Flyover City! A Novel (with Superheroes)

9. The No-Good, Very Bad Day

Through the window outside my cubicle, the sky is that bright, vivid gray that it turns just before it's about to snow. The only thing brighter in the whole world is the fluorescent light above my desk, buzzing with its eternal, dull flicker. I can't decide which is irritating my hangover more.

I got an email first thing this morning to schedule a one-on-one with my "team leader" after lunch. The fact that it's such short notice is a bad sign, and right now, I'm in no shape to deal with him even under the best of circumstances. Tim is one of those guys for whom middle-management represents a Platonic ideal. He reads Vaig stock quotes like they were scripture. If you were to meet him at a party, and you asked him what he does for a living, he wouldn't say he's a "manager", he'll actually use the words "team leader".

I kid, I kid. Tim doesn't get invited to parties.

So I'm killing some time, catching up on the news over at

SecretID.net. Apparently, Scott Tanner (The ex-Vanguardian) has vanished from the face of the earth. Everybody's got a theory as to what's happened to him, everything from "murder at the hands of his enemies" to the conspiracy freaks, who maintain that the Agency "expires" any outed members. Myself, I subscribe to the relocation theory. Low altitude flight and mid-level telekinesis are pretty standard issue powers; it's not like having to create a new alias for Centrifuge, or Holo (The Living Light!). So why knock off a perfectly good hero?

Just think of it: you go to bed one night with a pretty good sense of who you are, and what you've got going on, only to wake up the next morning to find your whole entire world has changed. Can you imagine it?

***

Last night: Spliff and I meet for bowling, just like we have every week for the last 5 years. Except that this week, it gets moved to Wednesday. It used to be one of those things you could always count on. Guys night. Just the two of us. But then, I started bringing Gwen along, as you do, when you're in a new relationship; but then Spliff invites fucking Kyle, and before you know it, the spirit, the integrity of the whole thing is diminished. And now, Gwen's invited a couple of her friends from work to tag along. Doesn't she realize that I've got my very own secret identity to protect? From my family, and the customers I talk to on the phone, and sure as hell from my coworkers? And God damn it, I just wish they'd extend that same courtesy to me. It's like that episode of Leave it to Beaver, when June asked the Beav's teacher over for dinner, and he got all freaked out when the whore showed up wearing open-toed shoes.

So here we are: Me, Spliff, Gwen, Corrine (Assistant Loyalty Retention Team Leader) and Bethany (Human Resources? Are you kidding me?) Which means I've got to deal with the ridiculous interpretation of "smooth" that Spliff affects whenever there are new females in the vicinity. With each turn, he strides confidently up to the lane, all zen archer posturing. Except he's "doing" when he's supposed to be "not-doing", which means his ball invariably winds up right in the gutter.

Corrine alternates between talking with Gwen and sending text messages from her cell phone, presumably looking for something better to do. Bethany is stone drunk by 8:30 pm, doing that thing that (admittedly) attractive women do, when they find themselves out with guys like us: making comments that she would totally have to fill out a file on herself for, if we were at work. And - she's actually flirting with Spliff, firing off signals left and right, so confident in her extreme level of hotness, that she's sure Spliff understands that he has absolutely no chance in hell with her.

She'll learn.

On the bright side, Gwen is being unusually affectionate with me. The term, I believe, is "mooning over". She brags to Corrine about me being a "writer", which I would find terribly embarrassing, overkill, even, if it didn't kind of turn me on.