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  But the three banks were nothing compared to their biggest target, the one that the news cameras were all focused on.

  Approximately fifteen minutes after the first rash of robberies, ten steel-faced criminals crashed through the outer wall of police headquarters. They used a garbage truck, the kind with the forklift in front, pouring out the back of it like it was the Trojan horse, machine guns spitting, sending a dozen cops scattering for cover. Surveillance cameras captured every moment. The initial shootout was intense but over quickly. The cops tried to hold their ground, but the masks and suits were all bulletproof, and with most of the police force speeding to three knocked-over banks with triggered alarms, it didn’t take long for the masked men to take over the building.

  The attackers moved in unison, swarming like ants. Just watching their hollow faces on the screen gives me the creeps. There could be anything behind there, grinning skulls or alien bloodsuckers or swirling black holes. Or maybe they are just blank. Oval heads without faces.

  They didn’t release any criminals from the cell block. They weren’t there for comrades. They were there for ammunition. And to show New Liberty what its police force was good for.

  Three banks and a police station. No way anyone could stop them all. But the ticker marching along the bottom of the television says otherwise.

  THE COMET STRIKES AGAIN!

  He got to three out of four, that’s how fast he was. Four masked men were found unconscious inside the vault at Old National Bank and Trust, bound together with telephone cables, wrapped like garlands around Christmas trees. Two more were found in the Dumpster outside the Forum Credit Union, knocked out cold with garbage bags for pillows. It couldn’t have taken him more than a minute at each place before he was back in the sky again. He couldn’t make it to the third bank. He barely made it downtown in time.

  He landed at the police station just as the men finished emptying the armory, loading the truck and another white van with enough weapons and ammunition to outfit a militia. A clip from one of the outside cameras showed the garbage truck pulling out just as the Comet came rocketing in. You can hear the sonic splinter of his arrival, the staccato of the gunfire, the growl of the truck’s engine barreling toward him. Even though I know it’s recorded video—that all this has already happened—I still hold my breath as I watch.

  The garbage truck plowed right into him, ten tons of metal at forty miles an hour. The camera showed the Comet turning just in time to be caught in the headlights, bringing up one hand to shield his eyes, bringing up the other in the sign to halt. But the truck didn’t stop. At least, not until it hit the wall of blue muscle, its back end lifting off the ground, men in masks, stolen guns, and boxes of bullets tumbling out like a popped piñata. There were more shots. A brief scuffle. The video is spastic. You can make out one of the men flying at least twenty feet through the air. You can see the white van screeching away. Can see at least eight of them surrounding him, but they were no match. The Comet didn’t bother tying them up or even taking off their masks, just left them in broken heaps strewn across the police station’s parking lot. Then, before the cops could question him, arrest him, or thank him for saving their hides, he vanished back into the night sky, leaving his telltale mark behind.

  The camera fixates on it for a moment, that blue streak, then switches back to the news anchor’s haggard face. “We take you now, live, to a statement offered by New Liberty’s chief of police.”

  The camera cuts to a barrel-chested man with a horseshoe mustache and a clear desire to be anywhere else. He is standing on the steps of his still-smoking headquarters. He opens with assurances that everything is under control and that they are not at liberty to share the information they have, which is another way of saying they have none. Then he says something that strikes me.

  “It is clear we are dealing with new and very dangerous threats.”

  Threats. Plural. Officer Mustache knows what kinds of people there are in the world, too.

  “Who’s winning?”

  I jump, nearly slipping off the loveseat, then turn to see my father standing in the entryway. He is staring at the television as well.

  “Sorry?”

  “Who’s winning?” he asks again.

  I look at the bullet-pocked walls of the police station; the smoldering remains of the truck, its front end smashed so hard that it looks like it’s smiling; the lingering scar of blue light stitched across the sky in the background; the little piles of men collapsed on top of each other.

  “Good guys, I guess?” I’m not sure how else to put it.

  Dad nods thoughtfully. “When you are winning a war, almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.”

  It’s a quote. Einstein, probably. Or Lao Tzu. Or Lady Gaga. I can’t keep tabs. He waits for me to guess, but instead I ask, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Dad stares at the image on the screen the way he stares at his columns of figures, at the complex equations he scribbles on paper towels sometimes, or on the bathroom walls. Scrutinizing it, dissecting it, reconfiguring it into something that makes sense to him and sometimes only to him.

  “It means that if they are winning, they are the good guys, whether they are or not.”

  As I fall asleep that night, I imagine I am back at the zoo, back in the desert pavilion. There is a man standing by the whiptailed lizards, dressed in royal-blue spandex with black boots up to his knees. His back is to me, but there is no question who he is. Everyone else in the place is gawking at him. Snapping pictures. Pointing and whispering. I walk up to the man and stand next to him, keeping my eyes on the lizards, not daring to look. Finally I can’t take it anymore. I turn to see his face.

  But there is nothing to see. He is wearing one of those silver masks. With the dark hollow eyes and rectangular mouth.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “Do I know you?”

  The man reaches up and removes the mask with one blue-gloved hand.

