The Book of Names: Stories

By Brian Kenneth Swain

From the author of Sistina, Alone in the Light, and World Hunger

The Book of Names is Brian Kenneth Swain’s first collection of short fiction. The stories, characters, and themes explored in this work are as universal as they are diverse: bravery, greed, legacy, and a serious infatuation with horses and French horns. In the title story, one soldier turns hopelessness into a moment of grandeur and sacrifice. In “The Antique Shop,” the proprietor and his customer marvel at the absurdity of debating the provenance and value of a book that cannot possibly exist, despite it being there in the shop with them. And in “Convergence,” two Middle Eastern men share a drink and speak of the inestimable loss each has suffered in a recent terrorist attack, and the terrible secret that binds them together.

Swain dissects with candor and immediacy the emotions and motivations of his characters, whether in response to dowsing a well, opening a hamburger shop, working to thwart child abusers, talking a friend off a ledge, or shopping for one’s own casket. The people are instantly recognizable, the fears and joys are boundless, and the language is imbued with empathy, honesty, and humor. The inhabitants of The Book of Names are your neighbors, your friends, your family, possibly even yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532071935

Brian Kenneth Swain

BRIAN KENNETH SWAIN is the author of nine previous books, including the novels World Hunger, Alone in the Light, and Sistina; the poetry collections Secret Places, My America, and Chicken Feet; the essay collection The Curious Habits of Man; the short story collection The Book of Names; and the children’s book Hegel and Hobbes Have an Adventure. Brian is a graduate of Columbia University and The Wharton School. He grew up in Brunswick, Maine and now lives in San Antonio with his black chow chows Maya and Loki.

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Copyright © 2019 Brian Kenneth Swain.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Printing

Phineas Talbot and The Dowser previously appeared in Voices de la Luna, and Convergence in Pebble Lake Review.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-7194-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-7195-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-7193-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019904239

iUniverse rev. date: 05/03/2019

Also by Brian Kenneth Swain

Novels

World Hunger

Alone in the Light

Sistina

Poetry

Secret Places

My America

Chicken Feet

Essays

The Curious Habits of Man

Dedicated to that small family of

readers who love short fiction.

You know who you are.

A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos—like amber in which a memory gets trapped.

Michael Chabon

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Book of Names

Lightning Man

Phineas Talbot

The Oldest Man in Texas

Underneath

The Dowser

Red Nearly Loses It

No Good Deed

Competition

The Antique Shop

The Horse Thief

The French Horn

The Negotiator

The Visit

The Blood Edition

Letting Go

Rumblings

As God Is My Witness

The Pembroke Thing

The Substitute

Conjecture

The Fletcher Legacy

Thinking Ahead

Before the Fall

Convergence

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My sincere thanks to Susan Ciancio, whose editing skills ensure that my writing ends up a good deal better than it began.

Thanks, as well, to the editors of Voices de la Luna—the literary journal of the University of Texas at San Antonio—and Pebble Lake Review, each of whom published some of the stories in this collection.

And, finally, heartfelt thanks to all the friends, colleagues, and others who have read my writing over the years. I’m more grateful than mere words can say.

INTRODUCTION

W hy do writers insist on publishing short story collections? They are almost certainly among the least popular books to occupy space in a bookstore, right up there with poetry and essay collections. And yet even the most successful novelists seem somehow compelled, from time to time, to push out one of these volumes. I have asked myself this question more than once, even while poring over my own stories, deciding which to include in this volume.

Don’t get me wrong; I have a pretty good idea why authors write short stories—those brief vignettes that don’t quite merit long-form treatment. Maybe it’s experimentation with a new voice or character. Or perhaps (as with Convergence, the story that concludes this collection) it’s exploration of an idea that you think just might blossom into a full novel someday, like a Renaissance sculptor practicing on a terra-cotta study piece before committing to that expensive piece of marble.

While we’re thinking this through, it’s also useful to wonder why a small handful of readers choose to buy short story collections. It may just be that they’re looking for an easy-to-digest ten or twenty pages before turning out the lights at bedtime. Or perhaps they read so infrequently that they cannot keep straight the flow and characters of a novel when days or weeks go by between readings. Maybe they just have short attention spans.

As with so many questions in the literary realm, there are doubtless as many reasons for writing and reading these stories as there are people with opinions about them. My own compulsion to both read and write short fiction stems from the same goal: keeping my library of narrative ideas and characters as populous and diverse as possible. Because never forget that, at the end of the day, every story ever written—short or long—is pretty much the same story, from Homer to the present day. Put simply, a good story is a well-wrought character faced with a challenge. For myself—and, I suspect, my fellow authors as well—the joy of writing short fiction is that of creating new characters, challenging them in new and clever ways, and then sitting back and watching them try to work their way out of the situation we’ve put them in.

