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The scars faded slowly – literally and figuratively.
They weren’t all from Dr. Moon’s torture. A lot of the marks on the Question were older than a few weeks – much older. Helena wormed the story out of him slowly, piece by piece: a few words over breakfast one morning, a few more lying in bed at night, the last bits falling into place one evening on a stakeout. How, before the Justice League, he’d gotten in too deep investigating a criminal ring that had been much bigger than he’d anticipated – one that went all the way up to the office of the mayor of Hub City. How he’d walked arrogantly into an obvious trap, knowing there was no lowlife thug he couldn’t handle … and how he’d been beaten nearly to death by the gang’s new hired hand, none other than Lady Shiva herself, and thrown into the river to rot. And then – how Shiva had saved him from the icy waters, to live and fight another day. “Why?” Helena had asked. “Why would she almost kill you and then save your life? What does she want from you?”
“Now that,” he had said, “is the question.” But then, Q said that about nearly everything.
Most of the time he kept the mask on, too; at his place or hers, even on the Watchtower. Not that they went to her place often, or for long. Her landlord had refused to let Q sweep the building for bugs, and Helena had refused to let Q put her lease in jeopardy to sweep the building without permission. “I’ll lose my security deposit!” she’d protested.
“Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.”
“That makes zero sense in context. And if you’re going to quote the Founding Fathers at me, you’re buying dinner tonight.” So they’d had Chinese at his place, which really wasn’t so bad when Q wasn’t ears-deep in a fresh conspiracy and if you left the windows cracked a little.
For a while she’d ragged on him for a name to go with that handsome face – who was the man behind the mask, exactly? But all queries to this effect were tidily sidestepped, swept under the well-worn rug of cornball theories and personality defects. “Come on, Q, fair’s fair! You know practically my life story, my whole biography – you probably know my third grade teacher’s social security number, for crying out loud.”
“I know your eight grade world history teacher’s social security number. But only because she’s involved in the plot to hide evidence of the Japanese moon landing.”
“What evidence?”
“Precisely.”
It didn’t take long for her to stop asking. A lot of people in the superhero community still put a great deal of stock in names, in private identities and personal lives, and hey: even if the Question’s personal life appeared to consist of a laptop computer and a few stacks of empty pizza boxes? If a name was the line he drew in the sand, Helena would toe that line. Besides, she was weird about some stuff too. Q had tried to suggest the role of the Gotham City educators’ union in a nationwide plot to increase sales of the Farmer’s Almanac. (It hadn’t gone over well, and Helena was pretty sure she could add her day job to the list of biographical data Q had on her, if it wasn’t there already.) So Q didn’t talk school conspiracies in front of Helena, and Helena contented herself with addressing notes to a punctuation mark instead of a person.
Not that she minded, particularly. She’d dated plenty of guys with names before. This one she liked, name or none. He had, as he was fond of reminding her, a certain eccentric charm.
###
Once bitten, twice shy.
Here were the things the Question liked about Helena Bertinelli; numbered according to the order in which he had thought of them and recorded them – mentally only, of course. Only idiots wrote down anything of import. Who knew where a physical list might end up? Nowhere good, that much was certain. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Q had been shamed before, oh yes. The list, though, where did it start …?
One – she listened.
For a man with no mouth, Q talked a lot. Yeti – secret alien invasions – the Loch Ness monster – the Illuminati – Project Cadmus. There was evidence for all of it, if you knew where to look. There just wasn’t time to do something about all of it. So Q prioritized, processed, deduced aloud (safer than writing it down. You couldn’t just write things down and expect they wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands.) And if there was someone else to listen, interpret, and redirect that processing – so much the better.
Two – the things she said mattered.
So much talk these days with so little value – there was reality TV and talk radio and a thousand newspapers not worth the paper they were printed on, and just here and there a voice worth tuning in to. And what she said mattered to him, yes, she was clever and well-educated (by a school no doubt operated by yet another agent of the New World Order, yes, but no one could be blamed for where they got their education); but what she said mattered to her, too. She talked about children and when she said the students she meant my students and there were words like hope and maybe and change that had perhaps been strangers to Q’s vocabulary for a long time now. She used words like that when she talked about other people but not about herself. When she talked about herself she used words like messed up and went wrong and what would my mother say, ha, wait, she married a Mafioso, so there you go, Ma; and she used the past tense and she didn’t smile. She was wrong about this, but lots of people were wrong about a great many things every day, and even if it was something rather important to be wrong about, this was Helena and she was very clever and very well-educated and also very young and had time to learn.
