mister x

Beate pulls her short, rabbit-fur jacket closed over a flat bead-board chest, crosses her arms. Her childlike fingers, hidden under her elbows, habitually stroke the soft, white fur. Honey-blonde hair, moments ago alive with winter static, now lies close to her scalp as though frightened. Her head resembles a tight, round melon. She peers over the counter at the nurse.

The nurse wrinkles her nose as if imagining white rabbit hairs floating in the air. She waves away an illusory bit of fluff.

“Name?”

“Wha...?”

The nurse puts her pencil down and leans forward to over-enunciate “Who are you here to see?” Beate, who’s not stupid, knows the nurse thinks she is.

Inside Beate’s head, Ivy whispers, She doesn’t think you’re stupid. She thinks you’re a retard.

“I...don’t...” Beate stammers. This was a mistake. She can’t believe she skipped out on Rick and left him to run the shop, put one foot in front of the other, took the number eleven and transferred twice to come all the way out here.

Ivy says, You gonna turn back now?

Beate blocks the sneer in Ivy’s voice and says, “Mister X. I’m here to see Mister X.”

In a pile of comics in her room at home lies a first edition, in a plastic sleeve, where Mister X made his debut. Mister X: Marvel supervillain. Mister X can read his opponents’ minds during a fight by using his powers of telepathy. He sees his opponents’ moves in advance and can stay one step ahead at all times. Since his only superpower is telepathy and not strength, he’s worked hard to master every form of combat and to build the strength he does have to the highest level possible. Even though he’s a villain, Beate sees the possibility for good in him. She fantasizes that Mister X will use his powers of telepathy to see her and do just one act that will redeem him: save her. He is, by far, her favourite Mister X.

A faint tune plays in the shadows, and he can’t quite put his finger on what it might be. The swirling vortex somewhere behind him blocks him from hearing it clearly. He cranes his neck first to the right and then to the left, and still the mystery remains a vague impression at the periphery of his perception. He imagines the vacuum-like sound coming from a huge, sucking black hole. He keeps his body tense to prevent falling in. A voice calls out out from the void one cryptic word: misdirects. He wonders if it’s God.

He’s in a private room. Beate can hardly look. She’s seen a lot of things in her sixteen years, but nothing like this. She puts her hand to her face, smells the baby powder scent that reminds her of taking care of Momma. The smell makes her want to vomit.

This isn’t him, Ivy declares. Ivy. I.V. Internal Voice. Beate hates her and yet can’t get along without her.

Beate gazes at Mister X through squinted eyes. If he would open an eye, wink at her in his way that suggests they share a delicious secret, then she’d know. But his eyes are fluid-filled and swollen shut, purple. They remind her of cartoon black eyes, the kind Fred or Barney might slap an enormous red steak over. A respirator moves his chest up and down, tapping out a flat tuneless beat.

Blood is caked under his nails; the knuckles of his right hand are cut and scabbed over. Ivy laughs at Beate for trying to be quiet. You can’t wake him. He’s in a COMA. Beate stands close on his left side, afraid to touch him. She looks at his hands because she can’t look at his face. Closed head injury. Blunt trauma. The nurse’s words loop in her head. Tentatively she puts her hand out, softly traces the place on his wrist where she imagines a tan mark from his wristwatch lingers. She already knows the watch has been stolen along with all his other possessions: jacket, boots, wallet, ID, jewellery. She shivers to think of him alone and cold in the February night after he left her place. Her fingers dig into the fur of her jacket.

She read once about a spy called Mister X. He was an anonymous French agent in the XYZ Affair. Three agents – X, Y, and Z – were sent by France’s foreign minister to offer a cleverly veiled insult to American envoys attempting to resolve a diplomatic dispute. The anonymous French agents, X, Y and Z, were later vilified by the Americans. They went down in infamy. Beate prefers the idea of infamy, as a concept, over fame. It seems much more realistic.

He lies flat to anchor himself and plants his cheek next to earth as soft as black velvet. The faint liquorice scent reminds him of another time, twenty years earlier, a time when the sounds were similar, swirling patterned but indistinct, a time in the womb when his mother compulsively ate the fresh dug loam from beneath the poplar tree, searching for hidden deposits, nutrients, iron, elements from the mother of us all to nourish the life inside her belly. He’s tasted dirt before and knows it to be scattered through with love. His fingers dig, and the velvet ground gives way.

Talk to him. He can hear you, Ivy prompts.

“I waited for you,” Beate whispers, close to his ear.

She’s close enough to see the individual black hairs pop out of his scalp as if they’ve been tidily sewn in. She remembers the dolls she owned when she was a girl and how one by one she cut their hair down to the scalp with the kitchen scissors, made them all ugly, the same as she felt. Their root-hole riddled heads were like an accusation until she stuffed them under her bed, out of sight. When Momma found them, Beate blamed Ivy, but even so, she got the belt, Ivy reduced to a silent accomplice. Beate sees a crust of dried brown blood inside the rim of his ear as if he’s a pie that’s overflowed its dish.

