Objects of Worship (22 page)

So that beautiful young woman — whoever she was —
vanished beneath the waves.

Already, the tide nipped at her abandoned clothes, the
wind scattering them.

Ten years ago, I sold my fishing license to a goddamned
corporation when fishing licenses were still worth a mint.
Paid off what little was left on my mortgage. Was able to
retire at forty-five. Janet kept her job at the bank, even
though I told her she didn’t have to. But she liked to get
out of the house, and most of her friends worked there.
The extra money was nice, but at first her decision left me
lonely. We had gotten married when we were twenty-five,
but we had never really spent enough time together and I
was hoping early retirement would change all that. That
we’d get to enjoy each other again while we were still young
enough.

It took me about a year to come to terms with the
fact that Janet and I would never get any closer. We were
reliable, loving companions, but we would never burn up
the world with romance and passion. I accepted this quietly,
never mentioning it to her. She was concerned about my
indolence, worried that it might turn into depression.
Gradually, the mood passed.

I’d never wanted to become a fisherman. My dad and
his brothers had all been fishermen. So had my granddad.
I didn’t envy their lives. In fact, when I was young, I hated
it. I yearned to escape this town and the life my folks had
brought me into. I used to dream about being an artist, a
writer, an archaeologist — anything that would take me
away from Singleton. I filled up notebook after notebook
with comics stories of the impossibly glamorous adventures
I would enjoy if I ever escaped this place. I loved drawing
monsters and girls best of all.

I tried to emulate the work of my favourite cartoonist,
Jake Kurtz. His stuff exploded with energy. His panels
were framed in odd, disorienting angles. He filled up his
pages with intricate designs and vividly imagined settings
of strange worlds. I desperately needed life to be as exciting
and wondrous as his comics.

On my sixteenth birthday, Dad had a stroke that left
his left side partially paralyzed. He needed me on the
boat after that. There wasn’t enough money for any other
option. The night before my first day out, I silently cried
myself to sleep.

I’d been out with my dad often as a little kid, so I knew
my way around the boat, more than I cared to admit. I didn’t
expect to be good at it, much less to like it.

But I was surprised at how much I did end up enjoying
it. Dad died of another stroke about six years later. During
the intervening years we became friends, something I had
never believed possible. I wish he could have been around
for my wedding. He hated dressing up, and we would have
shared a good laugh about it.

People in Singleton saw me as a traitor for selling my
license. Back then I could tell that not only were the fish
dying off but more and more of the catch was contaminated.
I got out while the going was still good. I didn’t hurt anyone.
The situation with the ocean was way past the point of no
return. We were all responsible for the damage we’d done
to the sea and to the fish. No use fighting a war that had
already been lost. Still, I didn’t exactly have any friends
around here anymore. Even ten years later — as if it was my
fault that the fish died out and the ocean was a poisonous
cesspool. Hell, humanity as a group was destroying the
whole world, species by species, ecosystem by ecosystem.
Selling my license didn’t precipitate that.

I tried to talk Janet into moving away, but she’d lived
here her whole life and didn’t want to leave behind everyone
and everything she knew.

I sat there for about an hour after the young woman
disappeared into the ocean, numbed. I knew I’d done the
right thing by not interfering, but it was a hell of a thing to
witness. And seeing something so obviously intended to be
a private moment felt dirty and invasive.

I got up. The sun hit my eyes. The cloudless summer sky
was a bright, almost glowing blue. I made my way back home
barely in time to fix breakfast before Janet had to leave
for work. I didn’t mention the woman to Janet — because I
didn’t really know what to say about it, but also because it
would have impinged even more on that woman’s privacy.
It was her death, not anyone else’s, and I didn’t have the
right to take it away from her.

As we did every morning, Janet and I ate breakfast
quietly. Janet isn’t really awake until she’s halfway through
her second cup of coffee. Before that she doesn’t do much
more than grunt. By the time she left, the skies weren’t so
clear anymore. Dark grey clouds formed over Singleton,
and the wind carried a hint of fierceness. Now that I was
alone, the weird morning suddenly caught up with me. I
was anxious, fidgety, filled with tumultuous emotions that
mirrored the sudden storm.