In the introduction to one of his older collections, Stephen King (one of the handful of successful novelists who, despite the immense popularity of his long fiction, still dives into the deep end of the short story pool with some regularity) equates a novel to a long passionate affair whereas a short story is, for him, a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. Why the novel has to be an affair rather than, say, a long happy marriage, is unclear, but it probably has something to do with risk, intrigue, and conflict. I like the analogy, but I’m not nearly as romantic about the whole thing. King and I both have Maine roots, as it happens. Perhaps he had a more passionate childhood than I did.

If I had to craft a comparative analogy, I’d be more inclined to regard the novel as a fully realized adult, whereas the short story is a very young child. The adult has a full life filled with successes and failures, happiness and sorrow, and if you really pay attention, you understand why he does the things he does and feels the way he feels. But you barely know that little child. How can you know him? He doesn’t even know himself yet. But somewhere down the line he’s going to become an adult, for better or worse. And I guess the optimist in me believes that, with the right level of imagination and work, there’s a novel waiting to be born out of every good short story. And despite the fact that so few short stories ever actually get to become novels, I think it’s a worthwhile aspiration, since stories are, after all, our children, and writers, like parents, want nothing but the best for their children. For that matter, just how many of those quick kisses in the dark from strangers ever become long passionate affairs? Again, not many. At least I can say that, of the twenty-five children in this collection, one (the final story) made it to adulthood. And that’s not nothing.

Brian Kenneth Swain

San Antonio, Texas

March 10, 2019

THE BOOK OF NAMES

"H e just fell over dead in mid-sentence, not two feet in front of me. And this on a day that had actually been relatively uneventful to that point, as least as these days go. Couple of inconsequential skirmishes. No casualties or injuries at all, in fact, aside from Flanders there, who sprained his ankle dodging a mortar round. We were all sitting around over by the depot, winding down a bit, but taking the usual precautions—sand bags, trip wires, couple of lads on watch up top. Preston and I sat off to one side, drinking a bit of that awful coffee he made, and he was telling me about this boat he bought just before signing on and how he’s going to go home and fix it up once we’re done fighting. And just as he gets to the part about how he’s going to muster up his nerve and make a run at some girl he knew from high school, take her out on the boat and whatnot, there comes this hiss—you know the hiss—and the round takes him straight in the left ear.

He never felt a thing. Of that I can assure you, Brother. But here’s the weird bit. I remember—don’t ask me why—that his last word on this earth was ‘I’ll.’ A bit sad to see life end on such an optimistic note. Never made it to the end of the sentence, so I’ve no idea what he meant to tell me. Something about either the boat or the girl, I expect. Preston was a good one, a hell of a good one, and he’ll damned well be missed.

Bates had just come in off patrol and was relaying the key points of the trip. The four-man scouting mission had now become three, and he and the two remaining members had taken turns shouldering Preston’s body back with them, which was doubtless no easy task, since they’d been more than a mile from camp when it had happened. He paused for a long moment, turning his expressionless gaze toward the ceiling, reflecting, I suppose, on what must surely have been a horrific image. Yet he seemed to take the whole thing with a bit more equanimity than most. I suppose that’s due to the extreme number of casualties he’d witnessed. In fact, I knew that he’d kept careful track of them all during his years in combat. He’d explained to me some days earlier that he carried a written record of every casualty he’d personally witnessed. Not a lot of detail—just time and date, location, and a brief statement of what happened: gunshot, landmine, that sort of thing. I was a bit taken aback when he confessed that he’d personally witnessed the deaths of fifty-four soldiers, along with an additional eighty-three wounded. The rebellion was now nearly four years old and it seemed he’d been around for the better part of it.

But here’s the thing—he really didn’t need the written record. If pushed, he could recite every last name in his book, along with all the other salient details of each case. He didn’t get into the why of it, but I took it to be his personal way of coping. He was simultaneously recognizing each man’s sacrifice by keeping the records, while also shielding himself from the horror of the situation by boiling it all down to a handful of simple notes. Not only did he know every nuance of each man’s case, but he could recite a wide range of statistics about the data in aggregate. He knew the exact percentage of men who had died from gunshots, mortar rounds, or landmines. He could quote you the distribution of their ages. Hell, he even knew the breakdown of which areas of the country they’d come from. Seemed like the more he embraced the numbers, the less he had to think about the faces.

