Free Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality by Bill Peters

subwoofer, the way the dresser has four drawers and is positioned in the corner by the window—is that my room?!
    Later that night, in my living room, the news shows roughed-up surveillance in which an explosion blows out the storefront windows of a building. It’s hard to tell how recent the footage is, either from yesterday or the 1970s. The blast expands jerkily, in frame-by-frame slo-mo, glass drifting across the street like a weather pattern.

MY ONE ASTERISK
    Roasted Face of Satan: Part II, The Proto-Stachening: One night, two new airbrush jobs appear on NecronicA—one that shows a fire reflecting in a Terminator-like chrome skull; another of Fearjaw Spangleveins, this character I drew one time at some sleepover and haven’t thought of since. His hands have molten off and his arms are burning, and you can tell it’s Fearjaw because of his long banana-shaped jaw and hat-and-feather and stubby Mario Bros. legs.
    I can’t even tell which is worse, because the day after, on TV, two fires occur at two of the city’s larger homeless shelters. Police find part of a pink Swatch watch and some burnt wire casing at a small explosion that happened near the rear, smoking-break entrance of the Frederick Douglass Shelter. At Roads Home, police find a broken window, and on the pile of clothing directly below it, traces of what they call accelerants.
    So the homeless go back to the Cadillac Hotel, or under Broad Street to the old subway. Or they go to Midtown Plaza, where there’s Applebee’s Baghdad, where me and Lip Cheese,tonight, go too. Because the soda at this Applebee’s, he says, is the most carbonated in all of Rochester.
    We’re sitting at one of the round high tables. At least three overhead table lamps are broken. Lip Cheese stares out at the Plaza’s center court, where there’s this Spirit-Bunny-type girl, standing by the court’s fountain, which the managers shut off because people were washing their clothes in it.
    She’s wearing one of those maternal apron-y hippie dresses and corduroys with duct tape over one knee. She’s standing under a tree that’s completely bare except for a pair of underwear hanging from a branch.
    â€œShe smiled at me from out there earlier,” Lip Cheese says. “But now, she’s baking my time! What is she out there, having her pyramid?”
    Watch his eyes move like squirrels. Watch him look down at his hands like they’ve played a trick on him by moving.
    Even sadder than Lip Cheese staring at Spirit Bunny is the Plaza concourse around her: a large lane of white tile through the middle and lanes of brown tile closer to the storefronts, shiny as an evacuated banquet. The monorail track, which I rode during Christmases years ago, circles the Plaza’s upper level, where all the stores are empty.
    Still, Lip Cheese is the only one around tonight. And I have some things I need to learn from him.
    â€œWhat is He’s Got a Home, He’s Got a Cash, Lip Cheese?”
    â€œA Home? A What?” His lizard eyes widen and his lips quiver. “Oh. It was just a thing me and Necro said, for a day. It’s not a thing anymore.”
    Lip Cheese plucks a napkin from the dispenser, runs itthrough his hair, and stuffs it down his shirt and into his armpit.
    â€œHas Necro told you anything weird lately?” I say. “About NecronicA, about Weapons of Mankind?”
    â€œI’m so happy for him! He’s really making it with Weapons of Mankind!”
    So Alas, You Leave Me No Choice, said the chancellor. “Well on one of his pictures, on NecronicA?” I say. “It shows, like, this burning building with all these people on fire? And I’m worried. Because one of the people on fire is sort of short, sort of scringy, with black greasy hair parted off to the side, sort of like you?”
    Which is a little messed up, maybe—that any given lie can make its way out of me so