Turn and Face the Strange, Chapter Thirteen
This was the chapter where I suddenly loved Johnny as a character instead of as a sitar-playing plot device. Also, how screwed up is Joe? Very screwed up.
Chapter Thirteen
I bless you madly,
sadly as I tie my shoes.
I love you badly, just in time,
at times, I guess;
Because of you I need to rest, oh yes,
Because it's you
that sets the test.
So much has gone
and little is new.
And as the sunrise stream
Flickers on me,
My friends talk
Of glory, untold dreams,
where all is God and God is just a word…
- “Cygnet Committee,” David Bowie
When Joe and Hermione leave the Web, Arthur sends Molly home immediately and then goes out to seek Johnny. He finds him sitting alongside a quiet street, leaning against a sunny wall with his legs crossed, and he tells Johnny precisely what transpired inside the cut rate club, including the story of the Diamond Dog girls’ deaths, and including Joe’s pronouncement that Hermione would never leave the Tower again.
Johnny listens to Arthur with a gentle frown of concentration during the entire story, and then closes his eyes and leans his head back against the warm wall again. At first Arthur thinks that Johnny is ignoring him, so he prepares to turn around and go after Molly, but the curly haired boy’s eyes open before he does. He smiles gratefully, if not happily, at Arthur, and lifts his head again from the wall.
“Thank you, Arthur. I appreciate it.” He picks up a clay bottle and a little clay cup sitting in the shade cast by his body. He pours some water into the cup, and holds it out to Arthur. “Arthur,” he says softly, “would you like a drink of water?”
Arthur hesitates. He very nearly turns Johnny down straight, the way he has every other time, but something makes him stop. He gives a single curt nod.
“All right. Yeah, I would.” He accepts the cup from Johnny’s hand, lifts it to his mouth, and drinks. The water is warm, but clean, and it wets his parched tongue like the hooch that comes from his own clay bottle never can. He drinks slowly, but without stopping, tilting the cup gradually back, and his head with it, his eyes closed against the afternoon sun and the sensory pressure of anything except this warm, clean water.
When the cup is empty, he lowers again both head and cup, and opens his eyes. He returns the cup to Johnny, and looks the boy from Freecloud straight in the face.
“Thank you,” he says clearly. Johnny smiles.
“You’re welcome, Arthur,” he answers. Arthur nods again, and after a brief, awkward pause, holds out a hand.
“I was glad to have you with us,” he says. He seems to know by instinct that Johnny is not coming back to the Web, will not play his borrowed sitar on stage with the Zeroes again, and Johnny does not contradict this assumption. He takes Arthur’s hand and shakes it slowly.
“I was as glad for the opportunity as you were to offer it, if not more so,” returns Johnny. “You’re a good man, Arthur, and Molly is a good woman. I’m in your debt. Both of you.” Arthur nods, and releases Johnny’s hand. Then he turns around and walks away.
v
After Arthur’s bad news, Johnny chooses not to wait for Hermione’s return, despite her instructions otherwise. He finds The Diamond Tower that evening without much difficulty, and without having to ask for any directions; he knows it to be north of the Web but still on the west side of town, and the concentration of Diamond Dog activity (which is easy to spot by itself), and before he runs himself enough out of clues to lend to guessing, he is close enough to pick it out as the tallest building in the area.
The Diamond Tower was once an office building, with every wall a glass window up to the very top floor. Few large windows survived the first looting after the initial collapse, and further looting, accidents, and inclement weather broke almost all of the others. Some of the safety glass still hangs, shattered and wavering, in the window frames, while some of it frames the opening in jagged starburst, and on all of it the sunlight coming through the smoggy clouds glitters and sparkles.
Johnny finds a place near what looks like the ground floor exit to the building, where he can watch for those entering and leaving while also remaining hidden behind a tall stack of building supplies. He remains there for the rest of the day, but although there is an unusually steady stream of people coming and going for the daylight hours, nobody leaves fitting the description Arthur gave Johnny of Joe until after dusk. The man is large, much larger than Johnny, with a topknot of dark hair whose color is difficult to tell in the falling dark. His face is scarred, and he looks pained and furious, and he carries a large satchel upon his back.
