Inside Straight

Daniel Abraham Jonathan Hive

2: Jonathan hive sells out!

Jonathan went over the release form again, flipping the paper back and forth. The time he’d spent trying to parse memos from Senate campaigns just didn’t help much when it came to these West Coast entertainment wonks. The whole point of the exercise, after all, was to get something he could write about. If the first thing he did on day one was sign away his rights, he might as well go fill out an application at Starbucks and be done.

He looked up and down the parking lot. Great silver buses and trucks filled the place, sound equipment and shoulder-mounted cameras making their way to the secular cathedral of Ebbets Field on the backs of scrungy-looking technicians. A folding table had been set up with a tarnished coffee service and a few boxes of donuts. Several of the other prospective contestants were milling around, trying to size each other up.

“Is there a question I can help you with?” the flunky asked through a practiced smile. She was early twenties, long-faced, and mean about the eye. Normal-looking people who lived in the beauty pits of Hollywood too long seemed to get that feral I’m-not-a-supermodel-but-I-might-kill-one look after a while.

“Oh,” Jonathan said, whipping out his own smile, “it’s just… I’m a journalist. I have this blog, and I don’t quite know what I can and can’t talk about there. If I did get on the show, I couldn’t really afford to take however many months just off.”

“Of course not,” the flunky said, nodding. “This is just the release for the tryouts. If you’re chosen for the show, there’s a whole other process.”

Which didn’t even sort of answer Jonathan’s question. He smiled wider. They’d just see which of them could nice the other to death.

“That’s great,” he said, shaking his head. “I just had one or two tiny questions about the wording on this one?”

“Sure,” the flunky said. “Anything I can help with. But it is the standard release.” Meaning move it, loser, I’ve got a hundred more like you to get through.

“I’ll make it quick. I really appreciate this,” Jonathan said. Meaning suck it up, jerk, I can stall you all day if I want to.

The flunky’s smile set like concrete. Jonathan killed half an hour niggling at details and posing hypothetical situations. It all came down to the same thing, though: If he wanted in, he’d sign. If he refused…well, the field was full of aces who were there for the express purpose of taking his place. He kept up the tennis match of cheerful falsehoods until the flunky’s smile started to chip at the edges, but in the end, he signed off.

He sidled over to the coffee and donuts just long enough to confirm that he didn’t want anything to do with either, and then a vaguely familiar blond guy with a clipboard rounded them up and led the way across the tarmac and into the entrance of the ballpark. They were divided into ten groups and then each was led to a camera and interview setup, where a small bank of lights was ready to make him and all the others glow for the camera. Of his group, he got to be the lucky bastard who went first.

“Don’t worry about the camera,” the interviewer said. “They just want to see how you come across through the lens. Just pretend it’s not there.”

She was much prettier than the flunky, dressed a little sexy, and willing, it was clear, to flirt a little if that made you say something stupid or embarrassing for the viewing public. Jonathan liked her immediately.

“Right,” Jonathan said. The five-inch black glass eye stared at him. “Just like it’s only you and me.”

“Exactly,” she said. “So. Let’s see. Could you tell me a little bit about why you want to be on American Hero?”

“Well,” he said. “Have you ever heard of Paper Lion?”

A little frown marred the interviewer’s otherwise perfect brow. “Wasn’t that the ace who—”

“It’s a book,” Jonathan said. “By George Plimpton. Old George went into professional football back in the 60s. Wrote a book about it. I want to do something like that. But for one thing, football’s for the football fans. For another thing, it’s been done. And for a third, reality television is for our generation what sports were for our dads. It’s the entertainment that everyone follows.”

“You want to… report on the show?”

“It’s not that weird. A lot of guys get into office so they can have something to write in their memoirs,” Jonathan said. “I want to see what it’s all about. Understand it. Try to make some sense of the whole experience, and sure, write about it.”

“That’s interesting,” the interviewer said, just as if it really had been. Jonathan was just getting warmed up. This was the sound bite fest he’d been practicing for weeks.

“The thing is, all people really see when they see aces is what we can do, you know? What makes us weird. These little tricks we’ve got—flying, or turning into a snake or becoming invisible—they define us. It’s doesn’t matter what we do. It just matters what we are.

“I want to be the journalist and essayist and political commentator who also happens to be an ace. Not the ace who writes. This is the perfect venue for that. Just getting on the show would be a huge step. It gives me the credentials to talk about what being an ace is. And what it isn’t. Does that make sense?”

“It does, actually,” the interviewer said, and now he thought maybe she was just a little bit intrigued by him.