She can’t think of anything else to say, so she repeats, “I waited for you, Mister X.”

Another Mister X, also known as Avenger X, is a first-rate thief – suave, daring and a master of disguise. In a classic B movie from the ‘60s, Mister X becomes Avenger X to clear his own name after he’s set up for a murder he didn’t commit. Avenger X takes on several disguises, uses lots of clever gadgets and encounters more than his share of action. Avenger X is in love with a beautiful woman, his sidekick in crime. Beate will force Momma to let her put on the tape tonight and watch it again. But Momma can be prickly about her TV.

Beate can see Rick is relieved when she returns to her post on the stool behind the glass counter at the pawn shop. He’s uncomfortable dealing with what he calls “the riffraff” – the scammer who sells his girlfriend’s stuff, the druggie who pawns grandma’s wedding rings, the single mom whose kids scrap in the car while she pawns their TV for McDonalds and says she’ll be back for it on “cheque day.”

TV sets line up like rag-tag soldiers on the grey metal shelving, where they wait to be either retrieved or forsaken. One small television sits at Rick’s end of the counter bleating out game show music, news and soap opera drama day after day.

Beate’s not like Rick; she sees people differently, sees through the thick layer of crappy life chances and bad luck to the cores of the people they might have been once. She’d be the first to admit she has to scrape pretty hard to find even a glimmer of a long-forgotten innocence in some of them, but usually, eventually, she does.

She saw it right away in Mister X.

Each of his organs works inside his body. One by one, he enumerates them: lungs, heart, kidneys, spleen, stomach, brain. His organs work together as a whole in neat tandem with one another to contribute to the rhythm of the earth under his chest. Heart skips a beat to tell brain, There’s something about this girl, the soft one with the baby powder smell. Brain’s too busy now to listen. His breath slows to keep time, and the faint tune from the shadows is subsumed in the operation of his lungs and the deep inhale – exhale of Mother Earth. In his attempt to get closer to her, he stuffs his mouth with dirt.

The day after Beate’s visit to the hospital, a young woman, no more than twenty, comes into the shop with a jangle of the door. The woman approaches Beate and slips a man’s watch from her wrist and lets it clatter to the scarred counter. Of course, Beate recognizes it right away. It’s a decent watch. Beate remembers selling it to Mister X – part of his careful dance around her. He wanted her to notice him, didn’t want to scare her off. The woman handles the watch confidently, carelessly. Beate turns it over to make sure it’s the same one. It’s warm from the woman’s skin. Iron brown specks like rust mark the stainless plate on the back. She scrapes one away with her nail. She avoids the girl’s eyes. Ivy chides, Stupid, and Beate wonders if this girl heard Mister X’s last words and, if so, what they were.

“Sell or pawn?” Beate asks.

“Sell.”

“Got ID?”

The girl tosses a battered card onto the counter. Beate examines the picture, fills out a form.

Her least favourite Mister X: Vortex Comics’ human quasi-hero. Gaunt, mysterious and trench-coated, he makes his “living,” such as it is, working as a private eye. He takes sleep-restrictive drugs to stay awake twenty-four hours a day so he can stalk the streets of dystopia looking for answers. Beate gives him credit for trying.

When Beate finally agreed to go out with him, it was the end of summer. He took her to the fair, the exhibition. They rode the merry-go-round and he jumped from horse to horse; he rode backwards and looked into her face, trying to make her laugh while his eyes danced like shiny black coals. After, when he walked her home, all the way over the bridge and through the dark streets, he held her hand like it was the most natural thing to do, as though they did this every day. Beate wouldn’t let Ivy say a thing.

They passed a group of boys, who called out “Chink,” unprovoked, then, “Indian,” as if they were guessing.

He laughed and said to Beate, “Yeah, I’m the missing link in the Bering Strait theory.” Beate laughed too, partly because it was funny, what he said about the Bering Strait theory, and partly because it was true, he did look kind of ambiguous.

After that he swung her arm with his between them, still holding her hand, as though the encounter had put him in a good mood. His step was light.

Outside her house, she could tell he wanted her to invite him in. That’s when Ivy finally piped up, alarmed. You can’t take him in there. Are you crazy? Of course Ivy was right. He kissed her on the lips before she ran inside.

Misdirects. The word comes to him on a sweet platform of baby powder scent that makes him calm and happy inside, reminding him of a girl, his girl. Frustrated that he can’t crack the code, the whispered word that comes to him through the sucking, humming, heart-beating noise, he reaches deeper into the reliable pocket of earth to bring her close in an extended bear hug. He puts out his hand to stop the noise, turn it down, but he has no effect. It’s broken, he sobs inside his chest and knows he’ll never escape the din. Misdirects comes the secret word again to remind him how his mother whispered comfort in his ear when all else raged around them, underneath the poplar tree, a sanctuary.

