On The Dangers of Living Too Long In Your Nostalgia. (#1)
Jun 1, 2019 0:10:11 GMT -5
The Anarchist and Gerard Angelo like this
Post by Kyle Shane on Jun 1, 2019 0:10:11 GMT -5
I'm not where I should be, and I'm very stressed about that fact. Desperate even.
I am, at this moment, burping a very colic-y baby on my shoulder as I sit behind someone else's desk. The phone rings incessantly, Hiro's secretary failing to do any kind of job of screening as she parks each caller from the divisions under Hiro's purview, and my phone's side is blinking like Christmas lights. Stacks of paperwork, denials for funding, and memos are scattershot across the whole works, and I am trying to keep all of this together. Miko's mouth stretches wide, and she lets an ear piercing howl go that bursts through my ear drums and I'm in a state of constant stress now because I cannot discern what she wants. Ever since that first night, the night of the freaky electrical storm; where I tried explaining, in a panic to Kitsune that I was not who she thought I was and I was a stranger in her bed, my life has devolved into this tragicomedy of errors. Nobody seems to pay heed to my protests that I don't know what I'm doing here, to a one they all just shoved me into the breech, slapped a baby bottle or a ream of expense reports into my lap and told me to get to work. My stomach is in knots as I think of all of the shit Hiro could be doing in my body, the damage.
**
He's examining himself in the mirror again. Lately, Array has noticed he is always examining himself in the mirror. And he's styling his hair in an unusual way, more blade like, gelled and precise than Kyle's usual unkempt style... this is an attribute to which he is paying a good deal of attention to every morning, making sure to check out every angle, and giving subtle, murmured commentary. He's telling himself how good he looks.
It had taken her all of fifteen minutes of watching his new morning ritual to work it out. That was not Kyle. She had thought and discarded numerous mental break theories, but the plain truth lie even beyond the fact that he was acting more boyish, giddy, and unbearable. It lay even beyond the fact that he had touched her in ways that made her skin crawl. It was the way he was looking at himself nonstop, smiling as he gelled his hair into that unfamiliar haircut, the casual arrogance behind the little smiles and whispered pep-talks, the entirely indifferent treatment to all of his usual staples of his life. That was what told her it wasn't quite him. The way he had touched her, therefore, took on a deeply souring and terrifying note in her mind, then... because if it wasn't Kyle doing... that to her then... her skin crawled. She made it a point to keep as much of the apartment and furniture between them as she could, but as she stood out in the hall by the bathroom, just behind the edge, and listened to him giving himself his narcissistic spa treatment, she heard his phone ringing, for the hundredth time. This time, finally, he picked up.
"Whaddup, bruddah?" Kyle Shane's smiling face answered his phone, gently applying a deep pore cucumber lotion to the bridge of his nose as he did.
**
"Hiro," I can't quite hide the exasperation and the pain in my voice, to hear... well, my voice coming across, so coolly. "It's been two days. I've been calling you for - "
"Yes, I know, and by the way, I changed your ringtones, mine is now a much cooler song by Blackpink," came the rejoinder, along with a goofy chuckle that sounded incongruous coming out of my own throat.
I sighed. Pinched the bridge of my nose. Transferred Hiro's own child to the opposite crook of my shoulder, and decided to try again. We both had worked out immediately that the switch had happened the night of the storm. It wasn't hard to figure out, body switch was a staple of the 80's comedies that informed our collective Game Boyz sense of humor, and that spared us the awkwardness of finding each other and having to explain the whole spiel. But I had been pushed out of bed and forced to take over Hiro's day to day, while Hiro assumed all of my surface, but none of my responsibility. Or, for that matter, what would happen if he actually showed up at my job pretending to be me. It made my head hurt, and not just because I was drowning here trying to keep up my appearances. Hiro's voice softens and I try to reason with my body again, "Hiro... listen, man. We have to put this right, because you don't want to have to go around dressing like me, acting like me - Hiro, you retired from wrestling in 2011, if you tried to be me again you'd - "
"You know I've been giving it a lot of thought," he breaks in abruptly, his voice both stubborn and a little bit defiant, "And I missed being in the ring. I missed doing what you do."
I can almost see in our minds eye the first time in a long time he had stepped a tentative foot into a ring. He had hesitated like a baby bird on the precipe, dipping a limb out to test the air currents, but the first time the ropes had kissed his skin and he had begun to run the ring he had let out a disbelieving laugh. I know this happened. I can see it.
"And I've watched you on TV, I know what to - "
"Hiro - " I can't believe I'm hearing the pure hubris of what is coming through, " - It's more than that, you're remembering what it was like in the IEW, through a lens of nostalgia, it isn't like that, wrestling isn't - the way we do promos now is more - You have to - " I just realized for the first time that I am trying to describe what being in a fed is like in the latter day to someone who has been out of the game since 2011, who has not been privy to the myriad ways it has evolved. Hiro-as-Kyle doesn't seem to care.
"Do you remember that promo we did where the pizza delivery boy fell into the wood chipper?" He lets this come across the phone line as if taking a hit of endorphins from each sacred syllable, a heady mix of member-berries that take him back to those simpler times and that long-ago, fondly remembered promo which had garnered us best of the week award. I want to say, as I always do when Hiro gets in his remembrances that of course I remember them, but I don't want to visit them as much or as fondly. I want to keep making things that are new. But I can't if I'm currently babysitting someone else's child. And Hiro can't go back to that time, even if we wanted to. It was the well laid trap of nostalgia, nothing would ever be as good if you went back and looked at it from the perspective of where you are now, because time and preferences evolve and move on.
"Or how about when we stole Go-Karts and drove them to the arena to play Game Boyz Kart? I could do something like that - or I could - "
I'm cringing so hard at thinking of Kyle Shane showing up in a makeshift Mario outfit that just now, I'm seeing with so much self-awareness how some people might see me when I do cosplay. But I push that aside, and I just as bluntly but as respectfully let Hiro know as I can, "That's stupid". Undaunted, he has the million pitches of a man who has been thinking about this since his glory days. I can see him now, in this office, as he's seated behind a spreadsheet, and he's mentally mapping out how another Game Boyz promo would go, and it's coming out a little like Hiro in Kyle's body saying - "Or what if I posted this long Reddit thread, but all of the Reddit names are names of guys in the Pure Class Wrestling, right, and Justin Michaels says "Blarg blah blag, I'm gonna win the Icemann Invitational Tournament" and there's like fifteen downvotes on it, and then I come in with a sweet meme of his head photoshopped onto a monkey with a finger up it's butt and I - "
"Hiro..." I more forcefully break in, bumping the baby on my shoulder, "That. Is. Stupid."