One step closer, he thought. Only about a million to go.

“Okay,” she said. “And Jonathan Hive? Is that right?”

“Tipton-Clarke’s the legal last name. Hive’s a nom de guerre. Or plume. Or whatever.”

“Right. Tipton-Clarke. And what exactly is your ace ability?”

“I turn into bugs.”

American Hero was the height of the reality television craze. Real aces were set up to backbite and scheme and show off for the pleasure of the viewing public. And it was hosted, just for that touch of street cred, by a famous celebrity ace—Peregrine. The prize: a lot of money, a lot of exposure, the chance to be a hero. The whole thing was as fake as caffeine-free diet pop.

And yet…

He’d woken before dawn in his generic little hotel room, surprised by how nervous he felt. He’d eaten breakfast in his room—rubbery eggs and bitter coffee—while he watched the news. Someone tied to Egyptian joker terrorists finally assassinated the Caliph, a Sri Lankan guy with a name no one could pronounce had been named the new UN Secretary-General, and a new diet promised to reduce him three dress sizes. He’d switched channels to an earnest young reporter interviewing a German ace named Lohengrin, who was making a publicity tour of the United States to support a new BMW motorcycle, and then given up. He dropped a quick note to the blog, just to keep his maybe two dozen readers up to speed, and headed out.

The subway ride out to the field had been like going to a job interview. He kept thinking his way through what he was going to do, how to present himself, whether his clothes were going to lie too flat to crawl back into when he had to reform. He’d half-convinced himself that his trial was going to end with him stark naked. He could always pause, of course. Leave a band of unreclaimed bugs just to preserve modesty; like a bright green insect Speedo. Because that wouldn’t be creepy.

Now, actually sitting on the benches the Hollywood people had put out for them and watching the lights and cameras and the milling, he was starting to feel a little less intimidated. He and the other contestants were in four rows of benches just inside the first-base foul line. The three judges—Topper, Digger Downs, and the Harlem Hammer—sat at a raised table more or less on the pitcher’s mound. The invisible mechanisms of television production—sound crew, cameras, make-up chairs, lousy buffet—were kept mostly between home plate and third base. The great expanse of the outfield was set aside for the aces to prove just how telegenic they were.

Which, you could say, varied.

Take, for instance, the poor bastard whose turn it was at present. He had his arms stretched dramatically toward the small, puffy clouds, and had for several seconds, as his determined look edged a little toward desperate.

“What are we waiting for?” Jonathan whispered.

“Big storm,” the guy beside him—a deeply annoying speedster by the name of Joe Twitch—muttered back. “Maybe a tornado.”

“Ah.”

They waited. The alleged ace shouted and curled his fingers into claws, projecting his will out to the wide bowl of sky. The other aces who had made it through the interview were sitting on folding chairs far enough away to be safe if anything did happen. The morning air smelled of gasoline and cut grass. Joe Twitch stood up and sat back down about thirty times in a minute and a half.

“Hey,” Jonathan said. “That cloud up there. The long one with the thin bit in the middle?”

“Yeah?” Joe Twitch replied.

“Looks kind of like a fish, if you squint a little.”

“Huh,” Twitch said. And then, “Cool.”

The public address system whined. The Harlem Hammer was going to put the poor fucker out of his misery. Jonathan was half sorry to see the guy go. Only half.

“Mr. Stormbringer?” the Harlem Hammer said. “Really, Mr. Stormbringer, thank you very much for coming. If you could just…”

“The darkness! It comes!” Stormbringer said in sepulchral tones. “The storm shall break!”

An embarrassed silence fell.

“You know,” Jonathan said, “if we wait long enough, it’s bound to rain. You know? Eventually.”

“Mr. Stormbringer,” the Harlem Hammer tried again, while behind him Digger Downs pantomimed striking a gong. “If you could … ah… John? Could you take Mr. Stormbringer to the Green Room, please?”

The vaguely familiar blond guy detached himself from the clot of technicians and walked, clipboard in hand, to escort the man out of the stadium. Jonathan squinted, trying to place him—café-au-lait skin, a little epicanthic folding around the eyes, blond hair out of a bottle.

“Aw, man,” he said.

“What?” Twitch demanded.

Jonathan gestured toward the blond with his chin. “That’s John Fortune,” he said.

“Who?”

“John Fortune. He was on the cover of Time a while back. Pulled the black queen, but everyone thought it was an ace. There was this whole, weird religious thing about him being the antichrist or the new messiah or something.”

“The one Fortunato died trying to fix up?”