I saw his book one time, though it was accidental and I don’t guess he much appreciated it, as he quickly slid it back into his breast pocket the moment he spied me looking at him. I remember thinking how odd that reaction was, what with him having been the one to tell me about it in the first place. I guess knowing and seeing are different things to some people. Before he had noticed me watching, I stared fascinated as he scribbled in it with the dregs of a pencil so small he could scarcely hold onto it. The book itself was a minuscule thing, no thicker than your little finger, no taller or wider than a pack of cigarettes. The cover was an ancient-looking cracked leather material that had once been black, but that had evolved to a sun-bleached gray. Truth be told, it looked like a tiny Bible. I didn’t get much more than a glance before he hid it away, but what little I saw of the two pages he had it open to looked as though he had dedicated one full page to each individual. Aside from an almost identical format of information for each man, there was a curious smudge in the lower right corner of each page. I wouldn’t learn the significance of this until sometime later. It also seemed that, as he wrote, he had the book open to a spot nearly at the back, which caused me to wonder what his plan was if he ran out of pages before we ran out of casualties. I did not think it prudent, though, to ask. That question would be put to the test soon enough.

The regime had not been too terribly particular about the sorts of munitions they dispensed upon us, though they had, in recent days, come to favor a weapon known as a barrel bomb, which is nothing more sophisticated than a spent fifty-five gallon oil drum loaded with a great deal of explosives and the devil’s own mixture of assorted hardware—nuts, bolts, scrap metal—with the goal of maiming anyone not fortunate enough to be killed outright by the initial detonation. Designed to explode at ground level, these were dropped in a more or less indiscriminate manner into our midst from cargo aircraft. I had personally seen only one of these in operation, and that from a safe enough distance to appreciate its effectiveness while suffering none of the consequences myself. The blast itself would generally dispatch anyone within a hundred-foot radius, while the flying debris did a fair job of sanitizing things for an additional 200 feet or so. It is possible, now that I reflect on it, that I have overstated the degree of my own safety in that one instance I witnessed, as I now recall the distinct whistle of a piece of metal flying overhead immediately after the detonation. I was, though, safely ensconced behind a wall and paid it little attention at the time. There are always lethal things flying about these days; we simply do our best to stay out of their way.

We slept fitfully that night, though, I suppose, no more or less so than soldiers have done every night in combat zones since the days of the Greeks. Aside from Preston’s death, we had seen no direct action throughout the preceding day or night, though we heard occasional deep thumps in the distance as our brethren in various other parts of the city were pummeled. We had no way of knowing the consequences of these distant assaults, though there was every likelihood we would gain some intelligence into the matter before day’s end. Our mission, commencing with the first glint of sunrise, was to rendezvous with another unit—one that had taken heavy casualties, particularly among its leadership. The brass had determined that it would be in everyone’s interest for our two units to merge, if we could manage it. They had several injured, rendering them relatively immobile, which meant we needed to get to them. Though we had suffered our share of casualties as well, they had all been fatalities. The only positive aspect of this was the fact that our complement of medical supplies had gone largely unused, whereas the unit we were to meet had nearly exhausted its supplies and was apparently in quite dire straits. The last intelligence we’d received suggested that the other unit was just two miles to the southwest, scarcely a half hour’s march under ideal circumstances. However, things were hardly ideal at the moment, and we reckoned that if we could complete the rendezvous by nightfall, we would be doing well.

There were sixteen remaining in what we euphemistically thought of as our unit. A month previous there had been thirty-two, so none of us who remained were terribly keen on the way the math was shaking out. We had actually lost eighteen men and picked up two stragglers along the way. With the rebellion in its current shape—extremely disjointed and disorganized, that is—no one much concerned themselves any longer with units, command structures, ranks, or any of the other niceties of formal military organization. As long as you weren’t fighting for the regime, we were pleased to have you.

We’d buried Preston the best we could the previous night. Much as we hated it, simple logistical reality militated against us attempting to carry our casualties with us. We did, though, carefully document where each body—or portions thereof—was buried, on the chance that more favorable future circumstances would allow us to return for a proper delivery of the man’s remains to his family. It was the best we could manage under the circumstances. By 05:30 that morning, we had gathered everything up, performed a surveillance of our immediate area, took a compass fix, and commenced making our way in the direction of the other unit.

