Chương 22: Some Nights I Dream of Becoming a Monster (2)

Supposedly it was cold that night, but I didn't really notice. I was beyond the point of considering something as trivial as my own body temperature.

I remember thinking to myself that if I didn't think about my failing eyesight or the contacts, if I didn't think about how violently I reacted to what was frankly—to any normal person—a minor setback, if I didn't consider the possibility that I'd need stronger contacts in a few months, then even stronger ones, and so on and so on until I became that forbidden word I wouldn't even allow myself to think, I would be okay. I conceptualized it in the phrase: touch no void, feel no pain.

Over and over again I thought of that as I walked into town late that night. It kept the fear from my head, at bay against a wall of alcohol-fog and repeated mantra. Touch no void, feel no pain. 0 0 0 Eventually I started thinking about old comics, and how I was, basically, a superhero with a misunderstood backstory. I was an invincible force of nature, but for one reason or another I never bothered to save the common man from the hands of petty evil. Why not? Wasn't that something superheroes were supposed to do?

And I was basically a superhero, more than close enough, so why shouldn't I go and do what so many of my favorites did—patrol the city at night as a protector, a divine guardian, descending from above upon the evildoers? That sounded like fun. That new plan was so powerful it banished all of my concerns. I was going to find some crime, and then I was going to stop it. Easy stuff. Nobody could possibly stop me from stopping all the crime I wanted.

I was invincible; what could they possibly do against my overwhelming power? The town wasn't huge, but it wasn't small, either—maybe a population of fifty thousand. That said, it was full of scum—and people who didn't recognize the sheer amount of scum. Crime was high for a town that size. I was sure I'd find something, if some unfortunate fellow didn't try to mug me or something. Walking down High Street, I heard some scuffling in an alley.

A woman's voice, muffled and fear-struck, and a man's mumbling, and soft noises of clothing shifting. I figured that was as much of a slam-dunk easy open-and-shut case as any. I thought briefly of Cygnus, and I knew immediately that this was something jail wasn't going to be good enough to correct. This was beyond petty crime—this was a real thing I could stop. Not just a mugging—lives were on the line. I knew it by the way it was. From my bottle I drew out a snake of water.

I could try and spear the man using only the moisture from his breath as an indicator of his location, but that had a chance of failing. And besides: who would believe that their savior was me? A thirteen-year-old girl out by herself in the most dangerous part of town past midnight, with a snake of water coming out of a beer bottle, swaying from drunkenness? Little silver-sapphire key around her neck. Nobody would believe that. It was a forbidden story. It didn't matter if she saw me or not.

In the darkness of that hour I ceased to be a person and instead became a rumor; a half-hidden, half-believed memory of someone or something. Too nebulous to recall but too striking to ever forget. So I walked around the corner in full view of the two of them. The woman saw me, but her eyes were glazed over and vacant. She didn't look to be in full control of herself. They reminded me of my own, somewhat, on my bad days.

The man was far too busy trying and failing to undress her—one hand holding a knife to her neck and another trying and failing to undo various buckles on her dress. I didn't need to see any more to understand what needed to be done. I'd already frozen the tip of the water-snake coming out of the bottle in my hand—it was as simple as sunlight to point the snake in the direction of the evildoer and spear him through his temples. I fired with no hesitation.

The spear leapt out and skewered the man's head straight through, knocking the knife into the air. In hindsight I can say it was lucky that the knife clattered helplessly to the concrete, where the woman's eyes lazily drooped down to stare at it. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. One shot, one hit, one kill. Crime stopped, person saved. I felt a bit of warmth bloom in my chest. Look what I did! I saved a life!

I was really doing it—really being a superhero, really doing the whole superhero thing. It was so easy! Why didn't everyone with magic do this? It was so intuitive. If given powers, use them for good. The equation was so mind-numbingly simple. Why didn't we all do it? Couldn't the world be so much brighter? The woman slowly looked up at me, watching me recollect the water the bottle had lost without touching it. Locking eyes with another human made me realize just how drunk I was.

