Yesterday, 01:28 PM
Years ago I wrote a Graphic novel about a hero called "The Aegis"
More recently - as the superhero genre gained traction on Netflix - I rewrote it as a 10 part screenplay
Not really much room for that here and I don't have much else to do with it so I am opting to rewrite it as one of my favorite formats of all time: The Serial! Why the hell am I posting this here???!! Not exactly sure, don't have much else to do with it TBH - I think the world moved on from serials maybe 50 years ago but here - in my beloved Pigpen - maybe there is still a small space for it. Anyway - Part 1 (of 10): The Aegis
The Block - Chapter 1
The rail yard spread out below the fence like something the city had forgotten about — freight cars sitting in the dark, the distant signal lights bleeding red into the October air. Marcus wrapped his fingers through the chain link and breathed.
He'd come four miles to get here. Maybe more. He didn't count anymore; he just ran until the particular pressure behind his sternum loosened enough that he could stand still without feeling like something was going to come out of him. Some mornings it took longer than others. This morning had been a long one.
Below, a freight car shifted against its couplings with a sound like a slow exhalation. Nothing was moving yet. The yard was all stillness and signal lights and the smell of oil and cold metal and somewhere underneath that, if you knew what you were smelling, rust.
Marcus was fourteen and he knew what he was smelling.
He stayed at the fence until the sky behind the skyline went from black to the particular gray-purple that meant the city was thinking about morning but hadn't committed to it yet. Then he let go of the chain link and turned back the way he'd come.
He heard her before he reached the apartment. Third floor, the window at the end of the hall — he could tell by the quality of the sound, the specific acoustic of their kitchen, the way the pipes knocked when she ran the tap at that angle. The thermos filling. He knew the thermos by the sound it made, a low gurgle that cut off abruptly when it hit full.
He took the stairs quietly, which was habit rather than strategy. Elena wasn't fooled by quiet. She wasn't fooled by much.
He was in bed with his eyes closed and his shoes still on when she stopped in his doorway.
For a moment nothing happened. He could feel her standing there the way you can feel someone standing in a doorway — the slight change in the air, the awareness that the space you're in has a different shape now. She was reading him. She did this with patients, he knew — stood at the door of a room and read what the room was telling her before anyone said anything. He had watched her do it in the hospital once, when he was young enough that she still brought him on shifts sometimes, before there were other arrangements. She had the ability to look at a situation and know more about it than the situation had offered.
She knew he was awake. He knew she knew. They had arrived at this a long time ago without discussing it, the way you arrive at certain things with people you live with — not decided so much as accumulated, an understanding that had built itself one morning at a time until it was simply the way things were.
"The neighborhood doesn't owe you anything, Marcus." Her voice was quiet, aimed somewhere between him and the wall, the way she sometimes talked when she was really talking to herself. "But you owe it everything."
The door to her bedroom closed. A moment later the front door opened and shut, and the particular silence of a space that had held someone and then released them settled over the apartment.
Marcus opened his eyes.
The ceiling had a water stain in the upper left corner that his mind had, over years, converted into a map of a coastline he'd never been to. He stared at it for a while. Thought about what she'd said. Thought about how her words were almost always doing two things at once, and how he had learned over time to listen for both things, and how sometimes the second thing didn't show up until days later, arriving in the middle of something entirely different.
Then he got up and unlaced his shoes and went to the window.
The block below was still mostly sleeping. A man he didn't know walking a dog he didn't recognize. The corner store's lights on but nobody inside that he could see. Down the block, the overnight freight truck from the food supplier was parked halfway on the curb, the driver's door hanging open, which meant Ramon was inside dropping the produce order and leaving the engine running again, which the building super complained about to nobody every single week.
Marcus watched it for a while.
Then he went and made himself something to eat.
He found them where he usually found them, in the particular way that didn't involve finding at all — Dre already on the corner when Marcus came around it, Bea sitting on the stoop of the building next door with her notebook open across her knees, Tiny standing slightly apart from both of them the way Tiny always stood, like he was practicing at being somewhere he hadn't fully committed to yet.
Dre saw Marcus and lifted his chin. Not a greeting exactly. More like an acknowledgment that the count was now complete.
"Truck's already there," he said.
