemed like nuanced surrealism, or bold, yet understated. It suddenly seemed very over the top; exploitative. It seemed cartoonish.
The guy shrugged. “I guess I’ve got to remind myself, it’s not journalism. They’re just trying to sell copies.” I nodded as I shoved the book into my shoulderbag. I said something about how it’s sort of cathartic to read graphic novels, that it’s a good way to tune out and shut down for a while. He cut me off. “Look, there will be plenty of time to ‘shut down’ when you hit a certain age. And then you’ll be wishing you could plug back in, but it’ll be too late. You won’t be able to keep up. Listen to me, buddy, don’t do that to yourself. Run yourself a little ragged.”
For some reason, I tried to defend myself to this cranky old stranger. For some reason, I told him that I was burning the candle at both ends as the manager of a discount electronics accessories store. For some reason, he laughed. “You need to burn that candle on all sides. Take some chances and build up a healthy history of mistakes. Just learn to apologize. It’s easy. All you gotta do is mean it, and be willing to fix whatever you screwed up.” I tried to say something particularly poignant about being considerate and asking for permission before forgiveness but he just kept on going as if I had said nothing. “I’ve seen a lot of good and bad ones go, kid, and I can tell you, it’s better to burn out and drop dead from stress or a heart attack a few years ahead of time than to get abandoned in a nursing home by the people you love, waiting for cancer or dementia or bed sores, or an infection to beat all the other possible diseases to the punch.”
I thanked him for the advice. He waved his hand. “Bah. You’re not listening.” he said. “But that’s okay, I wouldn’t listen when I was your age either.” I told him I was listening. “Never correct an elder” he told me. I apologized. “Don’t apologize” he added. I said I was confused.
“Look, I’m sure you think that I’m just busting your chops because you’re a 20-year-old kid reading a comic book.” I told him I was 32. He laughed and wiped a crumb off of the table. “In that case, I am busting your chops because you’re reading a comic book.” I picked up my coffee and grabbed my bag. I stood up and nodded to him.
“But I don’t care about any of that.” I’ll bet. “The big problem for me is that it’s just not accurate. Especially the last part.” Yeah, well, comic books aren’t supposed to be accurate. And this is a graphic novel. And, accurate to what? This is a first-run series. They’re purposely reinventing the canon. And what part, specifically, are we talking about anyway? “Near the end. Where Meririm hands his cape to Enoch. They’ve got him giving a speech about justice and entrusting honor to a new generation. It wasn’t like that at all. If you’re going to tell a story about a person... about someone that really lived, you should try as hard as you can to get it right, to capture what really happened. That book... it’s sensationalized nonsense. At least, that’s what I think, but maybe I’m just more of a simple guy.”
I sat back down, dropped my bag, and set my coffee down so hard that a few drops shot out over the top and onto the table. Something was off. Actually, many things were off. Two seconds ago, this guy was dismissing this book as a kid’s comic, but now he was pronouncing “Meririm” correctly (no one ever gets it right... it always comes out as “Miriam”), and wait... he knew a sub-character’s name? And... Really lived? He was talking like he KNEW Meririm. I had been so focused on this guy’s imposing size that I hadn’t taken the opportunity to see that he was insane. I felt foolish for having overlooked this fact. He grunted. “You kids... you don’t know your history. But that’s okay. I was the same way.”
I had all kinds of questions, but they were apparently locked behind my top lip which was caught in my teeth. I was squinting hard at this guy who was less than a foot from my face. He read my confusion. “Sorry, let me start over.” He offered a handshake. “I’m Rory Stewart. But, you can call me Enoch.” I wasn’t squinting anymore. My eyes had grown so big that they felt like they might slide right out of their sockets. “Shake my hand kid, be polite.” I shook hands while my hand was shaking. I asked for clarification. He meant THE Enoch? He did indeed. It all made sense now. His monstrous size. His penetrating stare. His lack of social graces. The scars on his hands, and the gash under his left eye. This man was one of the original Vigilantes. I wonder if he’d sign the book...