“Yeah, he’s Fortunato’s kid. And Peregrine’s.”

Joe Twitch was silent for a moment. The only thing that seemed to slow him down was trying to think. Jonathan wondered if he could buy the guy a book of sudoku puzzles.

“Peregrine’s producing the show,” Twitch said.

“Yup.”

“So that poor fucker’s working for his mom?”

“How the mighty have fallen,” Jonathan said dismissively. A new ace was taking the field—an older guy, skinny, with what appeared to be huge chrome boots, a brown leather jacket, and a ’40s-era pilot’s helmet, with straps that hung at the sides of his face like a beagle’s ears.

“Thank you,” the Harlem Hammer said. “And you are?”

“Jetman!” the new guy announced, rising up on the little cones of fire that appeared at the soles of his boots. He struck a heroic pose. “I am the man Jetboy would have been.”

“Oh good Christ,” Jonathan muttered. “That was sixty years ago. Let the poor fucker die, can’t you?”

Apparently, he couldn’t.

Of the constant stream of wannabes presenting themselves to the world, Mr. Stormbringer had been the worst so far, but the guy who called himself the Crooner hadn’t managed to do much either. And Jonathan’s personal opinion was that Hell’s Cook—a thick-necked man who could heat up skillets by looking at them—was really more deuce than ace, but at least he was a good showman.

And there had been some decent ones, too. Jonathan’s benchmate, Joe Twitch, had made a pretty good showing and also managed to be so abrasive it was clear he’d be a good engine of petty social drama. The six-five bear, Matryoshka—who split into two five-eight bears when you hit him, and then four five-footers, and so on, apparently until you stopped hitting him—had been decent. The eleven-year-old girl carrying her stuffed dragon had seemed like a sad joke until she made the toy into a fifty-foot, fire-breathing, scales-as-armor version of itself. She’d also had a bag of other little stuffed toys. Even Digger Downs had dropped his comments about wild card daycare. Jonathan was willing to put even money she’d make the cut.

Jetman finished his presentation to polite applause, and the blond—John Fortune—appeared at Jonathan’s side.

“Jonathan Hive?” Fortune asked.

“That’s me.”

“Okay, you’re up next. We’re going to be filming from cameras two and three,” he said, pointing at a couple of the many setups in the stadium. “The judges all have monitors up there, so if you have the choice, it’s better to play to the cameras than the people.”

“Great,” Jonathan said, mentally remaking his presentation. “Okay, yeah. Thanks.”

“No trouble,” Fortune said.

“Any other advice?”

Fortune looked serious for a moment. He was a good-looking kid, but maybe a little lost around the eyes.

“You’re the guy who turns into wasps, right? Okay, the guy on camera two is really afraid of bees, so anything you want to do up close to the lens, go for camera three.”

“And that one’s camera three?”

“You got it,” Fortune said. Jonathan redid his routine again.

“Cool. Thanks.”

Jonathan took a deep breath, rose to his feet, and walked forward to the clear area that Jetman had vacated. Jonathan nodded to the judges, flashed a smile at the other aces, and stepped out of his loafers. The grass tickled the soles of his feet.

“Anything you’d like to say? No? Well, then, when you’re ready,” Topper said.

It felt like breathing in—the comfortable swelling of the chest and rib cage—but it didn’t stop. His body widened and became lighter; his field of vision slowly expanded. Distantly, he could feel his clothes drop through where his arms and legs had been. A couple bugs were tangled up in them, left behind like nail clippings.

Jonathan rose up above the crowd, seeing them all at once through hundreds of thousands of compound eyes. Hearing their voices even over the hum of his wings. He had no particular form now, and the joy of flying, the freedom of his swarm-shaped body, thrilled and vibrated in him. He hadn’t really cut loose in days. He had to focus and think about his routine. He brought his multiform attention to bear on the crowd, picked a woman sitting in clear view of camera three who looked game, and sent a tendril of wasps to her. When they landed on her lap, he could see her stiffen, and then as he moved the tiny bodies to spell out words, relax slightly.

It is okay. Do not be scared.

He covered her in a bright green, crawling ball gown, then burst back up into the air and sped to the end of the stadium and back, circled around, and then it was time for the grand finale. It was hard to consciously form his body, and his kinesthetic sense was fairly rough, so he sent a couple wasps to sit on top of camera three and concentrated on the view through their eyes.

Slowly, carefully, he adjusted the swarm into a smaller, tighter, angrily buzzing mass. When the insects were thick enough to block the daylight, he moved. It was like dancing and also like trying to balance a pencil. The swarm that was his flesh took shape—huge, floating, ill-formed letters. EAT AT JOE’S.