"Oh come on, 'Hiro', you used to love my ideas!"
"Hiro... you have my body. But you can't just go back in to doing things like we used to do and pretending that you're fine. You haven't - "
"I haven't what, Kyle?" his - my - voice dared, and he was snarling now. "I know you think I'm out of touch because I haven't been interested in keeping up with whatever it is you're doing now. Those overblown, melodramatic emo pieces you like filming. Maybe I fucking WANT to do something like we used to do. Maybe I WANT to bring back a sense of fun."
"You think I haven't, dude? I used to love filming Game Boyz promos. I used to love filming things that took me thirty minutes of off the cuff riffing and surreal forum humor instead of digging deep into my life and showing people broken pieces. But it isn't REAL, Hiro. None of it felt real."
I feel and hear his mocking mumble under his breath. "And what's real?" I finally hear him say out loud. As much as I don't like him right now, I don't know what to say to that. All I know is that if I let him go out there, attempting to do the things he's forgotten how to in almost a decade of inaction, he is going to make himself look bad. Leave aside the fact that if he comes at Justin Michaels with a God damn Reddit thread or some other 2009-vintage idea then all the credibility I'd ever built up and all those "Innovative" awards I racked up I may as well have to give back. My oldest friend had fallen into a trap that, ironically, Michaels himself has fallen into. He'd experienced so much success in his heyday and he walked away from the business only to not follow it and see where changes were made.
I think of Michaels and how nonstop it is with him, how he is ALWAYS, always talking about what he did for PCW back in 2005, how he won this title, how he faced this legend that's about two generations removed from anyone I know. Honestly, that's what Hiro's "hey remember the time we" reminds me so annoyingly of, someone who just can't fucking let go. Michaels obviously didn't pay any attention to the product while he was gone, he literally only keeps Anarchist Jase Willard as a frame of reference. Because why should he make an effort, why should he give a shit? It pours through every single sentence to ooze out of his lips. How the first time he met me on that shitshow Club V segment, he poo-pooed me as some rookie he couldn't even bother to learn the name of. How every single time he speaks of Kyle Shane it's as someone who hasn't been here long enough for him to remember.
Or that I talk a lot. Of course. All the talking. So much for poor Justin. He always has to mention the talking, because I guess people didn't TALK so much back in his and Grimm's day. Like I ever care. But beyond that, everything is always about what Justin deserves, because don't you remember the time he did that thing ten years ago while he was here? Wasn't it awesome when he held the International title before, so much so that he had to rename his fucking NA title in a fit to bring back it's history? Don't you remember how people took him as a main event threat before he left for an interminable amount of time and came back and there was this kid named Kyle Shane in his way that proceeded to defeat him for number one contendership, and then stood in his way and continued to rise past Justin Michaels and push him back down the card every chance he got? Wasn't life so great when Justin Michaels was champion?
The danger of living so hard for yesterday is that you become a nostalgia act. An irrelevant anachronism, a frozen figure stuck in place. That's true in a wrestler's career, where nostalgia acts are sad fucking forty year old dudes like Johnny Matthews and Justin Michaels that still try to bring their outdated tactics out and insist they belong on a pantheon of an evolved crowd that no longer needs them. And it is even truer here, now, in real life. In the life of a man who was never prepared to transition from a life where he was given validation and applause for his forward thinking into a coldly unfeeling adulthood where he is given nothing.
All of which played out in my mind as I heard Hiro-as-Kyle humming and running water on the other end of the line, totally unbothered. Why would he be, in his reversed position? He's not sitting here with someone else's baby drooling spittle and baby food onto an expensive blazer. Someone's head peeked in my - well, Hiro's - office, a bespectacled, mousy girl I had to take a second to peg as Hiro's secretary. Oh, now she was going to do her job, I thought blackly. She hesitated a fraction and said, "Um, Hiro, your dad is calling to remind you of the meeting in conference room three - "
I waved her off, turning my chair back to the shaded window and finally thanking any god listening that Miko had started to doze off, drooling against my chest. The other end of the line is still going, but I can hear my voice, giving itself a little pep talk into the mirror, and it said "Ooh yeah daddy, girls are gonna be looking," and other such little notes of self-talk. The secretary stares at me, an urgent, impatient "Will you get going" grimace and hand indication to get to conference room three. I ignore her. I hope he stays on the phone with me, because I have no other recourse than to talk him into getting our bodies switched back the right way.
**
So that was it, she breathed quietly, and she moved away from the doorframe. Hiro was applying cologne with the lavish attention of a serial killer putting the lotion on the skin, all while giving himself little "ooh nice" mouth puckers and head tuts into the mirror. That wasn't Kyle at all. She felt... ill. Her mind flashfroze, thinking of his fingers crawling over her skin in the dead of night while she had been asleep, and she felt a dry heave coming up. She couldn't help it. She ran, putting the entire length of the apartment between her and that creep in the bathroom and getting to the kitchen sink, retching up a violent spill of stomach bile and purest, bleakest disgust. If she had been able to look, she would see him pause in the bathroom down the hall, waking briefly from his reverie to peer out of the bathroom, before going back in.
Array's chest was heaving, and she felt claustrophobic. Two days trapped with someone who wasn't even her Kyle, and... last night... it was all too much. Her chest was constricted by red hot iron bands and crawled on hands and knees towards the center island of the kitchen, using it to pull herself up. Her blind hands slapped for the drawers, and she extracted the drawer with cutlery in it, finding the biggest knife, but then, squeezing her eyes shut in that same frenzied state she recognized that that- in some way - was Kyle in there, it was KYLE - and she shut the drawer with the knives again before the temptation grew even a second stronger to use that knife, draw it out and use it on him, plant it right between those shoulder blades, or... worse, on herself.
She slapped a hand over her mouth, having to fight hard to push back a big, wracking scream. The man in there was saying something about wrestling, he was just discussing it like nothing else was any consequence to him... and she was in here feeling so violated by someone who was both a stranger and yet too familiar. The hurt and the horror was too much, and Array had to get out. She cast a worried stare towards the hall, but she snatched their car keys. She was out the door.
"Look, 'Hiro', let me bottom line it for you," she heard her tormentor saying, as confidently and smarmily as anything in the world, "I like it in this body, and you have a life I would give anything for, so this is the way it's going to stay."