Marcus looked down the block. The pharmacy delivery truck sat with its flashers going, the driver's door closed. He checked his watch. Nine-oh-four.
"How long?"
"Just parked."
So eleven minutes from now, give or take. It was always eleven minutes. Marcus had watched it three Tuesdays in a row before he said anything to anyone, and even then he hadn't said I think we should — he'd just mentioned the eleven minutes, offhand, the way you mention weather, and let the number do its own work in the room.
Bea closed her notebook without looking up. "Back door's unlocked on Tuesdays," she said. "Driver props it."
"How do you know that?" Tiny asked.
"Because I watched." She said it without any particular emphasis, the way you'd explain something to someone who'd asked what color the sky was. She tucked the notebook into her jacket and looked at Marcus. "Southeast corner of the truck has a blind spot from the pharmacy camera. That's new. They repositioned it last week."
Marcus nodded. He'd noticed that too, but he hadn't said so yet — he'd been waiting to see if anyone else had caught it. Bea had caught it.
"What about the corner store camera?" he said.
"Doesn't reach the truck. Angle's wrong."
"It reached in August."
Bea looked at him for a moment. "They put up the awning," she said. "End of September. Cuts the angle."
Dre made a sound that was almost impatience, almost amusement. He did this sometimes when Marcus and Bea went back and forth — a sound that meant I don't know why you two do this but it always ends up being right so fine. "You both done?" he said.
Neither of them answered, which was its own kind of answer.
Nine minutes and forty seconds, as it turned out.
The driver came back out at nine-fifteen, hitched himself up into the cab, and pulled the truck away from the curb without looking in either direction. Marcus watched him go. A man with eleven — now nine — minutes of his Tuesday accounted for, the rest of the day its own thing, the stop at the pharmacy already receding into the accumulation of stops.
They walked back through the park without hurrying. Tiny had the bag. Bea was already doing the count in her head — Marcus could tell by the way her lips moved slightly, just barely, a habit she didn't know she had. Dre was talking about something, a story about his cousin, and Marcus was listening to it with the part of his attention that was available for listening to Dre's stories, which was not the largest part but was genuine.
The rest of his attention was on the news monitor mounted outside the pharmacy across the street.
He almost walked past it. He had walked past it a hundred times. But something on the screen caught the edge of his vision and he slowed without deciding to slow, and then he stopped.
Aegis. Standing outside a downtown bank, the mayor to his left, the police commissioner slightly behind and to the right, the whole arrangement so precisely composed that Marcus's mind registered it the way it registered the truck's eleven minutes and the pharmacy camera's new angle — as a thing that had been thought about, calibrated, placed.
The chyron at the bottom of the screen said something about a Ghost-affiliated crew and a prevented robbery and community safety. Marcus didn't read all of it. He was watching the man.
The way he stood. Weight forward just slightly, enough to be present without being aggressive. Arms loose at his sides. Head tilted a few degrees to the right, which gave him the quality of someone always in the process of listening to something just out of range. Marcus had seen enough people perform confidence to know the difference between performance and the real thing, and this was the real thing — not performed at all, which was almost harder to look at than performance would have been.
"Marcus."
Dre, from five feet ahead. The others had kept walking.
Marcus looked away from the screen. Looked at Dre. Looked back at the screen once more — Aegis already mid-sentence now, answering a reporter's question with the same quality of unhurried attention — and then fell back into step.
They didn't say anything about it. There was nothing to say.
Later, in the back room of the place they used, Dre had the same press conference on his phone and was making the sound he made at things he found both impressive and irritating, which was a specific exhale through his nose.
"Standing up there with the mayor," he said. "Like they're old friends."
"Maybe they are," Tiny said.
"Nobody's old friends with the mayor." Dre set the phone face-down on the table. "That's a transaction. Everybody in that picture is getting something."
Bea was counting. The medication in one pile, the packaged food in another, the vitamins she was already sorting by type because she knew which ones Dre's buyer wanted and which ones he didn't.
"What does Aegis get?" Marcus said.
Dre picked up the phone again. Looked at the frozen image — Aegis mid-sentence, one hand slightly raised. "Same thing anybody gets from standing next to power," he said. "The appearance of more power."
Marcus looked at the phone. At the hand slightly raised. The weight forward.