  And my father stares at me blankly, as if he’s never seen me before.

  THE MAGIC TRICK

  I remember the day I learned who my father, Benjamin Edson, really was. The day he unlocked the door. It wasn’t a big surprise. There was no grand revelation. I had my suspicions. The men in long, dirty raincoats who would come to the door at night and ask to see him, armed with briefcases, the butts of pistols peeking from waistbands. The hours he would spend secreted away, leaving me upstairs with my mountains of homework. The occasional explosion that shook my plate and my chair as I sat in the kitchen eating a PB and J while he rushed up the stairs, hair smoking, mumbling to himself and smiling at me as if to say “That could have gone better.”

  And I had asked. A hundred times. A thousand. Ten thousand. But the answer was always the same: “I’ll tell you when it’s time.”

  And then finally, after two years of living in the same house as a man who spent most of the day in hiding, my father put his hands on my shoulders and asked if I was ready.

  He walked me to the basement door, closed and locked as always, the only key tucked into his pocket. Then he took out a small stack of photos.

  “What I’m about to tell you is just between us, do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “You can’t tell anyone, not without my permission. Got it?”

  More nodding.

  “Swear?”

  “I swear.” I remember crossing my heart and not my fingers. I could tell what was coming. I didn’t want to blow it.

  “All right, then,” he said, showing me the first picture. “You wanted to know who I am and what I do. Well, this is who I am.”

  The first photo was about half the size of the others, old and grainy, blurred yellows, blacks, and grays. It showed a man with a long curving mustache like a scimitar, wearing what looked like thermal underwear, standing beside a wooden crate with a lock on it. He wasn’t smiling. In fact, he looked pretty miserable. His hair was cropped close, and he had no shoes on.
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br />   “I come from a long line of box makers,” my father said. “My great-grandfather was a magician in London. His name was Robert, but he called himself Marvelo the Magnificent. He was a trickster and a hack, for the most part, performing parlor tricks on street corners, pulling cards from shirtsleeves and scarves from ladies’ bonnets. But he had this one bit that he would do for his finale. A magic box, three feet square. And he would somehow cram himself into it. Of course he wasn’t a very large man, as you can see, probably about my size, but still, to shove oneself into a box of that size is impressive.

  “And that wasn’t even the trick. An assistant—some hulking brute he had pulled off the street and paid a shilling—this accomplice would put a lock on the box, one of those ancient padlocks that you always imagine hanging from dungeon doors, and drop the whole thing into the Thames River. The crowd would hold its breath, waiting to see if Marvelo the Magnificent would surface, if he would break free from the box and escape the icy claws of death. Sometimes the women would faint. Sometimes they would beg their husbands to dive in after him. They would rush the banks and shout for help. It was a spectacle.

  “Of course the box had a trick bottom—my great-grandfather had designed it that way, though it still took some effort to squeeze himself free, especially underwater. He would emerge, dripping and gasping but undoubtedly alive, begging them all to drop another coin in the hat.

  “He escaped from that box ninety-seven times, my great-grandfather. On the ninety-eighth, the bottom tricked him back.”

  I pictured the man in the photograph trapped inside his wooden crate, pounding and kicking against the sides, sinking to the floor of the river, drowning in his three-foot-by-three-foot coffin. It gave me a shudder and I wondered if I was ready, but Dad took the picture of Marvelo the Magnificent and handed me another. This one was of better quality, though still washed-out, mostly browns and grays. It showed a man standing outside a large brick building, presumably a factory of some kind. A wagon stood to his right. Two giant stacks reached up out of the building, their smoky breath clawing its way into the sky.

  “Robert’s son, Reginald, my grandfather, took up the family love of woodcraft and started making boxes of his own, though his were larger, three feet by eight feet, mostly. They were fine works of craftsmanship, made of rosewood, cedar, and mahogany, lined with velvet and lace—though admittedly no one was too eager to buy them. Still, he developed a reputation for his artistry.”

  I looked again at the photo, at the wagon that was stacked three high and six deep with the boxes. I wondered if they were empty or if there were already people inside them.

  “For a while, being laid to rest in an Edson coffin was a sign of prestige. But then the war came. And the blitzkrieg. And my grandfather switched from rosewood to pine and opened a factory to mass-produce those boxes of his. Demand was high. The ships brought hundreds of men who needed one immediately, or would soon enough. Whenever the air-raid sirens cried out, Grandfather would huddle with his family in the cellar, praying for their safety—but secretly hoping that not everyone in town would make it through the night. You can profit from death.” He took the picture back.

  A drowned magician and an undertaker. I wasn’t sure where Dad was going with all this, but I hoped it got better.

  The next photo was a snapshot, like from one of those old instant cameras, showing a man in a white coat like a dentist, glasses perched on his nose, arms crossed in front of him, standing in a lab of some kind, other white-coated men with glasses and short haircuts scurrying in the background.

  “He made a lot of money off the war, my grandfather. Enough to send his own son, my father, off to college. This man, the late Anders Edson, traveled the world earning his education, learning everything he could about computers and engineering before he was hired by our good friends at the United States government to make . . .” He waited for me to fill in the blank.