My mind was racing. I had to slow it down... I had evidence, but I needed unequivocal proof. I didn’t want to be rude, but how could I know he was really THE Enoch and not just some homeless loon? He pointed to the mark under his eye. “The Christmas Eve incident. Year’s escaping me. Missile silo in Delingha, China. There was this small group of extremists who operated in complete secrecy with no name, so we called them the ‘Anonimos’... oh, and they didn’t use any verbal or written communication... that was a bit of a strange thing. Anyhow, these ‘Anonimo’ fellas stormed the silo, held a launch crew hostage, and attempted to park a warhead or twelve in India’s backyard, which would have likely started World War III, and maybe IV, depending on European intervention timetables. Course, that was all just psychic conjecture from the Nostrassos Guild. I didn’t buy their predictions nine times out of ten, but, you never know, do you? You with me so far?” I nodded and muttered something that might have sounded like, “yeahIthinksokeepgoing.”
“There I was, pummeling away on three or four of these mute ninja bastards, and one of them grabbed a civilian technician and threatened to slit her throat if I didn’t let up on his buddies. At least that’s what I think he was trying to tell me... the lack of communication was really challenging to work with. So, naturally, I peg the guy to a wall with a throwing knife, and the tech lady runs at me and starts clawing at my face in sheer panic and shock. I calmed her down eventually, but not before she caught me with one of her dagger-sized paste-on fingernails.”
Huh. He could have read that from the book, except the last part. The book said that the hostage-taker shot at him, and he dodged the bullet. “Like I said, it ain’t journalism. They’re just trying to sell copies off of a shelf.” Fair enough. If I was the writer, I’d probably have punched that up a little myself. So, assuming that I were to believe he was the real deal... he had said that the scene where Enoch, or rather, he got the cape from Meririm was off base. How? He laughed, but I could tell it wasn’t because he thought my question was funny. There was a little anger in there. Maybe a lot. His posture relaxed a little, and he crossed his legs, knocking the table a little bit. I imagined that kind of thing happened to him pretty frequently.
“The comic book has Meririm handing me the cape after a knockdown drag-out brawl with Kane. That’s the first problem, but I’ll get to that. Anyway, Meririm stands over me; I’m kneeling, and it’s a lot like Arthur knighting Lancelot, or Moses holding the stone tablets... totally overblown, like he’s bestowing wisdom upon the ignorant. Never mind that I was a full foot taller than the guy, and I can’t remember a single time in my life when I kneeled in front of anyone. He makes this big speech, and they show me soaking it all in, like I needed a lecture on fighting injustice. I’d been working with the guy for fifteen years by this point... Believe me, I’d heard all of his shtick. Then, he takes off the cape and lays it in my arms, with him all backlit by the moon or a streetlamp or something, and walks off into the night.” Okay, so that’s what’s wrong. How did it actually go?
Enoch shook his head and stared at a knot in the table for a long while. I asked him again, figuring he hadn’t heard me. “Don’t do that, kid. I’m not that old. Not yet.” I leaned back and shrugged a little. No offense. He scratched his neck. “Kane had been dead for almost ten years by the time Kevin... sorry... Meririm... bagged it in, that’s for starters.” Dead? I thought Kane got locked up in Europe? He smiled, sorta. “Well... that may or may not have been what the press was led to believe. But, no, you don’t lock up a guy like Kane. He’d killed hundreds of people over the years, mostly civilians, some of them kids. You don’t take the chance that a guy like that will get out of the clink and do more harm just because you don’t want to violate some misguided moral code you got from a Sunday School teacher. You put him down like a rabid animal. Now, you don’t drag it out, otherwise you lose a little something. But you do what you have to. That’s what we did. That’s what I did. Kevin didn’t have the balls.”
I must have looked surprised, or a bit put off. He pointed to my coffee. I took a sip and thought about what he had told me. I imagined Enoch putting a gun to Kane’s head and pausing before he pulled the trigger. Maybe he used a knife. “That’s all beside the point. Kane was dead for years, like I said. But I guess the writers needed something to make the scene less... well, I’ll just say the reality was far more boring.” I found that hard to believe. He rolled his eyes.