Johnny sits quietly all the same, intending to wait some minutes to make sure that he isn’t going to come back before he goes to check on Hermione and see if she’s all right. Then he sees her, peering out of the empty starburst in a broken window of the third floor. Johnny suspects she is waiting for the same thing he is. He holds his tongue for as long as he can, but when she starts moving away from the window he cannot help himself.
“Hermione,” he calls. It seems a safe enough word to risk overhearing; he rather doubts that Joe the Lion knows his little Wonder’s original name, or remembers it if he ever knew it. She stops at the word, and even from his distance, he can see the lines of her shoulders tense with listening. “Hermione,” he calls again.
“J… Johnny?” she calls back. “Hello? Johnny?”
“Yes,” he responds, stepping a little out of his hiding place and waving where he hopes she can see. He smiles when the tension leaves her shoulders again and she waves back to him in relief. “Where is he going?” he calls back to her, not bothering to define who he means. She knows. “He won’t be back soon, will he?”
She shakes her head. “No,” she calls. “None of them will. Joe and a lot of the other Dogs have all run off to a special meeting. Joe told me himself that he wouldn’t be back for hours. He told the sentry, too, so he wasn’t just trying to put me off my guard.”
“Sentry?” He does not risk too much exposure, but he comes out far enough from the protection afforded by his pile for Hermione to see him better.
“Yes. Oh J-J-Johnny, there were these awful murders, so they’re keeping all the girls inside the Tower and they’ve posted a sentry, under order from Halloween Jack, and oh, Johnny, it’s terrible. It’s so aw-awful, Johnny, their names were Marianne and Grace and I knew them, Johnny!”
“I heard about the murders,” he says sadly.
“I knew them! G-Grace lived on my, on my floor Johnny, and it’s so awful, it’s so t-terrible!”
“It’s all right,” calls Johnny up as soothingly as he can. “It’s okay, my love, it will be all right.” And up in the third floor window, she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath of air, and imagines the taste of clean water, and it is all right.
“Arthur-you know Arthur, the singer for the Zeroes, the one who cleared me out of the Web this morning-he told me that Joe said you weren’t ever going to come out of there again.”
“W-well you know, Joe says these things…”
Johnny walks a little bit closer to the tower. “I don’t know, Hermione,” he calls back gently. “Does he?”
“This will probably just all blow over,” she says a little bit louder. “It will be ugly and terrible but if we can just survive it then everything will go back to what it has always been. It’s the way of history, isn’t it? It’s always the way.”
Johnny wants to say yes, he wants to nod and say yes, that’s the way of it. She wants him to, but he can’t.
“Things aren’t going to get better, this time,” he says almost too softly for her to hear, so far above him. “Things aren’t going to go back to the way they were. Last week, you asked me why I’d come here. This is why, Hermione. This is different. Things have fixed themselves over and over for as long as they can, but now they have reached a combustion point and something has to explode. Whatever happens, the one guarantee is that nothing will be as it was. Some things will be lost. A lot of things will be lost. But some things can be saved, they still can, love, and together we could be one of those things. Hermione, come down. Come down with me.”
The thin girl in the painted breastplate takes one step away from the broken window. All the serenity that the boy from Freecloud has carried around him like a steel bubble is dissolved as though it has never existed. His face is painted with anguish.
“Hermione, please!” he cries. “I love you!”
“So does Joe!” she shouts, her voice cracking.
“No he doesn’t!” he shouts back. “Hermione, he doesn’t! Not like you should be loved. Please believe me! You have to come with me. You have to come with me now, before the rocks start falling. We can still save so much that’s good. That’s why I’m here.”
The thin girl does not know what to do. She has never had a choice to make. She has never ached so badly or been so confused. She can only remember the story from late at night, the end of Joe’s story, the part he doesn’t tell and she has to tell herself, about how he carried her home and watched over her and fed her and wouldn’t let anyone touch her.
“Joe needs me,” she says. It is almost a whisper, but still he can hear it from the ground. She takes another step away from the window.
