Action Figures
By Mark Bourne. Short story originally published in Realms of Fantasy, Oct. 2002. Distribution in any form without written permission from the author is forbidden.

      From the 55th floor of a high-rise construction project, the city is a 3-D maze of steel and glass and traffic.
      Thirty seconds after the 6 o'clock whistle blares, Tony Ottavino has already secured the welding tools and signaled to Carello down on 50 to bring them down. Time to knock off for the day. It may be July and hot as hell down on the streets, but up here with the birds and the view, the breeze is strong and cool. Tony unwraps a Butterfinger bar, carefully folds the wrapper before placing it in his pocket, and sits on an I-beam next to Frank Stropaugh, who, 55 stories above the streets, stares out into empty space toward downtown.
      Tony watches Frank's eyes move left, then right, then up, down, and back up again, tracking. Tony looks with him, then sees what Frank sees. "Oh," he says. "Huh." Frank just keeps staring. Frank is like that.
      After about three minutes, Tony points toward where they're looking and says, "My kid did a report about him in school last week. My daughter, Jennifer, you met her. She says he's six-foot-four, has black hair, turquoise eyes like Barbie's, and always tells the truth. Ain't that the cutest thing?"
      As if snapping out of a trance, Frank turns and says in that way he has, "You're full of shit. He's six-foot-six, can change his eye color just by thinking about it, and isn't bound by your narrow definition of morality."
      "Ooooh. There you go again with your new college book crap. I'm just sayin' what my kid said she learned in school is all. I tell ya, from up here I feel like I could fly and bend steel bars between my teeth and save whole towns from, y'know, hurricanes and shit. Yeah. But y'know, he's not really anything special. When you get right down to it, where it really counts, he's just a guy like me and you."
      "He's an alien. From another planet. He's plenty different from you."
      "That ain't what I'm talking about," Tony says. Frank is a good guy, but sometimes he comes off real snotty. He goes to some community college at night and sometimes puts on airs. He's 41, but he works out and still has the kind of good looks that women like. Always did, to hear him tell it. Sure can handle an arc welder, boy.
      Tony shakes his head and laughs.
      "What?" says Frank.
      "Don't that knock the shit out of them monsters-from-space movies. He looks like us. No tentacles or one eye or shit. My daughter, she watches that E.T. video every time she's at my place. Now look at that guy. Does he look like E.T.? No sir, not a bit. Looks like you and me. You see Independence Day? That Will Smith is pretty good. Don't like Jeff Goldblum, though."
      "How come?"
      "You know. He's too . . . I don't know. Just never worked for me, is all. Always plays the same character."
      Frank nods. "I heard he fucked Geena Davis."
      "Who, him?"
      "No, Jeff Goldblum."
      "Jeff Goldblum was married to Geena Davis, Professor."
      "No shit?"
      "No shit. So yeah, they probably fucked once or twice." Tony likes that he called Frank Professor. You know, to show the uppity son of a bitch. Tony bites off a dangling chunk of Butterfinger goodness. "She's too skinny for me."
      "Geena Davis."
      "Yep. I like 'em big enough to hang onto."
      Frank smirks. "She'll be sorry to hear it." He laughs and Tony laughs with him.
      Tony finishes his candy bar and wipes his hands on his pants. "Now he's tall."
      "Who?"
      "Jeff Goldblum."
      "Oh. Uh huh." Frank's eyes follow a purplish streak above the river docks. "Makes you wonder."
      "What?"
      "If there were any black people on his planet."
      "Whose planet?"
      "Who the fuck do you think? Or Asian types. Or even what religion he is. I mean, to us he's like some kind of god or something. So what's God like to him? Or is he an atheist? And if he's an atheist, is he really the kind of all-powerful being we want being taught to our children in school? The waters run deep once you stir them."
      "The waters, Frank, are full of shit." Tony cocks his head toward the flying figure silhouetted against the sky. "Him? Heh. He's probably Jewish. Wouldn't that be a kick in the balls, huh?"
      
      
      From the wall-sized picture window in a condo on the 40th floor of a high-rise apartment building, come Sunday night the view of Fourth of July fireworks over the East River will be splendid. Nicole says to herself: It'll be a damn shame to miss that. The view down Broadway has Nicole thinking about Lego towers and, what with all those cars ant-marching in 6 PM gridlock, a science video she saw in fourth grade. Turning thirty in three weeks and four days, she hasn't thought of those things in, like, twenty years. She doesn't know why she's thinking of them now. Especially now.
      The condo used to belong to Nicole's father. When his cancer finally took him, he left what he called his "summer cottage" to her. More, she suspected, out of guilt than of genuine fatherly love. It was a token salve, an attempt to heal physical wounds that vanished long ago, and nonphysical ones that hadn't. She never visited her father in the hospital. By that time it was far too late for him to decide to become her hero.
      Late afternoon sun hits the mirrored surfaces of high-rises throughout the midtown district. A quarter mile to the east, a new office building is going up. The construction crew started work last fall, using explosives to bring down the old warehouse that had been there forever. Nicole has already forgotten what the warehouse had looked like. Now the new building is 53, 54, 55 stories tall, higher than where she's standing looking out the window. Girders like bones are being manipulated into position. Some jut out into empty space far above the streets. She can barely make out the shapes of two men sitting on the girders. They are big men, but they look tiny from this distance. One of them is good-looking in a rugged sort of way, tanned and muscular from working outdoors. His hands are large and rough, with a scratchy callous on the right palm.
      There hasn't been a cloud in the sky all day and it's hot. Nicole unbuttons the top of her powder blue Saks blouse. Sure, the air conditioning is on, but it's hot anyway. She stares out the window another moment, then loosens another button. Her right bra strap bites into her shoulder, so she pulls it down toward her elbow. Her bra is that nice peach one she bought at a Victoria's Secret in an instant of impulse. She had walked in front of the Victoria's window display on Broadway six times before going in. Coming out, she felt her heart beat so hard she had to stop and press her forehead against the wall outside the store. Now she's wearing that nice peach bra in her late (ha) father's condo, and it's hot, and she loosens another button.
      Outside, a moving flash of color catches her attention. In the middle distance, among skyscrapers that had been the tallest in the world back in the '30s, or was it the 40s?, a man-sized bullet circles and darts and dives among the steel and glass and traffic, doing what he's done for so long that Nicole rarely notices him anymore.
      