Of all the nightmare scenarios that had ever arose from her life with Kyle Shane, hearing someone say that in Kyle Shane's voice was the scariest thing she could have thought of.
She fled down the hall.
**
I just looked at the phone, not sure what to say to that, the sinister tone, the insistent, stubborn arrogance. This was the Hiro I always knew lay under that cheesy Overlord persona, the dark narcissicm of a Raj Koothrapali to my younger self's less confident Howard Wallowitz. This was a Game Boy who had sat behind a desk for years and been subject to middle management headaches, deadlines, department drama, and family strife. I looked into the eyes of his daughter, resting her head on the shoulder, and I felt sad that we had come to this impasse.
"Hiro," I say, once more trying to be reasonable, "We don't know what effects this could have... it could be permanent... we could experience brain damage, dementia, we could - "
"Boring. Don't care," he said, and he seemed to finally be putting a cap on his facial ritual.
"Hiro, how can you say you don't care about getting your body back, about getting back to your life- don't you - "
"Yeah, pass." I could hear the shrug, and still, the coldness, the darkness, the utter impotent, shackled rage that lay behind the friendly veneer of our every few weeks hangout sessions, and to have to hear it come through in my own voice was the most chilling and disturbing part of it all. "You may not see it right now, but I'm giving you the chance of a lifetime, Shane, I want you to appreciate what it is to be me. To have a father that puts you in the most wasted divisions and sees you as a child who can't use his own money, to go home to a wife - "
"Hir-"
"A Wife, 'Hiro', who's so cold to you that when you come home from a long day of managing a tech division, she only wants to talk about why you didn't unload the dishwasher and hell no she doesn't want to have sex tonight, she's TIRED - A daughter - "
"HIRO-!"
"A Daughter, 'Hiro', who needs, needs, needs, she has asthma so she needs a nebulizer treatment, she has allergies to foods and we have to buy the expensive food that comes from a specialty maker that has no peanuts, she has to get the best toys even though she's testing below her percentile in infant intelligence but her Mommy wants -"
"Hiro, STOP. Dude I get it, you've had some bad breaks, but you can't expect it all to go away by - "
"Some bad breaks, Kyle? I GRADUATED an Ivy Freaking League school, I went to work for my father's company and I became head of a division, all of that while you dropped out and tooled around." And yet, it still didn't make him happy. It came through loud and clear in his voice. But he still continued his rant, sounding emotional near to tears. "I - I sacrificed so much to - And you just get to be this. Amazing person. With a life that is everything I wanted." He sighed, let out a shaky breath, and it felt in this emotional moment that both of our hearts were heavy, breaking.
How could I even begin to explain my life was not, and would never be perfect? How can you explain that to someone who only sees what you have? And the pitch perfect irony, in that I see all Hiro has here, and god if it doesn't look idyllic from the outside, if I didn't know how empty he was feeling about it.
And then my brow clouded, and I looked down at Miko, her sleepy eyes opening and looking up at her dada. And I got angry. Because that doesn't matter. "Are you just going to cry about it?"
"Wh-what?" he asks, astonished.
"Poor baby, life peaked when you were younger, being an adult sucks, wah wah wah." I seriously, seriously hated people that lived so much in the past. And that's, perhaps what made all of this so aggravating. What made even dealing with Hiro now such a headache.
"Uh, first, fuck you, mister sad boy," he came back, "The fuck do you even have to be sad about, your dad croaked after beating you and your mommy had cancer. Boo freaking hoo."
"Hiro, you shut your mouth - "
"You live in a Penthouse APARTMENT with a freaking smoking hot supermodel, which..." His voice dropped a pitch as if he was cupping a hand around the phone, looking furtively, the cadence we used to effect when we were discussing some celebrity we used to daydream over in Coding class, "...Can I just say, mmm, damn. She is so hot. I wish she wasn't such a frigid little bitch though. She doesn't ever want to fool around." He laughs, an ugly, locker room laugh. "Reminds me of Kitsune actually."
And now it was Hiro Sasuke's voice that came through the phone like an icy, tight snarl, as I spit out through clenched teeth "Don't you freaking touch her."
He gave a carefree, cocky laugh through my throat as if he had the whole world in his hands. "Oh, you. I don't need Array, bro, don't you remember, I usedta be able to pull any chica I want." The old Hiro Sasuke surfaced again, bristling with dangerous confidence and an edge that said who cares what they think, I am young, handsome and I can get anything I want.
It was that paperthin college age confidence which had propelled their adventures in point of fact, their Revenge of the Nerds esque quests to get some action. But now, removed from that context, given a decade to sour and curdle into creepy boundary crossing, it was it's own nightmare. And so I had even more reason to dread Hiro having control of the wheel over there, but even less idea how to go about fixing things.
"Hiro, stay there, will you? I just -"
"Sorry bruddah," he signed off with easy, sociopathic charm, "I'm gonna go out for a test drive. Latas."
I looked dumbly at the brick of the phone in my hand. I contemplated chucking it through the window in my corner office, along with Hiro's damn potted succulents and pictures of his family he had now cast aside. But the phone was a lightbulb in my consciousness, and I took a few minutes cursing to realize I didn't know the number I needed by heart - but knowing that she would have insight into this situation, how to talk Hiro down, stop him before he did any more damage - or find a way to lure him back to the lab so we could undo the switch -
I couldn't get more than a few rings in before a severe woman I had only seen maybe twice in my life came up to me, exuding more confidence and authority than I could imagine in all of my years of being called upon the carpet. With a sinking feeling I knew where I recognized her; Rumiko. It was Hiro's sister.
She glared hatefully at her brother, and I know that if she was able to twist my arm behind my head she would. She did the next best thing, verbally, eviscerating me with a look and said, "You can't duck father forever, little Hiro. Your quarterly review is now, and seeing as how you don't have any viable products in final stages yet, you have nothing to justify your budget."
"Rumiko, I - I know this is gonna sound strange, but you've got to listen to me, I have to go into the city, if you can just cover for me - "
Her stare is ice. "I have been covering for you your whole life. Even when people told father that you were not level headed enough to run a division."