I should have been doing housework, but I couldn’t
focus. I sank into my reading chair, listening to the rush of
the wind outside.

The doorbell rang a few minutes later. It was Donald
Hodge, the UPS driver. He made a comment about the
unexpected turn in the weather — there wasn’t even a speck
of blue sky anymore, and the wind was gaining strength by
the minute. I signed for my parcel: a box from The Golden
Age comics shop. Even the barely concealed contempt
that hid behind Donald’s superficial cordiality — that
underlying disdain that too many people in Singleton held
for me — couldn’t spoil my excitement. This treasure was
what I needed to shake off the day’s unsettling oddness.

I opened the box, knowing already what was inside:
Greatest Comics
#3–13 — the never-reprinted complete run
of Jake Kurtz’s “The Preservers,” before the strip graduated
to a comic book of its own. Kurtz and Shrugging Atlas
Comics never did work out their legal wrangles over those
episodes: Kurtz owned the stories, but the publisher owned
the characters. As a result, the original Preservers stories
were never seen again.

I had copies of nearly everything else Kurtz had ever
worked on, in addition to a complete set of the post-Kurtz
version of
The Preservers
comic book. This run of
Greatest
Comics
came out a few years before I started reading comic
books, so I missed them the first time around and had never
found copies I could afford. These were in poor condition,
but at least I could finally read the stories.

For years Kurtz continued to work for smaller publishers,
writing and drawing all his stories, until his death in 1994.
His oeuvre encompassed every genre imaginable, westerns,
romance, humour, superheroes, fantasy, war . . . and, what
many consider his specialty, monster stories. His most
admired work was a 250-page mythological epic called
Destroyer of Worlds
, from the mid-1970s. His comics were
always praised by connoisseurs, but sales didn’t match the
critical acclaim.

The Preservers were Stanley King, the patriarch of
his family, a shapeshifter who called himself Professor
Unknown; his wife, Suzanne, who could become intangible
and who adopted the name Spectral; their daughter, Sandy,
a.k.a. the Human Angel, who sprouted wings that gave her
the ability to fly; and Stanley’s younger brother, Cliff, who
was transformed into a superstrong ten-foot, blue-scaled
giant called the Brute. They gained their powers when,
after their private jet crashed in the Himalayas, they were
rescued by the god Vishnu, the preserver, who granted
them strange abilities “to preserve the world against the
forces of destruction.”

Something hard thudded against the house, and that
jarred me out of Kurtz’s universe. I looked out the window.
Although it was only around noon, it was as dark as dusk.
Trees were bending dangerously against the wind. The
rain was still sparse, but it was obvious it would soon be
torrential.

I switched on the TV. The weather channel was issuing
a severe storm warning, urging everyone to stay indoors.
The announcer emphasized that winds were now expected
to reach hurricane strength.

I was concerned about Janet. I wanted to be sure she
wouldn’t try to leave work in the middle of this mess. Best
that she stay there until it was all over. I tried to call her, but
the phone was dead. I needed to hear her voice, to reassure
myself. I calmed down by reminding myself that Janet was
much too reasonable to do something as careless as going
outside in this kind of weather.

Through the window, I saw the wind uproot the tree
on the Irvings’ lawn across the road. I grabbed my pile of
Greatest Comics
and ran to the cellar.

Even down there, I heard the storm rage. Stuck in the
cellar, I eagerly plunged into my new, long sought-after
acquisitions — but the electricity went out. In the dark,
I fumbled around for the shelf where we kept emergency
supplies. I found the flashlight, and I also lit some candles.

Willing myself to be oblivious to the sounds of the
destructive weather, I returned to the welcome escape of
Kurtz’s imagination.

“The Preservers,” as originally conceived by Jake Kurtz,
was different in tone and content than the version later
published by Shrugging Atlas Comics. Kurtz’s characters
weren’t so much superheroes, as they became under other
hands, but explorers. The mythological nature of their
origins and powers was played up more heavily, and the
stories concerned themselves with hidden societies, old
gods, and magical artefacts rather than supervillains and
the like. Themes and ideas later explored in
Destroyer of
Worlds
— such as humans being pawns in complex games
and conflicts between the gods of various pantheons —
were first hinted at in these stories.