Things went surprisingly without incident for the first mile-and-a-half or so. It was all dense urban environment, and the abandoned buildings and rubble piles provided plenty of cover. These slowed our progress somewhat, but also made the trip a good deal less hazardous. Just before noon, we reached the edge of town and suddenly the cover all but disappeared. Before us lay a large clearing—perhaps 200 yards across—and on the other side the remains of a school or some sort of municipal building. Tough to be sure, but whatever it was, it had clearly taken the brunt of a very large assault. All that remained were two partially intact walls and several enormous rubble piles. Best we could tell from our sporadic radio communication, the group we were endeavoring to meet was entrenched a few hundred yards beyond this building.

The clearing extended more or less indefinitely to our left and right and there was no immediately apparent way around it. We were hunkered down in the remains of a shattered restaurant, and in that moment the quiet suddenly became quite jarring. We were all experienced soldiers by this point, and everyone knew where the situation was headed. No one wanted to be the first to say it out loud, though, so after several moments of uncomfortable silence and eye contact avoidance, I cleared my throat and said what needed saying.

Gentlemen, I’m prepared to discuss with you my plan for moving this thing forward, but it is a bad idea, and so I would like to hear anyone else’s bad ideas first. This last bit of wit was meant simply to lighten the grim mood that had befallen us. The only good option, though no one was crass enough to articulate it, was to say screw the other unit and return whence we had come that morning.

I expect tunneling is out, one of the fellows said, doing his best to muster a grin.

No one else laughed or even attempted a smile. And no one had any other ideas—good, bad, or otherwise—despite the long minute of contemplative silence that ensued.

Then here’s the deal, I continued, doing what I could to sound decisive, though I certainly didn’t feel that way. We’ve no earthly idea what’s between us and that building across the field, but we damn well need to find out if we’re to have any hope of reaching the other unit. Way I see it, there’s two main possibilities out there—land mines and snipers. If it’s mines you’re worried about, you pick your way, slow and methodical. If it’s snipers, you run like a son of a bitch. That, Gentlemen, is what is known in military strategy circles as a conundrum.

I paused for a second to gather my thoughts and to allow the others to do the same.

"We don’t know what’s out there, but I can sure as hell tell you one thing. If we all go together, we’re fish in a barrel, for snipers or mines. If it’s just one, he’s a small and mobile target. What I propose is that one goes and takes with him a pack of medical supplies. Whatever happens, at least we’ll know better what we’re dealing with between here and there, and we can make a more informed decision for the others. That’s a pretty shitty deal for one of us, but unless you’ve got something better, that’s our best option."

More silence. No alternative suggestions.

I’ll take your silence as grudging agreement, which leaves only the unpleasant matter of deciding who it’ll be. There’s two choices—volunteering and drawing lots.

One more tense moment and no hands raised. There was no faulting the men over bravery. They were simply spent and dispirited and that was the long and short of it. It also occurred to me, as I sat waiting, that maybe the hardest part of this whole affair was deciding whether to run or take your time. Matter of personal preference really.

Right then, I said, a bit too loudly. Lots it is. I reached into my pack and extracted a filthy sheet of paper, tearing it into sixteen thin strips. I’m ONE, Biggs here is TWO, I said, gesturing to my left, and so on around the circle. Write your number twice and then tear your scrap in half. I sent the paper fragments around with a pen, and they complied in abject silence. One-in-sixteen would have seemed pretty favorable odds under most circumstances; only this wasn’t most circumstances. After a moment or two of silent scribbling, I removed my hat and sent it around in the same direction.

One goes in. One you keep, I said.

The hat had made its silent way past twelve of the men and was in Bates’ hand where it remained for a moment longer than seemed necessary. In that moment, a strange look came across his face and he flung the hat violently back in my direction, sending the scraps of paper drifting about like snow flurries.

Aw, FUCK your damned numbers, he said with a mad smile, before the paper scraps had even finished fluttering to the ground. I’m going. Ain’t none of you can run worth a shit anyway. He stood, turned, and made his way without further comment to the large bag of medical supplies.

Hell if I knew why, but I felt the need to say something. Bates, c’mon … I wasn’t even sure what I was trying to convey. I stood and walked to where he was already taking items out of the med kit and loading them into his pack.

Look, he said, not bothering to turn to face me, there’s no other way, right? You said so yourself. So here’s how it goes. I run like a madman on fire across that field—thirty seconds max. I dodge and weave, keep the snipers guessing. You keep an eye on my path so if I happen to find a mine, you know where there’s likely gonna be others. I get across, I find our boys just past the school. Piece of cake, right?