So much hate, unspoken family animosity and rivalry, power plays lay unspoken, hidden, and because I had no idea of any of it, buried, but Rumiko motioned me forward, flanked by two assistants, larger men in topknots, silk suits and sunglasses that I could swear were bodyguards. I remembered Ichiro Sasuke's Yakuza ties once upon a time and as the contingent of very large men flanked me, walking me towards the conference room, I gulped like a man being lead to gallows. As we walked to the office, my secretary peeked her head in again. She saw Rumiko, saw the two suit boys with the top knots, and she looked scared.
"Your wife is here to pick up Miko for daycare," she said hesitantly before looking like she'd rather be anywhere else. I look over to Hiro's sister, who heaves an impatient sigh, and checks her watch before cutting her eyes to the bodyguards and giving an imperceptible head bow. We go out into the hall, meeting the baby's mother, who does not seem pleased to see me. I mean, small wonder, I've been ranting in her face for two days about something that sounds like madness.
Despite being at wrists length from two big men in black, I step forward, handing her the child, and I meet my - Hiro's wife and my eyes plead with her to get help. Still I want to try again.
"Kit, I know the past few days have made no sense to you but you have to listen - "
Kitsune Hamada-Sasuke is a woman with a chubby face, and weary eyes, unkempt hair, and the weight of the world on her shoulders. She looks at me with not inconsiderable disdain as she takes Miko. "It does make sense, Hiro, it's just another silly story like the kind you're always reminiscing about. That's all you ever want to talk on the phone with your stupid boyfriend Kyle about, the old days and the million cute promo ideas you had."
I lean in, urgently taking her by the forearms, "No, just listen to me, I am K-"
She doesn't want to hear it, turning her head away, and saying "No, Hiro, you are not Kyle, because Kyle at least continued following his dreams and chasing after what made him happy. You don't want to try to make anything new for yourself. You are just a little boy that got transplanted into an adult's suit. You just want to go back to your childhood."
I'm a bit crestfallen. Rumiko, the bodyguards, they're taking in my dressing down with smiles hidden behind their hands, or looking up to count the fluorescent lights to hide their mocking smirks.
Kitsune pushes past me, bearing Miko on her hip, and I gesture to Rumiko and the bullyboys, as if tacitly telling Kit they mean to do me a serious threat here, but I just say, "Come on, Kit, don't leave me here alone..."
"You are alone, Hiro... because you decided you were going to live with all of your past victories instead of here with me." At that, one of the bodyguards lets out a muffled chuckle and "oh damn," but Kit is walking away still. And my hopes of rescue with her. And there it goes. Maybe that is the danger of living so long in your own nostalgia that you forget how to be a man.
Rumi raises her eyebrows, mouth confined in a little awkward ice-breaking smirk and says "Well... that went well, did it, brother? Come. Let's not let father keep waiting, don't want to disappoint anybody else."
As I was walked through a bullpen, people craned their head up from their cubicles. I smiled wanly, waved a little, showing weakly that everything was fine. By my side, Rumiko was smiling more honestly, even if her smile was nasty and brutal. "What's the matter, little Hiro?"
"Rumiko, you don't understand... I'm not..."
"I understand that your sci fi toys and expensive concepts are based on futurism that does not adhere to the resources you are given," she came back with. "I understand that you chose to use our father's money to fund your capitalist ventures, play with phone apps and chase dreams." She turned towards me, looking not unkindly, but still severely.
"And I understand, brother. You long for the simple years of filming silly videos for Youtube and playing around with your Iron Man suits, you wanted to make your nerdy sci-fi dreams realities. But our company can not profit from useless, fantastical trinkets that break our budget but produce no results. You will have to answer to father and the board."
And I had nothing to say to that, honestly. Just a sinking feeling of dread that had, for the first time over the last few days, nothing to do with the occupation of my real body.
Or maybe it had more to do with it than I want to admit, because Hiro was the blackest mirror to hold up and look into.
Hiro was what you got when someone lived off the past. I saw it in everything he had, in the corner office that was too small for the son of a CEO and the head of a division, in the frustration in his voice when he talked about his wife and how he always deflected talk to how much better things were back in the day, reminiscing about old stories. How his old girl crazy antics which seemed charming, just one of the boys like when we were 19 now turned bad when he was a husband and a father. And maybe it was my nostalgia that powered my acceptance of his flaws, because I remembered the good times the Game Boyz had had as being a lot better than they objectively were. It allowed me to look past the sexism, the creepy behavior, and the lack of empathy inherent in him. He was a rich boy that was brought up wealthy, and his familys money and... connections meant that he could have anything he wanted.
When someone like that, who hasn't struggled, grows up, and finds that life does not come easily to you like that, what happens? When someone who had it so carefree for so long gets brought down to earth?
I mean, it is a small wonder Hiro wanted to talk about the old times so much, right?
Makes me idly wonder about Justin Michaels, as we're waiting in the elevator, flanked by two big men, and if he ever had the flashes of self-awareness about his descent into pathetic nostalgia that Hiro always seemed to lack. Probably not, right? Dude obviously thought he was nailing it when he came out there with his 90's trenchcoat/baseball bat combination to berate announcers.
But Hiro... in my minds eye I can almost see him nailing the cocky Overlord strut using my long legs, grinning and finger gunning as he goes down the hallway, still trying to pretend like it's 2009 again and he's a young boy with all of the money and none of the responsibility. Kitsune, his father, Rumiko, his tech division, all of it falling away, onto someone else's shoulders. Putting on the mask of what he sees as Kyle Shane really is, because why should Kyle Shane give a shit?
The elevator dings, and Rumiko nods to her bullyboys, I'm "escorted" out. I pull my arms in, frustrated. There's a boardroom down the hall, I can already see the cold, sterile chairs and the men seated in a semi-circle under the austere lighting. And as I come through the entrance, I see him seated at the head of the table. Ichiro's face is like skin drawn taut over a skull, and his lips are firmly planted together in a perpetual, wrinkled frown. He looks like he hasn't ever experienced a moment of joy in his life. He stares down the table at me, and nods for me to sit down.
"We have much to discuss about the budget, do we not," he says, and the two guards over my shoulder stand there with their arms folded.
And just now I'm the one wishing for the sweet nostalgia of a few days ago.
**
Array watches him get into the car and leave, then returns to the phone. "I'm telling you, that isn't him. I freaked out when I heard them talking, but I know Kyle."
"Honestly, as weird as our life can get sometimes I wonder why I'm surprised. I - No, nevermind. Just can you come?" She listens impatiently. "I know you have patients, Doc. But you're the best candidate for the job. And if anybody is going to help me stop the guy wearing Kyle's face, it's you."