He took the swarm back to his fallen clothes, the insects crawling into the spaces within the cloth and pushing gently out to allow another few wasps in and then more and more as the bugs congealed again into flesh. He was tired and exhilarated. He took a bow to the polite clapping. The judges asked a couple of questions—yes, the wasps could sting; there were around a hundred thousand wasps in the swarm; yes, if he flew through insecticide, he would get viciously ill. Digger Downs called him Bugsy, the Harlem Hammer asked about his blog (an extra couple thousand hits if that made it to the final cut), and it was over. He walked back to his seat on the benches.

“Nice,” Joe Twitch said.

Someone gently tapped Jonathan’s shoulder. The woman he’d volunteered for his demonstration. She looked different, now that he could only see her from one angle at a time.

“Hey,” Jonathan said, smiling.

“Hey.” She had a nice voice. Sexy. “Jonathan Hive? That’s what you call yourself? Well, Bugsy, if you ever try to feel me up like that again, I’ll kill you. Okay?”

The woman’s hand vanished in a burst of concentrated flame like a blowtorch and then popped back. She smiled, eyes hard, nodded once, and went back to her seat.

Jonathan turned back to Joe Twitch.

“Oops,” Twitch said.

“Yeah. Oops,” Jonathan agreed.

“You get that often?”

“What? Death threats?”

“Bugsy.”

“Oh, that. Yeah.”

ANA delves deep. Stone and soil, clay and sand, they’re all putty in her hands. She’s the

KATE’s the all-American girl with the all-American arm. She’ll zip it past you or throw it through you. Nobody can hit

MIKE’s large, he’s loud, he’s pierced, he has six arms and attitude to spare. He’ll rock you and he’ll roll you. Let’s hear it for

Keep your green thumb, JERUSHA has ten green fingers. Mighty oaks spring up from tiny acorns at her command. Here she is, the

JONATHAN bugs out at the first sign of trouble, but he still packs a nasty sting. He’s

T.T. walks the high steel and builds them strong and straight. He’s tough, he’s tall, and he takes no crap off nobody. He’s

Seeing isn’t believing when ANDREW is around, so best not believe your eyes or your ears or your nose. Only the tail is real with

BUFORD hails from down the swamp. Some say he’s just a good ol’ boy, but he’s got him one mean tongue. Folks go green when they see

JAMAL takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Shoot him, stab him, burn him, and he’ll be back for more. No one can stop the

The best-laid plans develop hiccups when PAUL’s around. He makes men cry “Gesundheit,” and women cry “Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes!”

PEARL knows all the secrets of the sea, and speaks the language of the dolphins and the whales. Go deep with

TOM soars above his ancient lands on proud, strong wings, watching, guarding, remembering. Look, up in the sky, it’s

HALEY floats like a butterfly and hits like a piledriver. Light as a feather in the wind, hard as a ton of steel, that’s our

THADDEUS will knock you down, roll over you, and save your soul. Cry hallelujah, brother, and pray you don’t get in the way of the

That girl CLEO gets around. Pop, she’s here, pop, she’s there, pop, she’s just behind you. Watch out for

RACHEL has the bestest collection of stuffies anywhere. They’re all so soft and cute and cuddly, just like the

An iron man from the Iron Range, WALLY has steel in his fists and a furnace for a heart. Rust never sleeps and neither does

The KING is the mystery man from down along the border. Where is he from? What can he do? Who dares to look beneath the mask of

There’s never a loser when ROSA deals the cards. Diva or demon, snake or lion, even death itself, they’re all in the hands of

ALI likes to dust things up. The girl has got a little devil in her. From the land of Elvis and the Living Gods comes

JOHN burns bright by day and night in half a hundred hues. Let those who hide in darkness cower, and beware the light of

MICHELLE is always blowing bubbles, but best not stand too close when they start bursting. She’s

HOWARD is the man that Jetboy would have been. He’s seen The Jolson Story, but his own tale is just beginning. Make way for

IVAN is full of surprises. Like Mother Russia, the more you pound on him, the more you have to deal with. He’s

MEGAN was dirt-poor growing up, but now she’s learned to shine. A regular diamond in the rough is our

JOE be nimble, Joe be quick, Joe can snatch your candlestick. You better bring your best game if you want to go one-on-one with

EMILY is the fastest grrl on wheels. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss her whizzing by. There, that’s her, that

Don’t you dare call RAJ handicapped. His servants wouldn’t take kindly to it. Step aside and clear a path for