Under the Knife(49)

He’d observed during that first meeting, and subsequent ones, how other people were drawn to her warmth, as if she were the sun, and they the planets orbiting around her. She had a positive energy she transmitted to those around her. To him, she was unflaggingly kind and professional, but otherwise hadn’t shown the extreme deference, bordering on sycophancy, as the others who worked for him did. He liked that.

And her laugh. God. Her laugh had been like a drug to him. Other people’s laughter often annoyed him, grated on his ears, like a knife scraping against a glass bottle. Her laughter was music.

The more he was around her, the more he’d wanted to be around her. He’d started to schedule more meetings at her company just to have an excuse to be in the same room with her. And, privately, he’d fallen for her. It didn’t occur to him to ask her out. He’d simply watched her, content to admire her from a small distance, delighted to have joined her orbit.

Until the thing happened with the comic books.

Finney was a comic-book fan. Science fiction, too. As a kid he’d been a fanatic, had spent all his free time (and, without friends, he’d had a lot of it) poring over comics and science-fiction novels. He’d loved and collected the classic comics—kept them in special airtight plastic bags with cardboard backing, and would handle them only with white-cotton gloves—but he’d devour whatever he could get his hands on: old, new, valuable, worthless. It hadn’t mattered.

As a child, he’d dismissed the action figures and other toys that went with them as, well … childish, because it was the stories he loved. He’d steeped himself in their arcana with the seriousness of a professor. He’d even tried his hand at writing a few though he knew he wasn’t any good. He could wax poetic on the differences between steampunk and cyberpunk, expound on the history of Japanese manga, or recite the origins of even the most minor characters in the most insignificant, short-lived series.

The thing with Jenny had happened at Comic-Con, an international convention of comic-book, science-fiction, and fantasy fans. Each July, tens of thousands of Comic-Con conventioneers seized San Diego by the throat. Legions, shuffling from one exhibit to another, dressed in absurd costumes, clutching tote bags full of free tchotchkes, clogging sidewalks and streaming across downtown intersections in packed, multicolored lines like army ants on the march through the jungle. To him, it was the biggest Halloween party ever for grown-ups.

But it hadn’t always been like that. Finney had attended Comic-Con for years. Decades. Each year, growing up, he’d begged his parents to drive him the hundred-odd miles south from their home in Los Angeles to San Diego until he was old enough to make the trip on his own; and, each year, his bemused parents had acquiesced.

He was old enough to remember a time when Comic-Con was just him and several hundred fellow true believers sifting through cardboard boxes of comics in a hotel basement—not the obscene carnival it had become. He missed those days. As a kid, he was only rarely happy; and his happiest times were there, among his fellow fans. He’d looked forward to seeing them each year. Especially the adults, who’d treated him like an equal. How they hadn’t judged him, or cared where he came from—this skinny, awkward kid with acne so bad it looked like he’d tossed tomato sauce on his face each morning.

At Comic-Con, the dark and disturbing thoughts that had plagued him, that would steal into his head, especially at night—

(yes dark and disturbing he knew he’d always known that but didn’t know how to control them not until he’d met Jenny)

—the ones he’d nursed toward his tormentors through middle school and high school, would dissipate like morning mist in the rising sun.

Staring at the ceiling, listening to the shower water, he stroked the leather cover of his notebook and reflected that he’d never, not once, written down a fellow comic-book fan’s name in it. He’d never needed to.

The comics had sustained him: kept him company during the long, lonely hours of his childhood, nurtured his dreams of scientific things that did not yet exist, and inspired him to a career in which he invented them for real. Because of this, he’d continued to attend Comic-Con every year, like a sacred pilgrimage—well after he’d become a grown man who should have known better.

And then, one year, there she’d been.

On the sidewalk outside the convention-center entrance.

One hundred thirty thousand fans converging on eight square city blocks, and there she’d been. Total, random chance. Serendipity.

Or had it been?

He’d long been convinced that the universe had been telling him something that day. He didn’t believe in a benevolent deity guiding his destiny. But he did believe in a cosmic clockwork, unseen cogs and wheels, spinning under the influence of a divine, orderly plan. The cosmos had deemed that he and Jenny should be together, and its interlocking parts had spun to that purpose.

This had been several months after he’d met her. She’d been wearing a pair of jeans and faded I GROK SPOCK T-shirt. He’d been walking in, she out. He’d stood there, slack-jawed, his brain trying to process the image of her red hair glowing in the summer sun, of believing that she was really there, at his Comic-Con.

She’d spotted him standing there at the door, gaping. She’d done a double take, and blushed; and then she’d laughed, and bathed him in a beautiful smile. He’d grinned, smitten in a way he’d never been, or would ever be again.