It was hard to stand still—and again in hindsight I realize how lucky I was that I made such a good shot. I could have just as easily killed both of them, or neither. Not like there was ever a threat to me, but it wouldn't look good on my brand-new superhero resume. The man lay sprawled in the alley, head in three pieces, blood splattered in a burgundy arc obscured by the shadows. Only some of it came into the range of the light from the streetlamps on the other side of the street.

And some of it was on the woman, too, but she didn't seem to notice. She shifted into the streetlamp's glow so she could see me better, and I don't blame her at all for doing that—I wouldn't have believed my eyes either if I saw what she was seeing. From her perspective the streetlamp lit around my head like a halo, and I was a divine being sent to crush the sinful in my floral-pattern T-shirt and jeans. I avenged the vulnerable. I championed for the weak. I was invincible. Nothing could ever stop me.

The moon and streetlight in tandem over my head. We just stared at each other for half a second, and I realized that all good superheroes have catchphrases, every single one had one, and if I was going to commit to this gig like I planned to in that moment, I had to come up one fast. So I raised the bottle and said, "Cheers!" Touch no void, feel no pain. 0 0 0 I wandered around for another forty-five minutes or so, but couldn't find any more crime, so I went home.

I was getting tired anyway, and the cold was starting to set in. On my way home I got sick, and as soon as I did so the cold set in even more heavily, so I started trying to get home faster. As I returned, I thought about my deed for the day, and I thought about the man, and I thought about how vile it was to force yourself on someone so vulnerable and weak. The woman in that situation was helpless, and instead of helping her, he took advantage and did evil. I couldn't imagine abusing someone so helpless like that.

There wasn't a damn thing that woman could have done to stop that man from doing whatever he wanted to her, not in that state, anyway. What drives a person to do things like that? I tried to think of something, but I couldn't. All I could feel was disgust for the sort of person that would inflict such trauma upon someone so powerless. I came here to stop people like that—and the recognition that I was doing a swell job fulfilling that goal made me feel warm inside, despite the chill.

I went back to the cafeteria and drank lots of water from the bubbler in there. God forbid I woke up hungover; everyone would know I'd been up to something. I'd been very good about not drinking outside of group occasions. That night was the first time, and standing there I remember thinking that it wasn't something I had plans to do again. The vigilante thing, though, I considered revisiting. I stood around in the dark cafeteria for a moment, not thinking about anything at all. Then I went to bed.

0 0 0 I didn't end up going out again. The thought of getting caught kept me in line. If I let myself get pushed around by the thought of minor consequences, I'd never be anything more than a bruiser—I knew that, but this seemed like it would have more than minor consequences if I got caught. I was already on thin ice with Prochazka for my drinking; and thus far I'd managed to get to more stable ground by proving that it wasn't a problem.

Getting hammered and killing rapists in town, while a perfectly good idea on paper, probably wasn't going to win me any brownie points with Prochazka. Maybe I could get him to assign that task to me, but the precedent for asking for jobs wasn't there and I wasn't about to try and set it. That whole week afterward I was a little more distant than normal; I was even harder to talk to than usual.

Only Cygnus asked me what was wrong, and all I could do was shrug and tell him I didn't know, because that was the truth: I didn't know what was wrong. I knew something was. But God help me if I knew what the cause was or why. I caught myself wondering what I did to deserve it. But then the week was over, and my contacts came in the mail. They came in a little blue box with instructions printed on the side and a small bottle of solution to start me off.

It seemed like a cruel joke to have the usage instructions for contacts printed in tiny text on the side of a box, but I could still see up close just fine—when looking at things right in front of me it was almost as though nothing was wrong—so I just stored that observation for later use and moved on with my life. I had one of the contacts on my finger, and I found that I could not for the life of me put it in. Every time I went to do so, I couldn't. The idea of something touching my eye physically repulsed me.

It made me nauseous. I couldn't do it. But I knew I had to, or this would just get worse forever, and then I'd be dead. And I still had at least seventeen years ahead of me, and I really did want to make the most of those, because as far as I could tell they were going to be pretty good ones if I could keep this up. So I steeled my soul and gritted my teeth, and reminded myself that I was invincible; and invincible people aren't afraid of putting contacts in.

My finger went up and slotted the lens over my eye, and I blinked a billion times, and then I did it again with the other eye. And then world was a little bit brighter.