It was almost a physical sensation, the change in her tone when I called her. “’Seat of my Pants’”… and then after I told her who I was and why I was calling. “Oh thank Christ! I was having the shittiest of days. Thank you! Thank you!”
We arranged a convenient meeting time and she invited me to her office/loft-space.
“Just you and me?”
“Uh no,” she responded, “My business partner and camera guy, Dale K---- will be there too. Never know when you might need witnesses.”
On the day, she greeted me with a dry strong handshake. The wrinkles born of what I assumed were years of TV work deepened and yawned as she smiled and introduced her collaborator. Dale was swarthy lout whose camera-toting had lost him his muscular symmetry.
She turned down the volume on the Tom Jones duets and clapped her hands together. “That them?” She had spotted the manila envelope I had brought with me.
She looked to Dale and peeped a giddy little girl noise. I handed her the envelope.
She slid them out onto the coffee table’s glass top. They looked yellower in this light. With all of them leafed out like that, I could see the differences in pens used. Shades of blue, a couple of blacks and even the lacerated alarm of red.
She was about to scoop them, but stopped herself. “Oo, fingerprints!” And she went to the other side of her kitchen’s island and disappeared under the sink. Returning she wriggled on a pair of school-gum eraser pink dish-washing gloves.
“Impressive, huh? You’d never know I’m a CSI addict.”
Dale smirked and rolled his eyes. Then to me, “I swear she’s half detective. At CBC, you didn’t borrow her stapler without a hazmat suit on.”
I watched them quickly pour over the pages. She filled the auditory vacuum with questions like, “And you say you found them in the sleeves of a record collection?”, “Could you show us the house where they came from?” and ended on “Would you do us a huge favour?”
They wanted a sample of my handwriting, just so they wouldn’t look the fools. I complied amiably.
After writing a few paragraphs of “The lazy brown cartographer inked the fjords disparately and without enthusiasm…” I capped the pen she had lent me and went to collect the diary entries.
Her lips pursed instantly. Wrinkles radiating from her pucker drained the friendliness briefly, long enough to see her feral side.
“Oh, you’re not going to leave them with us?”
“I wanted to keep entering them on the blog.”
“Right, ok. Um.” Her eyes boring holes into the pages. If the sun had been behind her, her retinal lenses could have started them smoldering.
“Could we pay you for them?”
“Possibly,” I answered calmly. My hands had straightened the pages and slid them with a whisper back into the envelope. “Make an offer on paper and send it to me, and I’ll consider it.”
Desperately (pore-sized sequins of sweat had erupted on her upper lip), she posed, “How about, maybe we could copy them now? So we could see if they match up with what we’ve got on tape…?”
“The tape… Yeah, you can copy them. Could I have a look at the tape?”
She glanced at her camera man. He had nothing to add, so she finally proffered, “Ok, no copy, just…”
“No, I just want to have a look.”
So while she used the copying function of her fax/scanner/printer, Dale took me into a small room, a one-time den charred with briquettes of electronic video equipment, all of which seemed to trail one or more wires to a grail-esque pearlescent Apple laptop. It glowed like an angel waiting for us.
Dale roamed the mouse through various folders and finally double-clicked on a file with the dubious title of “Security Vid No edit”.
A new window sprouted, a giant blue Q flashed up and then there was a grainy black-and-white image dominated by the disappointing view of a sidewalk. “The front door security cam from an electronics shop.” Dale’s stub of an index finger drew my eye into the upper corner.
“Watch there.” It was a black rectangle that was the unlit space between two buildings. He pressed the virtual “Play” button. His finger kept pointing at the black rectangle. “Wait. Wait. Okay here it comes.”
The black rectangle went white three times. Blip and then blipblip. Each time highlighting the warbled brick pattern of the corner of the building. Like some alley-way hooker was trying to spark her crack pipe. Except far less dramatic and romantic.
I felt tremendous disappointment. “That’s it?”
“We think that was the gun fire you described. Guns don’t usually have muzzle flare, but if the slugs hit metal.
“Now wait for it…”
His finger and thick nail urged me to keep gazing in the same area. The dark rectangle seemed to ripple.
“He’s in the shadow. Looking to see if there’s any witnesses.” Dale’s voice trailed each word. He’d obviously watched each frame of this sequence many times. “Nobody there… Off it comes and he swings it down now.”
There it was.
That same horned skull, but mounted on some kind of helmet, rounder, a chin strap flapping akimbo. “26 frames and we knew it was the same skull on your blog.”
The foot, lower leg and the skull took a step and escaped the range of the camera. Dale backed it up to the least fuzziest blur of the skull. The tiny triangular shadows cast from the spines were what brought me there. The everyday street-lamp glare balefully shining down on something that had never before been lit. A demon taking off its calcified hat for a midnight stroll.
Her voice behind me was smug and gleeful. I could feel the eight-year old in her, sharing a glimpse of her Xmas morning with me. Stocking spewed chocolates in her breath. “It’s him, isn’t it?”
She gave me the diary entries, back in their manilla home. My hand imagined the weight of a bone and Kevlar helmet.
“You’ve read all of the entries, yeah?”
I nodded. My eyes still on the single stalled image on the laptop.
“We need a name for him. All super-heroes have names. He’s got a secret identity, an origin story, a costume… no cape unfortunately. But did he ever name himself?”
“Yeah,” Dale gruffed in eagerly, “Like, uh, Skull-man or the Revenger or something.”
I didn’t reply until the silence held us all too tightly.
“No, he didn’t call himself anything. No cape, no underwear on the outside of his leotards. In fact, he loathed what he became.”
She leaped on this with cannibalistic joy. “Really? Good, good. What did he say?”
I finally took my eyes off the laptop. Weirdly, I was all forlorn and a bit angry at these two people now. Stupid bullshit possessiveness. I had taken the glasses off Clark Kent and screamed “Look! It’s him!” And as everyone clustered around the reddening super man, I was pushed to the back of the crowd, and felt sorry for what I had done.
“You’ve got the diary now. It’s all in there.”
Without saying good-bye, I got up and left.
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