Three – gnocchi.
She’d said once, a throwaway thought, that her mother had made the best gnocchi on this side of the world. Q had done his due diligence investigating every Italian restaurant in Gotham’s Little Italy, compared notes against the part of Sicily that the Bertinelli family had come from and likely recipes to be passed down from a mother to her new daughter-in-law. Three weeks’ research – better safe than sorry. Once bitten, twice shy. And a night out, no masks, and the closest thing in Gotham City to Helena’s mother’s famous gnocchi.
Four – that smile.
Man cannot live on bread alone, especially not with the radioactive tracers the government put in “enriched” grain products to track our consumption. Or gnocchi, though this was also good. Man needed the Word, too, and for Q, it seemed, the Word was Helena Bertinelli leaning across the table at La Porta Bella and saying, “Thanks, doll.”
Five – the proper application of force.
A name. A name. For a few weeks she had pressured him for a name, and Q could neither provide her with one nor articulate the reasons why not. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a name he could call “his”, nor that he couldn’t have fashioned any number of false identities to slip into. The former fell somehow beyond his reach, and the latter – unthinkable. So she stopped asking that question, and asked instead, from time to time, that he take off the mask. This he could manage … for a spell. The world looked different without the mask: shoelaces were just shoelaces, tap water was just tap water. This was of course not thanks to any magical property of the mask, but rather to the man behind it. He knew this, and yet he still had to put the mask back on, sooner or later. And Helena was happy enough with this, to spend time with a man instead of a mystery for an hour or two, now and again, and she didn’t ask for more and he could give her no less.
Six – his wallet, fallen on the floor of La Porta Bella as he reached to pay the bill.
A stupid thing, really. What congruence of factors – the slip of his fingers, the tug of gravity, the crack in the wood flooring – had conspired to let the thing bounce to a rest between Helena’s feet instead of his own. There were names in there, or one name, specifically – Q didn’t carry credit cards, of course (not that currency wasn’t marked as well, but the quality of transponders wasn’t as good and probably didn’t carry a signal from inside a building) but there was the shiny piece of plastic that proclaimed a man with his face capable of operating a motor vehicle and that was enough to answer the question that Helena still carried in her eyes, if no longer on her lips. And Q held his breath, and she picked the wallet up, and she handed it across the table and she said, smugly, “Don’t think you’re going to get out of picking up the check that easily!” And that was the end of it – wasn’t it? Surely it was.
Seven – the day she walked into his apartment and said, without greeting, “One of my students is missing.”
###
The Question listened without interruption as Helena explained the situation. Annamaria was a foster kid, hadn’t been in class for a week and no one at the foster home could say where she’d gone. “Runaway,” they’d said. It happened with a lot of foster kids – it had happened with Helena once or twice, though she didn’t bring that up now. Annamaria had barely-average grades and not a lot of friends – she’d cut loose, so they said, taken off for New York or Los Angeles or somewhere else that teenage runaways went to watch their dreams die.
“That’s not it at all, Q. Annamaria worked hard for those C’s, and she didn’t hang out with the other kids because she didn’t want them to hold her back. She wants to get a job, a decent job, and get herself out of the life, and no one’s going to do it for her. She liked … she likes Pride and Prejudice.” Helena smiled in spite of herself. “And Twilight.”
The Question hadn’t moved a twitch yet. She looked over at where he was sitting, motionless at his laptop. “Well? What do you think, Q? You interested in the case? Or do you think I’m nuts like everyone else does?”
And like that, he was on his feet, cramming his hat on his head. “Looking into it,” he said, and the door to his apartment banged shut behind him.
“If you wait a minute I’ll suit up and join you!” she called after him, but there was no answer. She hadn’t handled that one well – kids were Q’s berserk button, same as her. She should’ve come caped-out, she supposed. Maybe she’d expected him to tut-tut her just as the school officials had. Or maybe she’d just hoped that. She’d have liked to think Annamaria had ended up somewhere better than inner-city Gotham, and to hear it from someone she –
– trusted –
- would have made all the difference.
She stood still in the aftershocks of that thought for a moment. Then she shook herself, put the pizza she’d brought in the refrigerator, and locked the door behind herself.
###
Four days later, she opened her own front door to find Q looming over her.
“Jesus!” was the first thing she said. “You smell like the bottom of a dumpster,” was the second. “Q – you okay?” was the third.