“Kevin had dropped off the map for a few days. He did that now and again, it wasn’t a surprise. He’d get up in his head, and he’d just need some time alone to clear out some baggage. So, I was trying to cover the gap. I was picking up calls from the scanner and doing what I could. Usually Elyse, or uh... Vanth would help me out in times like that, but she wasn’t around either. Didn’t know why. I had just packed up a purse snatcher in some back alley near 69th street, and I get a call. It’s some beat cop. He tells me I better get to this address, and fast. It’s one of Kevin’s places. I ride over there.” Rode? Like on the shadowbike, rode? Enoch gives me a look. The same look I’ve gotten from comic book authors at signings. “Yeah. The ‘shadowbike.’”
His cappuccino finally arrived. The waitress set it down and smiled as fake a smile as anyone could imagine. She asked if we wanted anything else. “No thanks, sugar.” Enoch said. She asked if he wanted sugar. He shot her a look. She backed away. Notice I didn’t say “walked” away. Backed away. He pulled a flask from his jacket, and filled the cup to the brim. He looked at me, waiting for a reaction, I think. I pretended I didn’t notice, and apologized for mentioning the shadowbike. I explained that an ex had gotten a collector’s edition model of it for my birthday a few years ago. Enoch smiled. “Maybe if you didn’t collect model motorcycles, she wouldn’t be an ex.” I reminded him of where he left off with his story.
“Yeah, so I get to Kevin’s ‘safehouse,’ as he called it. I thought of it more as a place for him to dry out when he’d been drinking too much, or a place to get hammered when Elyse told him he’d been drinking too much. The cop that called me is there, and says Kevin’s been hitting the bottle pretty hard. One of the neighbors called because of some crashing noises. He wasn’t sure he could be left alone. I tell him to split, that I’ll keep an eye on him.”
I didn’t know Meririm, or uh, Kevin, I guess, had a problem with drinking. Enoch grunted. “Everybody copes with the job one way or the other, and usually not in a healthy way. Drugs, sex, violence, drink, this one guy killed himself base jumping downtown. His thing was adrenaline.” Indicus. I remember when he died, even though I was really young... probably 8 or 9. I remember my elementary school teacher saying that he had been pushed by a criminal that he was tracking. Enoch snorted. “There was no one else around, at least no criminal. I can assure you. Indicus spent so much time chasing highs that he would forget to eat for days. He was all about marketing and getting noticed. I’m not sure if he ever caught a criminal, or helped out someone in need. But hey, the job... It’s not for everybody... and it sure as hell wasn’t for him.”
The crowd in the coffee house had started to thin out. The cutesy doorbell wasn’t ringing quite as much, and a couple of the staff members had started to chat with each other. I think Enoch became a little unsettled... worried that people might overhear what he was telling me. “I should probably go. My old lady will worry. I told her I was just going to the hardware store for a couple of screws. That was three hours ago, and I haven’t even gotten to the store yet.” I wanted to hear more, so I offered to walk with him. He hesitated for a second but then he nodded. He downed the rest of his drink, grabbed his giant jacket and put it on, nearly whacking some lady in the head as he did so. I dropped a couple bucks on the table, grabbed my bag, and we headed out to the street. It was quiet outside and only just cold enough to wear a jacket. We walked down the sidewalk as if we were walking through a small park, afraid that we might run out of room if we walked too fast.
“Long story short,” Enoch said, “that’s a laugh. All my stories are long. My wife tells me that all the time. Get to the point, Enoch. Get to the point.” It was fine with me if the story was long. I was enjoying it. “Good. But it’s almost over anyways. Kevin was in terrible shape. I had seen him pretty bad off before, but never as much as he was that night. He was crashed out on the floor in the corner of his kitchen, spinning a half a bottle of Jack in his hands. There were empties all over the room, and a few dishes and a TV dinner tray lying broken near the bedroom. He was mumbling something... I couldn’t really understand what he was saying, but I doubt it was anything important. I thought about trying to get him to stand up, maybe get him to a couch or his bed, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. He probably couldn’t have stood if he wanted to. So I did the next best thing. I grabbed the jack and downed the other half, then grabbed two beers out of the fridge and cracked ‘em open.” Wait a second. Enoch’s idea of a suicide watch included getting wasted with the person he was supposed to watch?