Beate’s marked her calendar – it’s been almost two weeks. They only ever did it the one time, out back, between the falling-down shed and the falling-down fence, where the overgrown autumn olive looked as if it would, any minute, push the fence clean over with a spindly finger. It was cold, February-cold, but the structures that surrounded them gave shelter from the wind and made it bearable. When he came close and kissed her, Beate held her breath.

“It’s okay,” he whispered in her ear.

She pressed her body into his and welcomed his warm hand, sliding up her back. His fingers left a trail of fire up her spine, over her ribs, across her belly and down her hip. She helped him undo her clothes, then his. With her back against the shed, he pushed inside her, still with his mouth on hers.

“It’s okay,” he breathed into her mouth.

“Okay,” she repeated and bit his lip. The whole time she half expected to hear Momma’s gravelly voice demand to know just what she thought she was doing. But Momma could never leave the house, could never haul herself over the doorstop, down the back porch steps and across the patchy weeds covered in snow. Momma couldn’t even lug herself to the bathroom anymore. These were the things Beate thought about that one time.

Later, Ivy couldn’t stop laughing at her.

He leaves the vortex behind to move closer to the earth. He sees through to the centre: a place within the musical hiss and click. No longer afraid of the rhythm, he instead seeks it out, the swirl and hum, the beat of life, the sound that’s now a part of his existence here, in the dark, his cheek next to Mother Earth. He longs, to the point of tears, to fill himself with the sound and feel of the fluid heartbeat from the centre of the womb.

After that one time, Beate waited for him to come back. She waited at the pawnshop. She looked more often out the window at home. Momma’s breathless voice scalded the back of her neck. “What the hell’s (breathe) gotten into you (wheeze), girl? Didn’t you hear (breathe) me say (wheeze) to bring the bucket?”

Ivy called her a retard and ran away.

The television is Momma’s only friend in the same way Ivy is Beate’s. One night, after ten days of waiting, the continuous background noise of the television broke into Beate’s thoughts. Local newscast. The police – asking for public help to identify a man. Found. Unconscious but alive. Possibly Asian, said the reporter.

Chink. Indian, Ivy chided.

Missing link. Beate knew he was a half-breed. Métis.

Day after day, the news reported on the search for someone who could identify him, and Mister X took on a certain curious infamy. That was when she went to see him.

Mister X: In the Uniform Case Naming Guidelines, Mister X is a legal term used to refer to an unknown or anonymous person. The guidelines exist so that cases can be referred to and looked up with relative ease. A fictitious name or set of initials may be used, such as Jane Doe or Mister X. Mister X can also be referred to as Personne anonyme. Unnamed person. To her, he’s not unnamed. To her, he is Mister X.

Earth runs through his fingers like fine beads, jewels, treasure. He’s a little boy again discovering the rich black earth beneath the poplar tree where his mother looked into his eyes and shared the gift of sight. She is the precious dirt he caresses in his hands. His mother is earth. She speaks to him without words, and he listens without mortal ears. Her message soothes and humbles him. He takes her hand and steps into the circle.

As Beate fills out the form for the young woman to sell the watch, the local newscast from Rick’s TV cuts through her thoughts.

“The man, known only as Mister X, has died.” Beate’s pen stops moving; she listens intently to the newscaster’s thick voice. His slight pause just before saying “has died” make his words sound at once both dramatic and sad. “Police continue to appeal to the public for clues to his identity. The coroner is expected to call an inquiry.”

Beate doesn’t look up, either at the girl or the TV. Time stands still as Beate pauses over the form. Her hand shakes. She wonders who this woman is in relation to Mister X, what she knows. Still, she can’t bring herself to look into the woman’s eyes and see.

What now? Ivy sneers. You’re not gonna cry, are you? Beate’s pen moves again.

“I’ll give you fifty,” Beate says without looking up. She feels the woman’s posture brighten.

“Sixty,” the woman demands. Beate knows the woman would be lucky to get thirty, max, at any other shop on the street. Beate sold it to Mister X for fifty. Reaching into her pocket for her own money, Beate steals a glance at the woman, who taps her fingers impatiently on the glass and checks on her ride parked by the curb.

Say something, Ivy hisses.

Beate hands over the money, watches through the window as the woman gets in the waiting car, a young man in a ballcap at the wheel.

Beate slips the watch into the front pocket of her jeans, where its heft spoons into the cleft under her hipbone. A transparent tadpole listens with a keen inner ear for a reliable tick-tock that comforts like a third heartbeat.

Now you’ve done it, Ivy says.