He answered her question with one of his own – typical. “When was the last time you slept?” He pushed past her without waiting for a reply, dropped onto her couch and fished a manila envelope out of his coat pocket.
“I … got a few hours last night.” Two was a few, wasn’t it? “Trying to chase down some leads on Annamaria at night, while still teaching a love of poetry and Gerund nouns to the other hundred and fifty pains in my ass that I see all day.” She frowned as he leaned forward to arrange the contents of the envelope on the coffee table in front of him. Photographs, scraps of newspaper, a Gotham street map. “Q … do you have something?”
“Warehouse on Thirty-Third street.” He jabbed a finger at the map. “Would’ve gone in myself already. But I need you.”
Helena was already moving toward her bedroom to get her costume. “Too many guards?”
“No. Too likely I’ll kill them.”
She stopped in the doorway, half in and half out. Her heart, a moment ago racing with adrenaline, had seemed to freeze to a halt in her chest. “It’s … that bad? And you think I’m going to restrain you?”
“Yes,” he said, very simply, very desperately.
His voice was raw, but she couldn’t see his face for the mask, for that damned mask. Where the hell had he been for the last four days? What had he seen? “Q, take the mask off. Just for a second.”
“No.” He stood abruptly, made his way to the door. “Go. Change. I’ll be in the hall outside. And hurry up.”
###
Time is not the linear A-to-B path as it is typically perceived.
For the rest of that day the Question perceived time as it truly was – a string of instants, domino stacks of branching timelines lined up one behind the other, where words like before and after had no real meaning, no more meaning than any word did, random scratches and noises construed by humans to have some greater sense where none existed.
Helena opening doors with a crowbar. Children straggling out. Q was just leaning against the wall, not helping, hardly helping at all, just collecting all the faces. Not helping. He’d been hit in the head, or maybe that was someone else. No excuse to just stand around. He lurched forward, picked up the youngest who was staggering aimlessly down the hall. She didn’t resist being lifted but once he had her in his arms she began to rain down blows, with her tiny fists, on his face and chest. He would have let her but Helena was there suddenly, and she said, “It’s okay, sweetheart,” and did she mean the child or him? And she took the child away from him and walked away, and they followed her down the hallway, the children, each and every one followed her out into the light as if she were the Pied Piper and they the children of Hamlin, being led back home at last.
Blood on the pavement – Helena’s? No. His. That was all right. They’d hit him with a crowbar and that had been unpleasant to say the least but Helena had the crowbar now and the attacker had a shattered kneecap. “Talk to me!” she shouted as she smashed the gun out of another guard’s hand with a Babe Ruth swing of the crowbar and he said through a ragged throat, “I’m fine. I’m fine,” and he thought he might mean it and he thought she might believe him.
Children. A great number of children. Two dozen? Three? He wondered which was Annamaria. Mostly girls, a boy here and there. The youngest couldn’t have been more than nine. Their faces blurred together. He’d been hit in the head – or someone had. Confused faces, tear-streaked, angry. He had worn many masks, been a man and a monster and a mystery, but somewhere deep down this had always been the face beneath them all - hadn't it? - that of a frightened, angry child.
Heavy breathing. His own? Looming over a man who was down, and bleeding, kneecapped and frightened. Q didn’t have a crowbar but it would have been easy, so easy, too easy, to lift him by the ears and bash his head against the pavement until it broke. Q reached down, grabbed him by the lapels, lifted him off the ground as he gibbered. A cry tore away his attention and broke his intent, but not the cry of the man whose throat he wanted to crush with his thumbs. “You’ll live,” Q said, and dropped him back to the ground as he took off across the pavement to grapple with the man who had Helena in a sleeper hold. His life for Helena’s – the most unequal of trades, but the moment was lost in the sea of possibilities and he would not come that close, too close, again today.
The mask peeled off and he stared up at Helena through his own uncovered eyes.
###
“No!” Q grabbed her wrist when she’d only gotten the mask half off. “Give it back!”
“Like hell I will.” Helena twisted her wrist so that it slipped out between his thumb and fingers, and the mask ripped the rest of the way away with the movement. “You’ve had blood dripping down your chin half the night. To say nothing of how much you were freaking the kids out – and me! – I’d like to make sure you didn’t lose any teeth.”
“Lost a mandibular second molar once. Wouldn’t let them put a filling in.”