Across town, in her office, Krista Miller adjusts her glasses, looking at the stacks of case files, but Array needs her help.
"Of course," the doctor says, "Just tell me where we need to go."
I am, at this moment, burping a very colic-y baby on my shoulder as I sit behind someone else's desk. The phone rings incessantly, Hiro's secretary failing to do any kind of job of screening as she parks each caller from the divisions under Hiro's purview, and my phone's side is blinking like Christmas lights. Stacks of paperwork, denials for funding, and memos are scattershot across the whole works, and I am trying to keep all of this together. Miko's mouth stretches wide, and she lets an ear piercing howl go that bursts through my ear drums and I'm in a state of constant stress now because I cannot discern what she wants. Ever since that first night, the night of the freaky electrical storm; where I tried explaining, in a panic to Kitsune that I was not who she thought I was and I was a stranger in her bed, my life has devolved into this tragicomedy of errors. Nobody seems to pay heed to my protests that I don't know what I'm doing here, to a one they all just shoved me into the breech, slapped a baby bottle or a ream of expense reports into my lap and told me to get to work. My stomach is in knots as I think of all of the shit Hiro could be doing in my body, the damage.
**
He's examining himself in the mirror again. Lately, Array has noticed he is always examining himself in the mirror. And he's styling his hair in an unusual way, more blade like, gelled and precise than Kyle's usual unkempt style... this is an attribute to which he is paying a good deal of attention to every morning, making sure to check out every angle, and giving subtle, murmured commentary. He's telling himself how good he looks.
It had taken her all of fifteen minutes of watching his new morning ritual to work it out. That was not Kyle. She had thought and discarded numerous mental break theories, but the plain truth lie even beyond the fact that he was acting more boyish, giddy, and unbearable. It lay even beyond the fact that he had touched her in ways that made her skin crawl. It was the way he was looking at himself nonstop, smiling as he gelled his hair into that unfamiliar haircut, the casual arrogance behind the little smiles and whispered pep-talks, the entirely indifferent treatment to all of his usual staples of his life. That was what told her it wasn't quite him. The way he had touched her, therefore, took on a deeply souring and terrifying note in her mind, then... because if it wasn't Kyle doing... that to her then... her skin crawled. She made it a point to keep as much of the apartment and furniture between them as she could, but as she stood out in the hall by the bathroom, just behind the edge, and listened to him giving himself his narcissistic spa treatment, she heard his phone ringing, for the hundredth time. This time, finally, he picked up.
"Whaddup, bruddah?" Kyle Shane's smiling face answered his phone, gently applying a deep pore cucumber lotion to the bridge of his nose as he did.
**
"Hiro," I can't quite hide the exasperation and the pain in my voice, to hear... well, my voice coming across, so coolly. "It's been two days. I've been calling you for - "
"Yes, I know, and by the way, I changed your ringtones, mine is now a much cooler song by Blackpink," came the rejoinder, along with a goofy chuckle that sounded incongruous coming out of my own throat.
I sighed. Pinched the bridge of my nose. Transferred Hiro's own child to the opposite crook of my shoulder, and decided to try again. We both had worked out immediately that the switch had happened the night of the storm. It wasn't hard to figure out, body switch was a staple of the 80's comedies that informed our collective Game Boyz sense of humor, and that spared us the awkwardness of finding each other and having to explain the whole spiel. But I had been pushed out of bed and forced to take over Hiro's day to day, while Hiro assumed all of my surface, but none of my responsibility. Or, for that matter, what would happen if he actually showed up at my job pretending to be me. It made my head hurt, and not just because I was drowning here trying to keep up my appearances. Hiro's voice softens and I try to reason with my body again, "Hiro... listen, man. We have to put this right, because you don't want to have to go around dressing like me, acting like me - Hiro, you retired from wrestling in 2011, if you tried to be me again you'd - "
"You know I've been giving it a lot of thought," he breaks in abruptly, his voice both stubborn and a little bit defiant, "And I missed being in the ring. I missed doing what you do."
I can almost see in our minds eye the first time in a long time he had stepped a tentative foot into a ring. He had hesitated like a baby bird on the precipe, dipping a limb out to test the air currents, but the first time the ropes had kissed his skin and he had begun to run the ring he had let out a disbelieving laugh. I know this happened. I can see it.
"And I've watched you on TV, I know what to - "
"Hiro - " I can't believe I'm hearing the pure hubris of what is coming through, " - It's more than that, you're remembering what it was like in the IEW, through a lens of nostalgia, it isn't like that, wrestling isn't - the way we do promos now is more - You have to - " I just realized for the first time that I am trying to describe what being in a fed is like in the latter day to someone who has been out of the game since 2011, who has not been privy to the myriad ways it has evolved. Hiro-as-Kyle doesn't seem to care.
"Do you remember that promo we did where the pizza delivery boy fell into the wood chipper?" He lets this come across the phone line as if taking a hit of endorphins from each sacred syllable, a heady mix of member-berries that take him back to those simpler times and that long-ago, fondly remembered promo which had garnered us best of the week award. I want to say, as I always do when Hiro gets in his remembrances that of course I remember them, but I don't want to visit them as much or as fondly. I want to keep making things that are new. But I can't if I'm currently babysitting someone else's child. And Hiro can't go back to that time, even if we wanted to. It was the well laid trap of nostalgia, nothing would ever be as good if you went back and looked at it from the perspective of where you are now, because time and preferences evolve and move on.
"Or how about when we stole Go-Karts and drove them to the arena to play Game Boyz Kart? I could do something like that - or I could - "
I'm cringing so hard at thinking of Kyle Shane showing up in a makeshift Mario outfit that just now, I'm seeing with so much self-awareness how some people might see me when I do cosplay. But I push that aside, and I just as bluntly but as respectfully let Hiro know as I can, "That's stupid". Undaunted, he has the million pitches of a man who has been thinking about this since his glory days. I can see him now, in this office, as he's seated behind a spreadsheet, and he's mentally mapping out how another Game Boyz promo would go, and it's coming out a little like Hiro in Kyle's body saying - "Or what if I posted this long Reddit thread, but all of the Reddit names are names of guys in the Pure Class Wrestling, right, and Justin Michaels says "Blarg blah blag, I'm gonna win the Icemann Invitational Tournament" and there's like fifteen downvotes on it, and then I come in with a sweet meme of his head photoshopped onto a monkey with a finger up it's butt and I - "
"Hiro..." I more forcefully break in, bumping the baby on my shoulder, "That. Is. Stupid."