There was no point arguing the matter. Look … Bates … If they’re shooting, it’s gotta be straight on from the school or from somewhere back here. We’ll cover you best we can from this side. Pull your pack up tight and you’ll have a bit of protection from any rearward shots. And keep moving about, yeah? We’ll give you a few minutes once you make it over to find the other unit. Give us a call on their radio; we’ll be right behind you.

Sounds like a plan, man, he said, hoisting the laden pack onto his back. No time like the present, eh? He stepped past the still-silent group and toward the front of the building. There were murmurs of encouragement from the group, but no one rose. The more routine the whole thing felt, the better, I guessed. No handshakes, none of that. I gestured to two of the men. They rose, grabbed rifles, and joined us out front. We talked briefly and the two departed for positions from where they could best offer Bates a modicum of cover fire if the need arose. It was a dubious comfort and we all knew it. Cover fire assumed the ability to identify the precise position from where a sniper shot had come, which was a decidedly dodgy proposition. Still, it felt better to do something, and the two seemed grateful for the opportunity. I unfolded my map and pointed to a spot beyond the destroyed school that was our best guess for where the unit was located.

Give us a shout when you’re in, I said. If their radio doesn’t work, send up a flare or something. I paused a moment, then solemnly said, It’s a hell of a thing you’re doing, man.

Hell of a stupid thing, he replied, still bearing that slightly mad grin. Just like the 200 meter in high school track. No problem. He turned to face the open field and began to breathe rapidly, steeling himself. Remember, you keep a good eye on my track now. In the instant before he broke for the field, he lifted his right hand, withdrew something small from his shirt pocket, and flipped it over his shoulder in my direction without looking back. Hang onto that for me, will you? he said, and off he went, sprinting like hell, the pack bobbing wildly upon his back.

There were no sounds now, save for the blood rushing in my ears, the receding thud of his steps—fast and hard upon the ground—and the sough of a cool breeze that had turned the day rather pleasant, circumstances notwithstanding. Bates moved across the field like a man possessed—left, right, pulling up occasionally, then leaping violently forward, all in an attempt to present as difficult a target as possible. He stumbled once, but it appeared from a distance to be his own doing, a poor piece of footing on the rough terrain. He was quickly up again and nearly there, with about fifty yards remaining, when there came a crack—a single shot from the far side of the field. The noise did not reach my terrified ears until what seemed an eternity and after I’d already seen Bates go down on one knee and stay there for far too long. He rose again and took a slow step, then another, almost seeming to regain his conviction, if not his original pace. He managed a jog to the right, then another feint to the left before a second sharp crack carried across the field. Bates fell back onto his knees. This time, he did not get up. I watched in horror through the binoculars, and it appeared as though he turned and looked back in our direction one brief time before falling forward not ten yards from the far edge of the field.

I stood, unable to comprehend what had happened, for what seemed hours before being jarred back to the moment by the distant rattle of automatic fire. There came several short bursts, followed by the puffs of ricochets off masonry from the peak of a tower some fifty yards to the left of where Bates lay. Someone in the other unit had drawn a bead on the sniper and was returning fire. Seconds later, a grenade was launched into the same tower, and, with a flash and a dull thud, it was over. As I continued watching through the binoculars, a figure appeared from behind a pile of stones adjacent to the school, gesturing wildly that we should make the crossing. On what degree of intelligence that gesture was based I could not say, but I signaled back, assuming they had binoculars as well, and turned to make my way back to the rest of the group.

Later that afternoon, after we’d compared notes with the other unit on troop movements and known or presumed regime locations, and had tended to the soldiers who needed medical help, we sat about the encampment, smoking, eating rations, and not talking much. A couple of volunteers went out onto the edge of the field and retrieved Bates’ body, which we treated with as much respect as we could muster, and we buried him in a berm behind the bombed-out school. As the men settled in for the night, I found a spot well removed from the others and pulled Bates’ small book from my pocket, for that was what he had tossed to me just before his dash across the field. I read carefully all 138 of the names and accounts before the night was over. As I turned the pages, it became clear, as I’d suspected from my earlier brief glance, that, indeed, every page was identical—name, rank/position, age, hometown, cause of death. I also discovered just what the small dark smudge in the lower corner of each page was. Some were randomly shaped and some were quite clear, but they were all fingerprints, presumably of the man himself. And each mark was rendered in the man’s own blood, for despite the aged dark brown tincture of each stain, there was no other possible explanation. Bates had been close enough to every man, killed or wounded, to make a signature in blood upon his page in the book.