“I bet.” She stuck two fingers in his mouth and levered it open. “Everything’s intact. I’m guessing you still won’t let me take you anywhere to get that head wound looked at?”
“I’m fine.”
“You keep saying that and I haven’t started believing you yet. You going to at least let me stitch it up?”
He nodded, jerkily. She left him sitting on the edge of his couch while she retrieved a needle and thread, the bottle of gin he kept behind one bedpost, and a lighter. He didn’t flinch when she washed the blood out of his hair or splashed the wound with gin or even when she held her breath and poked the needle through his skin. Instead he said, “We’re at my place.”
“Well, yeah.” She worked quickly – maybe she could finish up before his nerve endings decided to kick in and this got tricky. “It’s not like I can take you to mine. Besides, you wouldn’t go to a hospital. Or the Watchtower. You thought they might know you almost killed a guy and then they’d arrest you. Or maybe that was the Thought Police who were apparently after you tonight, too. You’ve been a little more erratic than usual the last little while, y’know.”
“I know.”
She cut the thread and dropped down onto the couch beside him. “You could’ve told me you were an orphan too, Q.”
His posture, already distant and formal, stiffened further. “I told you—?”
“I figured it out, genius.” She laid a hand on his shoulder, then withdrew it a moment later when he didn’t relax under her touch. “Somewhere in between the way you took off when I brought you the case and when the cops showed up and you lit into them about what kind of 'so-called parents' didn’t care where their kid ended up or what happened to her.” She pulled her legs up in front of her. She was still costumed up, but probably Q wasn’t going to care if she put her boots all over the couch. “It’s okay that you didn’t tell me. You don’t have to tell me stuff – you don’t have to tell me anything. I just don’t want you to think you can’t tell me. What happened to you. Who you – where you come from.” She glanced to her other side, found the mask lying limply on the cushion next to her. She picked it up and held it out to him. “Do you … need this back?”
Q stood abruptly, disappeared into the bedroom. Helena waited for a moment, listening for an indication of what he was up to or what the hell she was supposed to do now she’d put her foot in it again. When nothing was forthcoming, she got up too. “All right … night, Q. I’m going to call you every hour to make sure you’ve got a busted scalp and not a closed head injury.”
He reappeared at the bedroom door and strode back across the room to her. Not all the way to her – he left room in between them, leaning into the empty space but not quite bridging it. “I don’t have a name,” he said, not sadly or angrily, only by way of explanation, and he held out his hand.
She took what he offered her. A yellowed piece of paper, which she unfolded carefully to keep the well-worn seams from cracking: a birth certificate, detailing the natality of one Charles Victor Szasz, post-dated from weeks after the actual birth. And then a shiny piece of plastic, proclaiming one Vic Sage as possessing the right to operate a motor vehicle granted by the state of Illinois. “I don’t have a name,” Q repeated. “I have two. One they gave me at St. Catherine’s. One I gave myself. Not sure which one’s real.”
“Well …” She looked down at the two documents. “Which one do you like better?”
He shrugged.
“Well. Okay. Vic. Charlie.” She gently refolded the birth certificate, with the driver’s license wrapped up inside, and tucked both together into the breast pocket of his suit coat. “I’ve kind of gotten used to calling you ‘Q’, and you know what they say about old dogs and new tricks. Mind if I just carry on?”
He leaned forward, swayed, found balance with his head resting on top of hers. “I’m … extremely tired.”
She grabbed his hand with hers. “Too bad, babe, you’ve got a gaping head wound and at least twelve hours of consciousness lying ahead of you. Let’s go sit and you can tell me about how Sasquatch is behind the rise of monosodium glutamate.”
###
There were a great many things that Q liked about Helena Bertinelli. Someday perhaps he’d have to tell her some of them. For now it was good enough to number and re-number them for himself, until the dull ache of the day had receded into silence.
Eight – that smile. Had he already made note of that? Somewhere along the line he’d lost count. There was something about old dogs and new tricks but more importantly, yes, every dog had its day, and today, these days, were his.
Nine – excellent first aid skills. Very valuable in a pinch. Also a fundamental understanding of the dangers of MSG, a trait whose worth could hardly be overstated. That the pizza she retrieved from the fridge was most likely steeped in the stuff was a minor oversight that could certainly be overlooked given the circumstances.
Ten – for the second time in his life, a woman had pulled him back from the brink, and this time, at least, she had left no mystery as to why. There was something to be said – sometimes – for having the answers to go with the questions.