"Oh come on, 'Hiro', you used to love my ideas!"
"Hiro... you have my body. But you can't just go back in to doing things like we used to do and pretending that you're fine. You haven't - "
"I haven't what, Kyle?" his - my - voice dared, and he was snarling now. "I know you think I'm out of touch because I haven't been interested in keeping up with whatever it is you're doing now. Those overblown, melodramatic emo pieces you like filming. Maybe I fucking WANT to do something like we used to do. Maybe I WANT to bring back a sense of fun."
"You think I haven't, dude? I used to love filming Game Boyz promos. I used to love filming things that took me thirty minutes of off the cuff riffing and surreal forum humor instead of digging deep into my life and showing people broken pieces. But it isn't REAL, Hiro. None of it felt real."
I feel and hear his mocking mumble under his breath. "And what's real?" I finally hear him say out loud. As much as I don't like him right now, I don't know what to say to that. All I know is that if I let him go out there, attempting to do the things he's forgotten how to in almost a decade of inaction, he is going to make himself look bad. Leave aside the fact that if he comes at Justin Michaels with a God damn Reddit thread or some other 2009-vintage idea then all the credibility I'd ever built up and all those "Innovative" awards I racked up I may as well have to give back. My oldest friend had fallen into a trap that, ironically, Michaels himself has fallen into. He'd experienced so much success in his heyday and he walked away from the business only to not follow it and see where changes were made.
I think of Michaels and how nonstop it is with him, how he is ALWAYS, always talking about what he did for PCW back in 2005, how he won this title, how he faced this legend that's about two generations removed from anyone I know. Honestly, that's what Hiro's "hey remember the time we" reminds me so annoyingly of, someone who just can't fucking let go. Michaels obviously didn't pay any attention to the product while he was gone, he literally only keeps Anarchist Jase Willard as a frame of reference. Because why should he make an effort, why should he give a shit? It pours through every single sentence to ooze out of his lips. How the first time he met me on that shitshow Club V segment, he poo-pooed me as some rookie he couldn't even bother to learn the name of. How every single time he speaks of Kyle Shane it's as someone who hasn't been here long enough for him to remember.
Or that I talk a lot. Of course. All the talking. So much for poor Justin. He always has to mention the talking, because I guess people didn't TALK so much back in his and Grimm's day. Like I ever care. But beyond that, everything is always about what Justin deserves, because don't you remember the time he did that thing ten years ago while he was here? Wasn't it awesome when he held the International title before, so much so that he had to rename his fucking NA title in a fit to bring back it's history? Don't you remember how people took him as a main event threat before he left for an interminable amount of time and came back and there was this kid named Kyle Shane in his way that proceeded to defeat him for number one contendership, and then stood in his way and continued to rise past Justin Michaels and push him back down the card every chance he got? Wasn't life so great when Justin Michaels was champion?
The danger of living so hard for yesterday is that you become a nostalgia act. An irrelevant anachronism, a frozen figure stuck in place. That's true in a wrestler's career, where nostalgia acts are sad fucking forty year old dudes like Johnny Matthews and Justin Michaels that still try to bring their outdated tactics out and insist they belong on a pantheon of an evolved crowd that no longer needs them. And it is even truer here, now, in real life. In the life of a man who was never prepared to transition from a life where he was given validation and applause for his forward thinking into a coldly unfeeling adulthood where he is given nothing.
All of which played out in my mind as I heard Hiro-as-Kyle humming and running water on the other end of the line, totally unbothered. Why would he be, in his reversed position? He's not sitting here with someone else's baby drooling spittle and baby food onto an expensive blazer. Someone's head peeked in my - well, Hiro's - office, a bespectacled, mousy girl I had to take a second to peg as Hiro's secretary. Oh, now she was going to do her job, I thought blackly. She hesitated a fraction and said, "Um, Hiro, your dad is calling to remind you of the meeting in conference room three - "
I waved her off, turning my chair back to the shaded window and finally thanking any god listening that Miko had started to doze off, drooling against my chest. The other end of the line is still going, but I can hear my voice, giving itself a little pep talk into the mirror, and it said "Ooh yeah daddy, girls are gonna be looking," and other such little notes of self-talk. The secretary stares at me, an urgent, impatient "Will you get going" grimace and hand indication to get to conference room three. I ignore her. I hope he stays on the phone with me, because I have no other recourse than to talk him into getting our bodies switched back the right way.
**
So that was it, she breathed quietly, and she moved away from the doorframe. Hiro was applying cologne with the lavish attention of a serial killer putting the lotion on the skin, all while giving himself little "ooh nice" mouth puckers and head tuts into the mirror. That wasn't Kyle at all. She felt... ill. Her mind flashfroze, thinking of his fingers crawling over her skin in the dead of night while she had been asleep, and she felt a dry heave coming up. She couldn't help it. She ran, putting the entire length of the apartment between her and that creep in the bathroom and getting to the kitchen sink, retching up a violent spill of stomach bile and purest, bleakest disgust. If she had been able to look, she would see him pause in the bathroom down the hall, waking briefly from his reverie to peer out of the bathroom, before going back in.
Array's chest was heaving, and she felt claustrophobic. Two days trapped with someone who wasn't even her Kyle, and... last night... it was all too much. Her chest was constricted by red hot iron bands and crawled on hands and knees towards the center island of the kitchen, using it to pull herself up. Her blind hands slapped for the drawers, and she extracted the drawer with cutlery in it, finding the biggest knife, but then, squeezing her eyes shut in that same frenzied state she recognized that that- in some way - was Kyle in there, it was KYLE - and she shut the drawer with the knives again before the temptation grew even a second stronger to use that knife, draw it out and use it on him, plant it right between those shoulder blades, or... worse, on herself.
She slapped a hand over her mouth, having to fight hard to push back a big, wracking scream. The man in there was saying something about wrestling, he was just discussing it like nothing else was any consequence to him... and she was in here feeling so violated by someone who was both a stranger and yet too familiar. The hurt and the horror was too much, and Array had to get out. She cast a worried stare towards the hall, but she snatched their car keys. She was out the door.
"Look, 'Hiro', let me bottom line it for you," she heard her tormentor saying, as confidently and smarmily as anything in the world, "I like it in this body, and you have a life I would give anything for, so this is the way it's going to stay."