  “Boxes?” I guessed. I figured it wasn’t chocolate bars.

  My father nodded. “Little metal ones like so.” My father made a box with his hands, not much bigger than those lining the shelves of our basement, though I didn’t know that yet. “They contained little computers, very sophisticated, the cutting edge of technology, and they became the guidance systems found on nuclear missiles—the little brains that would someday help obliterate Moscow or wipe China from the face of the earth, or so the government thought. Turned out all those boxes would sit inside all those missiles inside all those silos just gathering dust. Still, they could have destroyed mankind if they’d wanted to. And my father would have been partly responsible. Unfortunately, my father had his father’s entrepreneurial spirit but lacked his common sense. He sold his secrets to the Russians and likely found himself at the bottom of a river, just like Marvelo, except without the audience.

  “I never knew any of them, of course,” Dad said. “My grandfather died before I was born, and my father disappeared when I was only three, but I somehow inherited their fondness for boxes.”

  The third picture was snatched back, and the three men disappeared back into my father’s pocket.

  “What about the last one?” I asked as the pictures vanished. There had been four photos. He had only shown me three.

  “Just an old friend,” he said. Then my father reached into his other pocket and pulled out the key, a little coppery thing with nubby teeth, and held it between us. I started to reach for it and he pulled back, just a little. He looked me dead in the eyes.

  “Boxes are marvelous things, Michael. There is a moment, just before you open one, when a box contains anything, when it could be anything. And even though you know it’s not true, you still imagine that one day you will find a box that holds the exact thing you’ve been looking for, the thing you’ve wanted most of all.”

  I remember nodding. Hearing what he said, but not really listening. Just looking at that key. Opening that door and finally figuring out what he did down there all day—that’s what I wanted. I reached for it again, but he still held back.

  “That’s the other thing about boxes,” he said. “You don’t have to open them. It’s your choice. You can stay up here as long as you please. But you should know that if you do open that door, if you look at what’s inside, things will never be the same. And you won’t be able to turn back.”

  I looked up at my father. The man who had rescued me from St. Mary’s School for Wayward Boys. Who had brought me ice cream and bought me my first pair of tennis shoes and taught me how to play backgammon and what it’s like to sleep in on Sundays, the way God supposedly did. And I knew that no matter what was down there, it wouldn’t change the way I felt about him. I nodded, and he handed me the key.

  I opened the door and flipped on the light.

  And made my descent.

  For three days, nothing happens. Not nothing, nothing. Just nothing remarkable, nothing. The sky is blue, not streaked blue, just plain blue, with the occasional wisp of cloud for garnish. The kids are out in force, even along our street, playing stickball and tumbling off skateboards, sitting on front steps and smoking, occasionally looking up at the sky.

  Don’t misunderstand. There are still crimes. This is New Liberty, where the police blotter gets its own section in the daily paper. Purses are snatched. Six cars are stolen. Four houses are broken into. A convenience store is held up, but the suspects hide their faces with ball caps and sunglasses. The police arrive well after the perpetrators leave.

  No sign of the Comet, though. Or the men in masks.

  The news choppers flitter all around the city like hummingbirds, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. I can hear them pass over our neighborhood, and I watch my Dad’s nose twitch. Apparently a group of high-school kids calling themselves the Comet Chasers tools around in a truck spray-painted with blue fireballs, hoping to catch him on camera to post to their website. One man actually sticks his own cat in a tree and sits on a folding lawn chair in his front yard with his camera, waiting to see if the hero w
ill come and rescue it. After four hours he gives up and calls the fire department. They don’t come either, but a news reporter does. They are working every possible angle.

  There is speculation that he is gone already, the city’s new blue defender. That he was just passing through, like one of those rough-shaven gunslingers who show up in town just long enough to take out the trash before flying off into the sunset. That he has already taken care of the Men of Steel, as the bank-robbing, police-headquarters-smashing posse is now being called, and has moved on.

  I spend too much time upstairs watching television. Less time down in the lair. I get behind on my homework. Occasionally Dad resurfaces, coffee cup in hand—the one that says QUIET. GENIUS AT WORK. “You really ought not be watching this,” Dad says when he sees me. But I watch him watching, stuck there momentarily, sucked in the same as me. Then he shakes his head and fills his mug with lukewarm coffee and tells me I’m welcome to come join him. I want to say the same but don’t.

  And yet for three days I’m told to stay close to home, where he can see me, though he immerses himself in his work until it’s time for dinner and then pretends like it’s just another night. Sandwich night. Spaghetti night. Fishstick night. I sit at the table and listen to lectures on electromagnetism, pre-Raphaelite poetry, and Kant’s categorical imperative. The fishsticks are freezer burned. The helicopters pass overhead and Dad pauses again, a spoonful of peas at his lips. We both wait for the tchk-tchk-tchk of their rotors to fade.

  It’s these times, when nothing is happening, that you become absolutely certain that something is happening.