"He stopped something today," Marcus said. The words came out quieter than he intended. "That crew was going to hit the bank."
"And now they're not, and the bank's money is safe, and the people who own the bank are grateful, and Aegis is on television." Dre put the phone down again. "You see how that works?"
"That man doesn't know your name, Marcus," Bea said, without looking up from her counting.
She said it without cruelty. That was the thing about Bea — she delivered true things the way she delivered the count, just the number, no editorializing. Marcus knew she was right. He also knew that knowing she was right didn't change the feeling that sat in his chest when he watched the man on the screen, which was not admiration exactly and not envy exactly but something that lived between them and didn't have a cleaner name.
He didn't answer. He took his share — smaller than his cut, same as always — and put it in his jacket and listened to Dre finish his story about his cousin while the afternoon light moved across the wall.
Elena was home between shifts when he got back, or at the end of her night — the timing shifted depending on the week and Marcus had long since stopped trying to predict it and simply adjusted to whatever he found when he came in.
She was at the stove. This meant she'd been home long enough to decide cooking was worth it, which meant at least forty minutes, which meant she wasn't going back out immediately. Marcus dropped his jacket on the chair by the door and sat at the table and she didn't turn around.
"There's rice," she said.
"I know, I can smell it."
"Then why are you sitting down like you're waiting to be served."
He got up and got a bowl.
She told him about a patient while they ate. A man in his fifties who'd come in through the wrong channels — routed through a clinic that didn't have what he needed, delayed, the paperwork building up around him like a slow flood. She'd spent two hours on the phone that morning, before her shift technically started, navigating between three different departments and a billing system that seemed designed to make the right answer as difficult as possible to reach.
"Did it work?" Marcus said.
"He's on the right program now." She pushed rice around her bowl. "For now. Until something else changes."
She said it without bitterness. That was the thing that got him sometimes — the absence of bitterness in the way she talked about the work. Like the difficulty of it was just weather. Like you didn't get to be bitter about weather.
"Sometimes," she said, "the system needs someone willing to work inside it and outside it at the same time."
She said it the way she sometimes said things — aimed slightly away from him, at the middle distance, like she was testing the sentence before she committed to it.
Marcus ate his rice. Thought about the press conference. Thought about the back room, the count, Bea's voice saying that man doesn't know your name. Thought about the drawer inside him where he put things that were going to matter.
"What do you do," he said, "when working inside it isn't enough?"
Elena looked at him. It was the look she gave patients when they asked questions that didn't have answers she was willing to simplify.
"You figure out how much outside it you can afford to be," she said. "And you stay honest with yourself about the cost."
She got up and put her bowl in the sink. The conversation was over the way Elena's conversations ended — not abruptly, just completely, a door closing on a room that would still be there later.
At midnight Marcus was at the window.
The block below had settled into its late version of itself — the corner store closed now, the overnight quiet that wasn't really quiet if you knew how to listen. A car passing. Someone's window open three floors up with music coming through it, too low to identify, just the bass underneath everything like a second heartbeat.
He had his phone out and he was watching old Aegis footage. Saved clips, some of them barely watchable — shot from across a street or from a high window, the camera shaking, the resolution the particular blur of something that happened too fast and too far away. A chase across a rooftop, the figure moving in a way that made Marcus think of water moving around obstacles. A confrontation outside a parking structure, two minutes of circling and then something that resolved so quickly the camera missed it and the operator swung back to find Aegis already still, already turning toward the gathering crowd.
He watched it the way he watched everything. Looking for the pattern underneath the thing itself.
The weight forward. The head tilted right. The arms loose and ready in a way that looked relaxed until you understood that ready and relaxed were the same thing if you practiced long enough.
He watched it until the phone screen dimmed and he had to tap it back to life.
Below, the block went on being the block. Owing nothing. Requiring everything.
Marcus stood at the window for a long time after he put the phone in his pocket. The freight yard was too far to see from here but he knew it was there, the cars sitting in the dark, the signal lights bleeding red into the sky. The city breathing around all of it.
He thought about what Elena had said. He thought about the cost of being outside.
He thought about the hand, slightly raised, mid-sentence, on a screen outside a pharmacy on a Tuesday morning in October.