Of all the nightmare scenarios that had ever arose from her life with Kyle Shane, hearing someone say that in Kyle Shane's voice was the scariest thing she could have thought of.
She fled down the hall.
**
I just looked at the phone, not sure what to say to that, the sinister tone, the insistent, stubborn arrogance. This was the Hiro I always knew lay under that cheesy Overlord persona, the dark narcissicm of a Raj Koothrapali to my younger self's less confident Howard Wallowitz. This was a Game Boy who had sat behind a desk for years and been subject to middle management headaches, deadlines, department drama, and family strife. I looked into the eyes of his daughter, resting her head on the shoulder, and I felt sad that we had come to this impasse.
"Hiro," I say, once more trying to be reasonable, "We don't know what effects this could have... it could be permanent... we could experience brain damage, dementia, we could - "
"Boring. Don't care," he said, and he seemed to finally be putting a cap on his facial ritual.
"Hiro, how can you say you don't care about getting your body back, about getting back to your life- don't you - "
"Yeah, pass." I could hear the shrug, and still, the coldness, the darkness, the utter impotent, shackled rage that lay behind the friendly veneer of our every few weeks hangout sessions, and to have to hear it come through in my own voice was the most chilling and disturbing part of it all. "You may not see it right now, but I'm giving you the chance of a lifetime, Shane, I want you to appreciate what it is to be me. To have a father that puts you in the most wasted divisions and sees you as a child who can't use his own money, to go home to a wife - "
"Hir-"
"A Wife, 'Hiro', who's so cold to you that when you come home from a long day of managing a tech division, she only wants to talk about why you didn't unload the dishwasher and hell no she doesn't want to have sex tonight, she's TIRED - A daughter - "
"HIRO-!"
"A Daughter, 'Hiro', who needs, needs, needs, she has asthma so she needs a nebulizer treatment, she has allergies to foods and we have to buy the expensive food that comes from a specialty maker that has no peanuts, she has to get the best toys even though she's testing below her percentile in infant intelligence but her Mommy wants -"
"Hiro, STOP. Dude I get it, you've had some bad breaks, but you can't expect it all to go away by - "
"Some bad breaks, Kyle? I GRADUATED an Ivy Freaking League school, I went to work for my father's company and I became head of a division, all of that while you dropped out and tooled around." And yet, it still didn't make him happy. It came through loud and clear in his voice. But he still continued his rant, sounding emotional near to tears. "I - I sacrificed so much to - And you just get to be this. Amazing person. With a life that is everything I wanted." He sighed, let out a shaky breath, and it felt in this emotional moment that both of our hearts were heavy, breaking.
How could I even begin to explain my life was not, and would never be perfect? How can you explain that to someone who only sees what you have? And the pitch perfect irony, in that I see all Hiro has here, and god if it doesn't look idyllic from the outside, if I didn't know how empty he was feeling about it.
And then my brow clouded, and I looked down at Miko, her sleepy eyes opening and looking up at her dada. And I got angry. Because that doesn't matter. "Are you just going to cry about it?"
"Wh-what?" he asks, astonished.
"Poor baby, life peaked when you were younger, being an adult sucks, wah wah wah." I seriously, seriously hated people that lived so much in the past. And that's, perhaps what made all of this so aggravating. What made even dealing with Hiro now such a headache.
"Uh, first, fuck you, mister sad boy," he came back, "The fuck do you even have to be sad about, your dad croaked after beating you and your mommy had cancer. Boo freaking hoo."
"Hiro, you shut your mouth - "
"You live in a Penthouse APARTMENT with a freaking smoking hot supermodel, which..." His voice dropped a pitch as if he was cupping a hand around the phone, looking furtively, the cadence we used to effect when we were discussing some celebrity we used to daydream over in Coding class, "...Can I just say, mmm, damn. She is so hot. I wish she wasn't such a frigid little bitch though. She doesn't ever want to fool around." He laughs, an ugly, locker room laugh. "Reminds me of Kitsune actually."
And now it was Hiro Sasuke's voice that came through the phone like an icy, tight snarl, as I spit out through clenched teeth "Don't you freaking touch her."
He gave a carefree, cocky laugh through my throat as if he had the whole world in his hands. "Oh, you. I don't need Array, bro, don't you remember, I usedta be able to pull any chica I want." The old Hiro Sasuke surfaced again, bristling with dangerous confidence and an edge that said who cares what they think, I am young, handsome and I can get anything I want.
It was that paperthin college age confidence which had propelled their adventures in point of fact, their Revenge of the Nerds esque quests to get some action. But now, removed from that context, given a decade to sour and curdle into creepy boundary crossing, it was it's own nightmare. And so I had even more reason to dread Hiro having control of the wheel over there, but even less idea how to go about fixing things.
"Hiro, stay there, will you? I just -"
"Sorry bruddah," he signed off with easy, sociopathic charm, "I'm gonna go out for a test drive. Latas."
I looked dumbly at the brick of the phone in my hand. I contemplated chucking it through the window in my corner office, along with Hiro's damn potted succulents and pictures of his family he had now cast aside. But the phone was a lightbulb in my consciousness, and I took a few minutes cursing to realize I didn't know the number I needed by heart - but knowing that she would have insight into this situation, how to talk Hiro down, stop him before he did any more damage - or find a way to lure him back to the lab so we could undo the switch -
I couldn't get more than a few rings in before a severe woman I had only seen maybe twice in my life came up to me, exuding more confidence and authority than I could imagine in all of my years of being called upon the carpet. With a sinking feeling I knew where I recognized her; Rumiko. It was Hiro's sister.
She glared hatefully at her brother, and I know that if she was able to twist my arm behind my head she would. She did the next best thing, verbally, eviscerating me with a look and said, "You can't duck father forever, little Hiro. Your quarterly review is now, and seeing as how you don't have any viable products in final stages yet, you have nothing to justify your budget."
"Rumiko, I - I know this is gonna sound strange, but you've got to listen to me, I have to go into the city, if you can just cover for me - "
Her stare is ice. "I have been covering for you your whole life. Even when people told father that you were not level headed enough to run a division."
So much hate, unspoken family animosity and rivalry, power plays lay unspoken, hidden, and because I had no idea of any of it, buried, but Rumiko motioned me forward, flanked by two assistants, larger men in topknots, silk suits and sunglasses that I could swear were bodyguards. I remembered Ichiro Sasuke's Yakuza ties once upon a time and as the contingent of very large men flanked me, walking me towards the conference room, I gulped like a man being lead to gallows. As we walked to the office, my secretary peeked her head in again. She saw Rumiko, saw the two suit boys with the top knots, and she looked scared.