“Hermione,” keens the curly haired boy standing in the dust three stories below her. She turns around and walks away from the window, disappearing from its starburst broken glass frame.
v
He almost walks away. He should walk away. It’s like he said-he has so much he needs to save from falling into darkness. But he stares at that broken window, and stares, and stares, and he cannot look away, and he cannot, cannot walk away. It would be easier for him to cut off his right arm and leave it behind the scrap metal pile to guard for him. Johnny of Freecloud cannot save the world until he has at least saved her. So he sits down in the darkness behind the pile, and waits.
It is not until long after sunrise the next day that anyone finally comes back. It is Halloween Jack, leading a small group of Diamond Dogs back to the Tower-among them, yes, Joe the Lion. Halloween Jack and most of the others go around to the back of the building, but Joe goes inside. Johnny strains his ears, and almost thinks he hears voices coming from the third floor window that he has been watching all night-but how would he be able to tell? After a few minutes, Joe emerges from within the Tower, and goes around the building, presumably to join the other Dogs.
Johnny settles back in, and tries to rub some of the night chill out of his arms.
v
Wonder stays far away from the window for the rest of the day, as though she has developed a new fear of falling out of it. She stays mostly over on the other side of the room, sitting in the middle of the pallet on the floor. She sleeps a little bit, but it is full of dreams and not very restful.
It is not until the sun has set again and the color has leached out of the world along with the light that Joe shows up again. He is calmer than he was that morning, and much calmer that he was the day before. He says nothing at first upon coming through the door; he just walks toward her, with his great arms open, and when she runs into them he wraps them around her and holds her tightly, and she wraps her arms around him and does the same.
“My little Wonder,” he chokes. “I’m sorry if I hurt you or I scared you. I was just so afraid for you. I don’t want to lose you. I can’t. I need you, my Wonder.”
“I know,” she whispers, too softly for him to hear.
“It’s those two girls,” he goes on, “but it’s also a lot of things that are happening because of them. Things that were supposed to happen quite a while from now, but are having to happen now instead. A lot of it is my work, and a lot of it needed more time than we’ve got now.”
“So that’s… What does that mean? What is that going to mean?”
“Nothing, my girl.” He pulls back to kiss her forehead. “I’ll be gone again tomorrow as soon as the sun rises. And it might sound scary out there, but I need you to stay in the Tower. You mustn’t leave. You mustn’t ever leave for anything.” He kisses her again.
“Y-yes, Joe. Yes, no, of course I won’t,” she assures him, stammering.
He leads her over to the pallet and wraps his arms around her again.
Something is different, comes the thought again, like it did as they laid in the dead grass at the drive in movie. Something is changed. When he touches her, she can hardly keep from shuddering, and that isn’t right, because Joe needs her, and Joe is good to her. But the feel of his fingers on her skin is as hard and cold as the feel of her iron breast plate when she puts it on in the morning chill. When he moves over her, she closes her eyes very tightly, and pretends she is not here. She pretends that she is at her favorite table at the Web, right by the stage on the right side, and she can hear a sitar and she has a little clay cup of clean water in her hand. It makes his hands feel warmer, pretending, but when they touch her face the wrong name passes her lips.
He stops immediately. Her eyes fly open. The room is dark, but she can see him above her as a great dark shape, and in the dark shape are his eyes, and they glitter.
“Who is Johnny?” he asks her, and his voice is quiet and dangerous.
She ought to say something. She ought to say “Johnny who?” or “I didn’t say anything,” or “What are you talking about?” or anything that is not sitting there silent and frozen like a small animal hiding in the dark and hoping that a predator does not see them.
“Who is Johnny?” he says again, a little louder this time. His hands are clamped around her arms again. He holds her so hard, and it hurts, it hurts so much.
“Who is Johnny?” he roars, and now he is shaking her again. Her head jerks back and forth limply on her neck like a flower on a bruised stem. She closes her eyes, even tighter than she had before; she closes them as hard as ever she possibly can, until stars and flowers pop on the black background of the inside of her eyelids. She hears a sharp crack, and feels as though something explodes in her left cheek and eye, and the black background of her eyelid flashes gold, like the far off cloud lighting that flashes over Freecloud.
Who is Johnny, Joe screams over and over. But as he shakes her and she watches the stars and flowers inside her eyes, the thought passes across her mind that even if she wanted to answer, even if she could answer, she does not know what exactly it is that she would say.