      
      From the tiny "balcony" of the tenth-floor apartment, the former Patricia ("not Patty") Dabrowski looks west across the river into the city's famous skyline. For months now she's been watching a high-rise going up, girders like toothpicks being swung into place, the pinpoints of arc welding like tiny suns. Patricia has lived here enough years she can name every one of those skyscrapers. From the inner boroughs you can tell the weather or the purity of the air by how visible the windows are on those clean and gleaming façades. A little ways beyond the construction site, a high-rise apartment building glows golden and silver in the 6 P.M. summer sun.
      In her left hand hangs a cigarette, more ash than paper. With her right she raises a glass of Scotch — the good stuff, from the "private stock" her husband won in a bet and hides in his bottom dresser drawer. The bottle she's forbidden to open. She raises the glass, looks over its rim, finishes her third round. Ice a half-hour old rattles, and through the glass's bottom the city skyline goes all wavery and distorted and melty.
      She puts the glass down next to the potted plants and tosses the cigarette over the railing. She watches it fall, watches it carried on a breeze half a block before landing on the sidewalk near the liquor store. Patricia turns, supports herself on the sliding door's frame, and steps back into the apartment. The air conditioning is still out so the place is hot and smells like socks.
      Should she fix another drink, or wait a while before finishing off his precious bottle? It's Friday so he'll be home his regular time unless he stops to talk or have a beer before catching the subway. She looks at the clock above the couch. 6:05. There's time.
      In their bedroom she puts on her favorite fancy dress, the one she keeps in the thin plastic wrap from the dry cleaners so it doesn't get all dusty in the closet. It's burgundy with black trim, just enough classy and just enough sexy. She used to feel so good in that dress. Now she looks in the dresser mirror and loathes the fat woman staring back at her. Sometime over the past twelve years, she can't figure out exactly when, this fat woman replaced the former Patricia Emily Dabrowski.
      She remembers what it feels like to be in love. She read in a magazine that falling in love was exactly like being hit by a bus: It happens when you're not looking and afterwards you either go to heaven or end up in a body cast eating whipped shit through a straw. She thought that was funny at the time. She's realized that somewhere during the past twelve years, when she wasn't paying attention, she got moved out of heaven and put into that body cast.
      She smoothes the dress against her body with her hands, feeling beneath the fabric every curve of flab along the way. She's a cow. It's amazing she can still fit into the dress at all. With age she's gone soft, all loose-fleshed and pale. It's normal, it happens to everyone, it happens to everyone. She hates her thighs most of all. Dimpled and pasty. Like bread dough. To think she wanted a baby through those thighs. It wasn't her fault she couldn't. What would she look like now if she'd done that?
      It's easy to remember why she fell in love with him. He had strength, both the inner type as well as the outer type. He was quiet, which she always took as a sign of inner depths. He wasn't rich, but she never had a chance to know what that might be like anyway. She had been alone and lonely and years of therapy had not changed that.
      Somewhere along the way she has failed him. He says so every time he tells her she needs to lose weight, every Wednesday night when he comes home after midnight smelling of that other woman's cunt. Not that he's been able to be a man in their bed anyway. He hasn't gotten it up for ten months, ever since that trip to the bank he still refuses to talk about.
      Patricia rubs her red-rimmed eyes with a wrist that she notices is puffy and veined, then goes back to the living room. The dress makes a whoosh-whoosh sound with her footsteps. She thinks of her senior prom twenty-five years ago. Bobby Reyerson had gone with her. He told her she was beautiful and she let him feel her breasts. Wonder what happened to him. That new young clerk at the market has eyes for her, that's for sure. Lately she responds to his subtle flirting by flirting right back. What would the bastard think of that, huh?
      She sits on the couch — whoosh! — and shoves aside a clutter of magazines. A razor blade and a pile of cuttings spill onto the freshly vacuumed carpet. They're pictures and articles neatly sliced from the daily paper or from People and Newsweek and MetroToday and even a National Enquirer she picked up at the market just for the fun of it. It's a girlish hobby, she knows, but lots of people do it and it isn't that silly really, no more than collecting baseball cards or recipes. Still, she hides them from her husband, who more and more lately flies into a fitful rage or a sulking silence whenever she cuts and sorts them in front of him.
      From the photos an oh so handsome face stares right at her. Beneath his obsidian hair, those intense clear eyes focus on her above his flawless white teeth and perfect jaw. He can melt steel girders with those eyes. That image makes her laugh and almost fall off the couch.
      Then she sees the letter on the coffee table and all laughter leaves her. Its two neatly typed pages have been torn in half and Scotch-taped back together. She had started drinking while sticking the tape on, and the corner of one page is still wet from a little spill. Her hands had been shaking.
      She doesn't feel like reading the letter for a third time. Instead she finds the TV remote and presses On. An evening news report about a school bond proposal. She picks up the VCR remote, presses Rewind until the machine stops, then hits Play. For the second time today the crude video plays on the 25-inch screen. The sound is poor, but that doesn't matter. Her face emotionless, Patricia manages to watch the tape for almost six minutes before throwing up.