“If I had stood over him and told him to get up, he would have fought me. It wouldn’t have done any good, and I’d just be pissed off. So, the way I see it, if he wasn’t coming up to me, I was going down to him. He wasn’t down there because he was drinking, the drinking was just a symptom. Something had gotten to him. Usually, he’d pull himself out of his head trips, but this time I could tell something was different. I had to meet him at his level, so I started rambling about the guy I’d just tangled with before coming over. Kevin stared at me dead-eyed while I talked. His face was all red and swollen. He must have been crying for hours.”
It was hard to imagine Meririm, Lord of the Darkness, crying in a drunken stupor. “Well, it wasn’t something he mentioned at press conferences, I guess. Everybody’s got two or more sides, I’m sure you recognize that. A guy like Kevin has half a dozen. There’s the side he showed criminals, the side he showed the public, the way he was with Vanth, and then there was the part of him he let me see that night. The scared kid. The shaking, terrified weakling that gathers all the near-death experiences and horrors that a guy like that sees over the course of a career battling bad guys... and just takes ‘em on all at once. It’s like watching a nerdy kid get the crap kicked out of him by a football team. He doesn’t have a prayer, and he knows it, but he’s gotta walk down that same hallway, day after day, and deal with it.” I wondered... if Kevin had such a big problem, had he ever gotten help, like professional help?
“What would a guy like that do, go to a therapist? ‘Yeah, doc, I’m a wreck. I was just in hand-to-hand combat with a religious whackjob that threatened to blow up a pre-school because some ‘god’ told him to. If I had let him loose for even a second, I and twenty-five toddlers go to smithereens.’” Enoch rubbed his nose. “You can’t let stuff like that out to civilians... to anyone, really, except maybe another Vigilante, and they’re not usually much help because they’re dealing with their own stuff. That’s why he and Elyse lasted so long, I think. They were both able to tell each other this kind of thing, and I think that they were afraid that if they split up, other people might find out what they were really like, and by that point, it had all gotten too big and out of control. Entire cities and countries depended on some of us. You need somewhere, or someone, to help you let out some of the pressure. It’s crazy when I think about it.”
A panhandler approached us. I could tell he was about to hit us up for money, but then he took a second look at Enoch, and kept walking. Enoch turned around, grabbed the guy by the shoulder, scaring the bejeezus out of him, and handed him a couple of bucks. “I miss that look of fear.” he said.
We continued down the sidewalk. “Where was I...?” Talking about Kevin’s drunken crash. “Oh, yeah. So after a while of me talking, Kevin just sorta snapped into something, or out of something. Hard to tell which. He started telling me this story about a fight we were in 9 or 10 years before that. Told it to me like I wasn’t there when it happened. But I didn’t stop him. Then he just kept telling me story after story, every one of which I’d heard a dozen times or more. And of course, the bad guys had gotten bigger with every telling. The heights that he could have fallen from had gotten higher. More civilians were at risk. Everything had grown over the years. He just kept telling them. It seemed to me like he was about to die, and his life was flashing before his eyes.” I asked if he really would have killed himself. Was that on his mind? If it was, could he could go through with it?
Enoch took a moment to answer. He jingled some change in his pocket. “In a way, I think he did kill himself. I guess I should say he killed a part of himself. After that night he never wore his cape again... the comic got that part right. Well, at least, he never wore his gear again. The cape was more just for ceremonies, photoshoots, and the like. But, him giving up the gear wasn’t some triumphant ritual, where he decided it was wiser to let the next generation take the reins. It was sad, empty, kinda pathetic, really. He felt old and useless. He maybe could have kept it going another couple of years, but if you’re starting to doubt yourself, well, you should probably just cut the line right there. You can’t fight crooks half-assed.” I didn’t think Kevin was that old if I was remembering correctly. “Late 40’s. Old enough.”
40 didn’t seem very old to me anymore. Twenty years ago, it seemed like a number almost impossible to conceive of, let alone reach. I was curious if some specific event had occurred that put Kevin in the dumps about his age. Had he gotten beaten in a fight, or almost beaten, or something like that? “No. Nothing so tidy. Not that I know of, anyway. He had been thinking about all of that nonsense for months, maybe even a year or two. He moved a little slower, I could tell. Took longer to recover. We weren’t working together as much by then, we’d gone our separate ways a couple of years before that. But, all the same, I had started to hang around more often outside of work. I was worried about him.”