He stayed at the window until the bass from three floors up finally stopped, and then a little longer, and then he went to bed.
More recently - as the superhero genre gained traction on Netflix - I rewrote it as a 10 part screenplay
Not really much room for that here and I don't have much else to do with it so I am opting to rewrite it as one of my favorite formats of all time: The Serial! Why the hell am I posting this here???!! Not exactly sure, don't have much else to do with it TBH - I think the world moved on from serials maybe 50 years ago but here - in my beloved Pigpen - maybe there is still a small space for it. Anyway - Part 1 (of 10): The Aegis
The Block - Chapter 1
The rail yard spread out below the fence like something the city had forgotten about — freight cars sitting in the dark, the distant signal lights bleeding red into the October air. Marcus wrapped his fingers through the chain link and breathed.
He'd come four miles to get here. Maybe more. He didn't count anymore; he just ran until the particular pressure behind his sternum loosened enough that he could stand still without feeling like something was going to come out of him. Some mornings it took longer than others. This morning had been a long one.
Below, a freight car shifted against its couplings with a sound like a slow exhalation. Nothing was moving yet. The yard was all stillness and signal lights and the smell of oil and cold metal and somewhere underneath that, if you knew what you were smelling, rust.
Marcus was fourteen and he knew what he was smelling.
He stayed at the fence until the sky behind the skyline went from black to the particular gray-purple that meant the city was thinking about morning but hadn't committed to it yet. Then he let go of the chain link and turned back the way he'd come.
He heard her before he reached the apartment. Third floor, the window at the end of the hall — he could tell by the quality of the sound, the specific acoustic of their kitchen, the way the pipes knocked when she ran the tap at that angle. The thermos filling. He knew the thermos by the sound it made, a low gurgle that cut off abruptly when it hit full.
He took the stairs quietly, which was habit rather than strategy. Elena wasn't fooled by quiet. She wasn't fooled by much.
He was in bed with his eyes closed and his shoes still on when she stopped in his doorway.
For a moment nothing happened. He could feel her standing there the way you can feel someone standing in a doorway — the slight change in the air, the awareness that the space you're in has a different shape now. She was reading him. She did this with patients, he knew — stood at the door of a room and read what the room was telling her before anyone said anything. He had watched her do it in the hospital once, when he was young enough that she still brought him on shifts sometimes, before there were other arrangements. She had the ability to look at a situation and know more about it than the situation had offered.
She knew he was awake. He knew she knew. They had arrived at this a long time ago without discussing it, the way you arrive at certain things with people you live with — not decided so much as accumulated, an understanding that had built itself one morning at a time until it was simply the way things were.
"The neighborhood doesn't owe you anything, Marcus." Her voice was quiet, aimed somewhere between him and the wall, the way she sometimes talked when she was really talking to herself. "But you owe it everything."
The door to her bedroom closed. A moment later the front door opened and shut, and the particular silence of a space that had held someone and then released them settled over the apartment.
Marcus opened his eyes.
The ceiling had a water stain in the upper left corner that his mind had, over years, converted into a map of a coastline he'd never been to. He stared at it for a while. Thought about what she'd said. Thought about how her words were almost always doing two things at once, and how he had learned over time to listen for both things, and how sometimes the second thing didn't show up until days later, arriving in the middle of something entirely different.
Then he got up and unlaced his shoes and went to the window.
The block below was still mostly sleeping. A man he didn't know walking a dog he didn't recognize. The corner store's lights on but nobody inside that he could see. Down the block, the overnight freight truck from the food supplier was parked halfway on the curb, the driver's door hanging open, which meant Ramon was inside dropping the produce order and leaving the engine running again, which the building super complained about to nobody every single week.
Marcus watched it for a while.
Then he went and made himself something to eat.
He found them where he usually found them, in the particular way that didn't involve finding at all — Dre already on the corner when Marcus came around it, Bea sitting on the stoop of the building next door with her notebook open across her knees, Tiny standing slightly apart from both of them the way Tiny always stood, like he was practicing at being somewhere he hadn't fully committed to yet.
Dre saw Marcus and lifted his chin. Not a greeting exactly. More like an acknowledgment that the count was now complete.
"Truck's already there," he said.
Marcus looked down the block. The pharmacy delivery truck sat with its flashers going, the driver's door closed. He checked his watch. Nine-oh-four.