As I made my way slowly through the names—a few I knew, but most I did not—I came at last to the final page, upon which was written Bates’ own name, in precisely the same format and handwriting as all the others. There was his rank, age, hometown, all of it, even a still reddish blood fingerprint, though I had no idea when he’d had the opportunity to make it. The only difference between his entry and all the others was a blank space where cause of death belonged. Without a moment’s hesitation, I withdrew my pen and wrote neatly Sniper fire in the appropriate spot. Then I closed the book, replaced it in my shirt pocket, and lay back to rest.

LIGHTNING MAN

T here comes a point in every man’s life when he realizes he is nothing, or if not nothing, then very little. Ephraim Pontoon realized this earlier than most, primarily because of the considerable help he received from his parents, who offered continuing reminders of how unlikely he was to amount to anything. It wasn’t that they hadn’t liked him as a child; they’d expended much of their parenting energy inculcating this view into all four of the Pontoon children. Ephraim, being the oldest, had simply heard it the longest and had taken the message to heart well before entering secondary school.

Ephraim, his father intoned over countless dinners, the last thing this world needs is more people, particularly people like us. We Pontoons are altogether ordinary, and society is structured to ensure that ordinary people get nowhere and achieve nothing.

Ephraim was never certain whether his mother agreed with her husband’s defeatist sentiments. The boy had no recollection of ever having heard her contradict him.

You listen to your father, Ephraim, she was fond of saying. He knows what he’s talking about. It wasn’t clear whether this was tacit acquiescence or simply her method of avoiding confrontation. In either event, Ephraim and his siblings heard some variation of this philosophy nearly every day from their fifth to their eighteenth birthdays, and, for the most part, it had taken deep and unyielding root.

A crisp black Friday night has descended upon Leeds, England. But it’s not so late as to see the city dwellers home and asleep. Near the intersection of Bishopsgate and Neville Streets, about 100 meters southwest of Leeds Shopping Plaza, people mill about, some scouting for an open pub or dance club, others walking nowhere, curiously peering in the windows of the closed shops. The weekend has begun, and the youngsters are out in force, looking for a bit of excitement, or at least something of a diversion from the ordinary humdrum of Yorkshire working life.

Bloody HELL! There he is! comes a sudden cry from the far side of Neville Street, near Chamberlain’s Chemists. The shrillness with which the cry pierces the English night is such that most who react do so by looking in the direction of the sound, not toward what the voice is exclaiming about. Quickly though, all eyes in the area seek out the subject of the outburst. What meets their astonished gaze is at once delightful, shocking, and bizarre—something they will tell their friends about in the coming weeks and months. They have just seen Lightning Man.

Lightning Man—Legend of Leeds, though not a legend in the sense of the Loch Ness Monster, whom many claim to have seen, but none can prove. This is an honest-to-goodness superhero, or superhero aspirant, at any rate. He is simultaneously folk hero, tourist attraction, and, in the local parlance, loony.

Lightning Man both defies and demands description, for it is the visual experience that enhances the legend. Witnesses usually only see him from some distance and only for fleeting intervals. Hence, the details have been the subject of lively debate in pubs from one end of Leeds to the other. The initial impression is one of brilliant and absolute redness. He is clad head to toe in some sort of reflective and impossibly tight red fabric. The tightness with which the material ensconces his physique is made more notable by Lightning Man’s less-than-super body shape. He is of below average height and decidedly above average girth—an image which, though increasingly ordinary in the western world, is ordinarily and mercifully lacking in the panoply of superheroes one recalls from childhood. He has the sort of build of a man who would have to put serious effort into looking merely paunchy.

The glistening tight red fabric stops at the neckline, the wrists, and the ankles. The hands are bare, the feet clad in what appear to be track shoes. And atop Lightning Man’s globular head sits a relatively ordinary bicycle helmet, made less ordinary by the degree to which its sheen and hue perfectly match the shining red outfit beneath. Covering his eyes is the only material in his ensemble that isn’t red—a simple black eye mask of the sort made popular by archaic heroes such as the Lone Ranger or Zorro.

But the pièce de résistance of Lightning Man’s accoutrement is the flowing red cape that trails behind as he makes his way across the square. The shimmer given off by the enormous piece of fabric suggests silk, satin, or some equally ethereal and weightless material. And the reason that Lightning Man’s cape flows with such splendor is the rapidity of his chosen means of conveyance—a 1970 Raleigh Robin Hood bicycle, so altogether unique and wonderful as to merit a story all