I said that it was good that Kevin had Enoch around... that not everyone has someone like that to watch their back. “You’re right,” he said. “Not everyone has that. I don’t know if he ever appreciated that, but he was damn lucky to have a sidekick like me.” He laughed quietly. Walnut Street. We were less than a block from the hardware store. Enoch pulled back his sleeve and looked at his watch. “Wow. It’s later than I thought. Gotta get home to the old lady. She’s expecting me.” I don’t know why I noticed, but it occurred to me that Enoch wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. However, he had a pretty big indent behind his over-sized arthritic knuckle from where, I assumed, he used to wear one. He shoved his hands back in his pockets, stopped walking, and faced me.
I asked if something was wrong. “No. I just... I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this. Must be something about you that made me just spout off like a whiny teenager. I probably shouldn’t be telling anyone this. If it ever got out... a lot of people could be hurt.” He seemed very anxious all of the sudden. I wasn’t sure what to say. I reassured him that I wouldn’t tell anyone what he had told me... For a normal person, that might be hard, but for me... I’ve got no family to speak of, I’m not with anyone, and I work too much, so I don’t have too many friends... who would I tell? I jokingly blamed the whole situation on the book. The book had just brought it all back. It was just a dumb comic book, written by some schmucks trying to sell copies, like he had said before. “Yeah. You’re probably right.” I could tell he had to go, or at least wanted to go, so I asked him to finish telling me what happened with Kevin that night. He looked... no, he peered at me for a very uncomfortable minute or two. Then out of nowhere he just picked up as though he had never stopped talking... like he had told this story before.
“I could tell Kevin was done, that he was out of the game for good. There was no way I could let him go back out and get into trouble when he was thinking the way he was. I told him as much, but he kept arguing with me, kept saying he could hack it, if he just worked a little harder, or drank a little less. He told me that Elyse had left him, but that much I already knew.” He paused there for a while.
How had he known? He didn’t say anything, but he pulled his hand out of his pocket and absent-mindedly rubbed his ring finger with his thumb. He coughed, deep and throaty, like an old man. “I knew. She was with someone else. Had been for a while. She was tired of his drinking. In fact, I may have played a part in convincing her to leave. She was afraid he wouldn’t be able to survive without her, and she was probably right, but that’s no way to go through life... being someone else’s crutch.” He stuffed his hand back in his pocket as a cold wind hit us both square in the face. It passed and he shivered a little. “It’s too damn cold out here.” I agreed.
“So, after a while, Kevin ran out of stories. He whined about Elyse for a bit, and I listened. A few hours later, when he stopped blubbering and started to sober up, I dragged him to the couch and told him what I was going to do.” Enoch’s eyes narrowed, and he folded his arms across his chest. “I told him that I was leaving, and I was taking his gear with me. His suit, his tools, his mask. All of it. I couldn’t let him go back out in that condition... in any condition... and I wasn’t going to. He was done. He started to cry, and I didn’t stop him. Then I did just what I said I was going to do. And then I left. That’s it.”
I must have looked like a little kid to Enoch at that moment. He had taken this story that I’d heard, read, re-read, and memorized for years, these characters, these heroes, that I’d come to view as... alive... fixed in history... immortal... and he had totally re-written all of it in just over an hour. I could never read “Meririm: Lord of the Night” the same way again. Hell, I probably could never read it again, period. It wasn’t just changed, it was gone. The story was over. I don’t know if I said anything to Enoch as I started to walk away. If I did, it must have come out as a mumble. I collided with a trash can a few yards away from where we had been standing. Without thinking, I pulled the comic book out of my bag and stuffed it in the trash. I started walking again. I wasn’t even sure where I was going.
I heard Enoch calling after me. He was calling me “kid.” He wanted me to stop, but for some reason, I pretended like I didn’t hear him. I just kept moving. I didn’t turn my head, or hesitate. I just kept walking. Then it dawned on me why he might be calling me. I heard him getting closer, more insistent. I started walking faster. So did he.