"How long?"
"Just parked."
So eleven minutes from now, give or take. It was always eleven minutes. Marcus had watched it three Tuesdays in a row before he said anything to anyone, and even then he hadn't said I think we should — he'd just mentioned the eleven minutes, offhand, the way you mention weather, and let the number do its own work in the room.
Bea closed her notebook without looking up. "Back door's unlocked on Tuesdays," she said. "Driver props it."
"How do you know that?" Tiny asked.
"Because I watched." She said it without any particular emphasis, the way you'd explain something to someone who'd asked what color the sky was. She tucked the notebook into her jacket and looked at Marcus. "Southeast corner of the truck has a blind spot from the pharmacy camera. That's new. They repositioned it last week."
Marcus nodded. He'd noticed that too, but he hadn't said so yet — he'd been waiting to see if anyone else had caught it. Bea had caught it.
"What about the corner store camera?" he said.
"Doesn't reach the truck. Angle's wrong."
"It reached in August."
Bea looked at him for a moment. "They put up the awning," she said. "End of September. Cuts the angle."
Dre made a sound that was almost impatience, almost amusement. He did this sometimes when Marcus and Bea went back and forth — a sound that meant I don't know why you two do this but it always ends up being right so fine. "You both done?" he said.
Neither of them answered, which was its own kind of answer.
Nine minutes and forty seconds, as it turned out.
The driver came back out at nine-fifteen, hitched himself up into the cab, and pulled the truck away from the curb without looking in either direction. Marcus watched him go. A man with eleven — now nine — minutes of his Tuesday accounted for, the rest of the day its own thing, the stop at the pharmacy already receding into the accumulation of stops.
They walked back through the park without hurrying. Tiny had the bag. Bea was already doing the count in her head — Marcus could tell by the way her lips moved slightly, just barely, a habit she didn't know she had. Dre was talking about something, a story about his cousin, and Marcus was listening to it with the part of his attention that was available for listening to Dre's stories, which was not the largest part but was genuine.
The rest of his attention was on the news monitor mounted outside the pharmacy across the street.
He almost walked past it. He had walked past it a hundred times. But something on the screen caught the edge of his vision and he slowed without deciding to slow, and then he stopped.
Aegis. Standing outside a downtown bank, the mayor to his left, the police commissioner slightly behind and to the right, the whole arrangement so precisely composed that Marcus's mind registered it the way it registered the truck's eleven minutes and the pharmacy camera's new angle — as a thing that had been thought about, calibrated, placed.
The chyron at the bottom of the screen said something about a Ghost-affiliated crew and a prevented robbery and community safety. Marcus didn't read all of it. He was watching the man.
The way he stood. Weight forward just slightly, enough to be present without being aggressive. Arms loose at his sides. Head tilted a few degrees to the right, which gave him the quality of someone always in the process of listening to something just out of range. Marcus had seen enough people perform confidence to know the difference between performance and the real thing, and this was the real thing — not performed at all, which was almost harder to look at than performance would have been.
"Marcus."
Dre, from five feet ahead. The others had kept walking.
Marcus looked away from the screen. Looked at Dre. Looked back at the screen once more — Aegis already mid-sentence now, answering a reporter's question with the same quality of unhurried attention — and then fell back into step.
They didn't say anything about it. There was nothing to say.
Later, in the back room of the place they used, Dre had the same press conference on his phone and was making the sound he made at things he found both impressive and irritating, which was a specific exhale through his nose.
"Standing up there with the mayor," he said. "Like they're old friends."
"Maybe they are," Tiny said.
"Nobody's old friends with the mayor." Dre set the phone face-down on the table. "That's a transaction. Everybody in that picture is getting something."
Bea was counting. The medication in one pile, the packaged food in another, the vitamins she was already sorting by type because she knew which ones Dre's buyer wanted and which ones he didn't.
"What does Aegis get?" Marcus said.
Dre picked up the phone again. Looked at the frozen image — Aegis mid-sentence, one hand slightly raised. "Same thing anybody gets from standing next to power," he said. "The appearance of more power."
Marcus looked at the phone. At the hand slightly raised. The weight forward.
"He stopped something today," Marcus said. The words came out quieter than he intended. "That crew was going to hit the bank."