"Your wife is here to pick up Miko for daycare," she said hesitantly before looking like she'd rather be anywhere else. I look over to Hiro's sister, who heaves an impatient sigh, and checks her watch before cutting her eyes to the bodyguards and giving an imperceptible head bow. We go out into the hall, meeting the baby's mother, who does not seem pleased to see me. I mean, small wonder, I've been ranting in her face for two days about something that sounds like madness.
Despite being at wrists length from two big men in black, I step forward, handing her the child, and I meet my - Hiro's wife and my eyes plead with her to get help. Still I want to try again.
"Kit, I know the past few days have made no sense to you but you have to listen - "
Kitsune Hamada-Sasuke is a woman with a chubby face, and weary eyes, unkempt hair, and the weight of the world on her shoulders. She looks at me with not inconsiderable disdain as she takes Miko. "It does make sense, Hiro, it's just another silly story like the kind you're always reminiscing about. That's all you ever want to talk on the phone with your stupid boyfriend Kyle about, the old days and the million cute promo ideas you had."
I lean in, urgently taking her by the forearms, "No, just listen to me, I am K-"
She doesn't want to hear it, turning her head away, and saying "No, Hiro, you are not Kyle, because Kyle at least continued following his dreams and chasing after what made him happy. You don't want to try to make anything new for yourself. You are just a little boy that got transplanted into an adult's suit. You just want to go back to your childhood."
I'm a bit crestfallen. Rumiko, the bodyguards, they're taking in my dressing down with smiles hidden behind their hands, or looking up to count the fluorescent lights to hide their mocking smirks.
Kitsune pushes past me, bearing Miko on her hip, and I gesture to Rumiko and the bullyboys, as if tacitly telling Kit they mean to do me a serious threat here, but I just say, "Come on, Kit, don't leave me here alone..."
"You are alone, Hiro... because you decided you were going to live with all of your past victories instead of here with me." At that, one of the bodyguards lets out a muffled chuckle and "oh damn," but Kit is walking away still. And my hopes of rescue with her. And there it goes. Maybe that is the danger of living so long in your own nostalgia that you forget how to be a man.
Rumi raises her eyebrows, mouth confined in a little awkward ice-breaking smirk and says "Well... that went well, did it, brother? Come. Let's not let father keep waiting, don't want to disappoint anybody else."
As I was walked through a bullpen, people craned their head up from their cubicles. I smiled wanly, waved a little, showing weakly that everything was fine. By my side, Rumiko was smiling more honestly, even if her smile was nasty and brutal. "What's the matter, little Hiro?"
"Rumiko, you don't understand... I'm not..."
"I understand that your sci fi toys and expensive concepts are based on futurism that does not adhere to the resources you are given," she came back with. "I understand that you chose to use our father's money to fund your capitalist ventures, play with phone apps and chase dreams." She turned towards me, looking not unkindly, but still severely.
"And I understand, brother. You long for the simple years of filming silly videos for Youtube and playing around with your Iron Man suits, you wanted to make your nerdy sci-fi dreams realities. But our company can not profit from useless, fantastical trinkets that break our budget but produce no results. You will have to answer to father and the board."
And I had nothing to say to that, honestly. Just a sinking feeling of dread that had, for the first time over the last few days, nothing to do with the occupation of my real body.
Or maybe it had more to do with it than I want to admit, because Hiro was the blackest mirror to hold up and look into.
Hiro was what you got when someone lived off the past. I saw it in everything he had, in the corner office that was too small for the son of a CEO and the head of a division, in the frustration in his voice when he talked about his wife and how he always deflected talk to how much better things were back in the day, reminiscing about old stories. How his old girl crazy antics which seemed charming, just one of the boys like when we were 19 now turned bad when he was a husband and a father. And maybe it was my nostalgia that powered my acceptance of his flaws, because I remembered the good times the Game Boyz had had as being a lot better than they objectively were. It allowed me to look past the sexism, the creepy behavior, and the lack of empathy inherent in him. He was a rich boy that was brought up wealthy, and his familys money and... connections meant that he could have anything he wanted.
When someone like that, who hasn't struggled, grows up, and finds that life does not come easily to you like that, what happens? When someone who had it so carefree for so long gets brought down to earth?
I mean, it is a small wonder Hiro wanted to talk about the old times so much, right?
Makes me idly wonder about Justin Michaels, as we're waiting in the elevator, flanked by two big men, and if he ever had the flashes of self-awareness about his descent into pathetic nostalgia that Hiro always seemed to lack. Probably not, right? Dude obviously thought he was nailing it when he came out there with his 90's trenchcoat/baseball bat combination to berate announcers.
But Hiro... in my minds eye I can almost see him nailing the cocky Overlord strut using my long legs, grinning and finger gunning as he goes down the hallway, still trying to pretend like it's 2009 again and he's a young boy with all of the money and none of the responsibility. Kitsune, his father, Rumiko, his tech division, all of it falling away, onto someone else's shoulders. Putting on the mask of what he sees as Kyle Shane really is, because why should Kyle Shane give a shit?
The elevator dings, and Rumiko nods to her bullyboys, I'm "escorted" out. I pull my arms in, frustrated. There's a boardroom down the hall, I can already see the cold, sterile chairs and the men seated in a semi-circle under the austere lighting. And as I come through the entrance, I see him seated at the head of the table. Ichiro's face is like skin drawn taut over a skull, and his lips are firmly planted together in a perpetual, wrinkled frown. He looks like he hasn't ever experienced a moment of joy in his life. He stares down the table at me, and nods for me to sit down.
"We have much to discuss about the budget, do we not," he says, and the two guards over my shoulder stand there with their arms folded.
And just now I'm the one wishing for the sweet nostalgia of a few days ago.
**
Array watches him get into the car and leave, then returns to the phone. "I'm telling you, that isn't him. I freaked out when I heard them talking, but I know Kyle."
"Honestly, as weird as our life can get sometimes I wonder why I'm surprised. I - No, nevermind. Just can you come?" She listens impatiently. "I know you have patients, Doc. But you're the best candidate for the job. And if anybody is going to help me stop the guy wearing Kyle's face, it's you."
Across town, in her office, Krista Miller adjusts her glasses, looking at the stacks of case files, but Array needs her help.
"Of course," the doctor says, "Just tell me where we need to go."
