The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [2]
Superheroes
The kiddie playground of P.S. 179. Children toss and tumble, a maddened sea of screams and limbs, in the middle of which, high and dry, sits Ursula’s boss, Chas Lacouture. Atop the back of a cement dolphin. A good choice, the dolphin, she thinks. Better than the lion, the turtle, the orangutan. It goes with his sharkskin suit, pressed to a cold perfection beneath his trenchcoat. He looks more natural here than in his natural habitat, the rarefied crags of upslope office buildings, the blue-lit hallways and slate-gray conference rooms of the Black Tower. There he’s too perfect, a weathered masterpiece of brilliantined gray hair, pulsing jawline, and leathery skin. He doesn’t look like other men; he looks like their impossible expectations for themselves. But here he’s just another fantastic fixture. You’d almost expect the children to hurl rubber balls off him, the pigeons to settle on his massive shoulders.
As Ursula approaches, her fellow agent Javier Delreal sails down the main schoolyard ramp on rollerblades, waving to her as he circles through the kiddie playground’s entrance. He is just a little too tall and too thin for verisimilitude. He cuts ahead of her and slaloms around the playing children, his trenchcoat flapping behind him. Then he pirouettes neatly and hops up to a seated position on the dolphin’s back next to Chas, who, without looking at him, begins to speak.
“I saw a guy with a neck beard masturbating in a cybercafé,” he says curtly.
Ursula pulls herself aboard on Chas’s free side, the curvature of the dolphin’s back sliding her closer than she wants. Her fingers find the smooth spout hole between her legs. Its position strikes her as lewd, and a little neurotically she covers it up with her palm.
“I saw a sorority girl reading a book called Subcultures,” Javier responds. Even his head is tall and thin, bracketed by a high, bony forehead and a long, tapering jaw, as though his face were a rack designed to torture his elongated and slightly broken-looking nose. His skin is olive-colored, his hair is dark and frizzy, his eyes are hazel. She can’t begin to guess his ethnicity.
“I saw two fat men in black suits get into a pink Cadillac,” Chas says.
Javier flips through the pages of a notebook.
“In the last seven days I’ve seen twenty-nine people wearing shirts with images of anthropomorphic suns, and only two with anthropomorphic moons,” he announces.
“Astrological iconography,” Chas mutters, shaking his massive, square head. “The simpletons.”
He falls silent, retreating into the runes and cursives of his squint and furrowed brow. Meanwhile, Javier watches the children raptly, a hieroglyph of big nose and big, unblinking eye. Ursula feels that if she can ever manage to decipher the mind of either of these men, she just may begin to understand all the other things that currently baffle her: what her schizophrenic sister means when she says that fashions are messages from the future; why a pretty teenage girl lives in the park and wears primitive clothing and never speaks to anyone; how to dress for success; how to win friends and influence people; how to bring the system to its knees. . . .
Chas tocks his tongue five times, takes a breath.
“Kyle Dice from Nestlé called this morning.