"And now they're not, and the bank's money is safe, and the people who own the bank are grateful, and Aegis is on television." Dre put the phone down again. "You see how that works?"
"That man doesn't know your name, Marcus," Bea said, without looking up from her counting.
She said it without cruelty. That was the thing about Bea — she delivered true things the way she delivered the count, just the number, no editorializing. Marcus knew she was right. He also knew that knowing she was right didn't change the feeling that sat in his chest when he watched the man on the screen, which was not admiration exactly and not envy exactly but something that lived between them and didn't have a cleaner name.
He didn't answer. He took his share — smaller than his cut, same as always — and put it in his jacket and listened to Dre finish his story about his cousin while the afternoon light moved across the wall.
Elena was home between shifts when he got back, or at the end of her night — the timing shifted depending on the week and Marcus had long since stopped trying to predict it and simply adjusted to whatever he found when he came in.
She was at the stove. This meant she'd been home long enough to decide cooking was worth it, which meant at least forty minutes, which meant she wasn't going back out immediately. Marcus dropped his jacket on the chair by the door and sat at the table and she didn't turn around.
"There's rice," she said.
"I know, I can smell it."
"Then why are you sitting down like you're waiting to be served."
He got up and got a bowl.
She told him about a patient while they ate. A man in his fifties who'd come in through the wrong channels — routed through a clinic that didn't have what he needed, delayed, the paperwork building up around him like a slow flood. She'd spent two hours on the phone that morning, before her shift technically started, navigating between three different departments and a billing system that seemed designed to make the right answer as difficult as possible to reach.
"Did it work?" Marcus said.
"He's on the right program now." She pushed rice around her bowl. "For now. Until something else changes."
She said it without bitterness. That was the thing that got him sometimes — the absence of bitterness in the way she talked about the work. Like the difficulty of it was just weather. Like you didn't get to be bitter about weather.
"Sometimes," she said, "the system needs someone willing to work inside it and outside it at the same time."
She said it the way she sometimes said things — aimed slightly away from him, at the middle distance, like she was testing the sentence before she committed to it.
Marcus ate his rice. Thought about the press conference. Thought about the back room, the count, Bea's voice saying that man doesn't know your name. Thought about the drawer inside him where he put things that were going to matter.
"What do you do," he said, "when working inside it isn't enough?"
Elena looked at him. It was the look she gave patients when they asked questions that didn't have answers she was willing to simplify.
"You figure out how much outside it you can afford to be," she said. "And you stay honest with yourself about the cost."
She got up and put her bowl in the sink. The conversation was over the way Elena's conversations ended — not abruptly, just completely, a door closing on a room that would still be there later.
At midnight Marcus was at the window.
The block below had settled into its late version of itself — the corner store closed now, the overnight quiet that wasn't really quiet if you knew how to listen. A car passing. Someone's window open three floors up with music coming through it, too low to identify, just the bass underneath everything like a second heartbeat.
He had his phone out and he was watching old Aegis footage. Saved clips, some of them barely watchable — shot from across a street or from a high window, the camera shaking, the resolution the particular blur of something that happened too fast and too far away. A chase across a rooftop, the figure moving in a way that made Marcus think of water moving around obstacles. A confrontation outside a parking structure, two minutes of circling and then something that resolved so quickly the camera missed it and the operator swung back to find Aegis already still, already turning toward the gathering crowd.
He watched it the way he watched everything. Looking for the pattern underneath the thing itself.
The weight forward. The head tilted right. The arms loose and ready in a way that looked relaxed until you understood that ready and relaxed were the same thing if you practiced long enough.
He watched it until the phone screen dimmed and he had to tap it back to life.
Below, the block went on being the block. Owing nothing. Requiring everything.
Marcus stood at the window for a long time after he put the phone in his pocket. The freight yard was too far to see from here but he knew it was there, the cars sitting in the dark, the signal lights bleeding red into the sky. The city breathing around all of it.
He thought about what Elena had said. He thought about the cost of being outside.
He thought about the hand, slightly raised, mid-sentence, on a screen outside a pharmacy on a Tuesday morning in October.
He stayed at the window until the bass from three floors up finally stopped, and then a little longer, and then he went to bed.