The most shocking episode of Kurtz’s “The Preservers”
was the last one: “The Mysterious Suicide.” Professor
Unknown sees a sobbing woman on a secluded beach walk
into the ocean. Despite his efforts, he fails to prevent it, and
her body vanishes under the water. Soon after the suicide —
while King is still trying to locate the body — a savage storm
erupts. It hits the nearby town. The Preservers use their
powers to protect the townspeople from the storm. As the
weather calms, Professor Unknown spots the woman from
the beach driving away. Alive.

The story ended there, the final panel being a blurb for
the never-published follow-up episode: “Next! The Hunter
Strikes!”

When silence fell, its starkness was almost deafening.

I had by then reread “The Mysterious Suicide” several
times, trying in vain to make sense of its similarity to my
own experiences.

What I found when I emerged from the cellar helped me
focus on something other than a comics story written and
drawn half a century ago.

All our house’s windows had been shattered. Stupid old
man. Too focused on my comics, I’d forgotten the storm
shutters; I should have gone out and secured them as soon
as the weather showed signs of turning foul. There were
shards of glass, rocks of various sizes, and all kinds of
debris littering the floor and the furniture. The pictures
that had hung on the walls — all of them Janet’s: family
photos, works by local artists, a painting of her as a baby by
her long-dead father — had fallen, the frames broken. It was
going to take a lot of work and expense to fix all this.

I tried calling Janet again, but the phone lines were still
down.

I should have stayed and cleaned up the damage. But
it was too much, too extensive. I couldn’t face it. I left the
house, rushing to join Janet at the bank. To make sure she
was okay.

Singleton looked like a war zone.

Oily blotches, presumably from the ocean, splattered
all over. Cars smashed up and turned upside down. Debris,
shattered to unidentifiable fragments, strewn everywhere.
Dead birds and squirrels on the ground, limbs and heads
ripped off. Even some fish and seaweed lying here and
there. House walls wrecked by uprooted trees. Our home
hadn’t fared that badly, all things considered.

The closer I got to Main Street, the more panicked
and wounded people I encountered. Ambulances, police
cars, and military trucks were already on the scene, with
personnel doing what they could to help. The enormity of
the destruction was too much to grasp.

On our way back from the bank, Janet and I kept stopping
to talk to townsfolk: old man Steinberg from the post
office, the Bradfords (who both used to work for me back in
the day), Taylor from the hardware store . . . They were all
unusually friendly, as if we were good neighbours, as if the
last decade had never happened. Part of me wanted to stay
resentful, but I let it go.

Everywhere people chatted, helping each other out, and
making plans to work together to rebuild the town. Amidst
all this destruction, Singleton felt like a community again.
Like a community I was a part of. I wasn’t naive enough to
believe that people liked me again, but, in the wake of the
storm, disliking me stopped being so important. It was a
start.

As we walked home, Janet held my hand with a firmness
I hadn’t felt since the first months of our marriage.

Next to me, Janet slept. I kissed her shoulder, eliciting a
drowsy moan, and then I slipped out of bed. I got dressed,
wandered through our wrecked home, and, restless, went
out for a midnight walk.

I didn’t have a destination in mind, but I wasn’t
surprised when I realized I was heading toward the ocean.
What did surprise me was the shiny, expensive-looking
black car with tinted windows parked near the path in the
woodsy area that led down to the secluded beach. Nobody
in Singleton had a car like that. I approached it and peered
into the windows, but they were too opaque. I didn’t want
to touch the vehicle; it might have a sensitive alarm.

Stealthily, I made my way down to the beach. There was
a man standing there, facing the ocean, away from me. He
was very tall — well above six feet — and wore blue jeans and
a brown turtleneck. He was pointing some kind of handheld device toward the water; it emitted a high-pitched
ping!
as he arced slowly from east to west and back again.
He repeated the gesture several times before folding up the
machine.