She had quite liked change—mostly. But he did not want to dwell on that. So she asked him about the fingers trick, and he was happier to talk about why it had upset everyone so much.
He said, Keep this in mind: it was the first time anyone had ever done it. You couldn’t explain it away. There were no strings or magnets. No illusion of the witch or whatever. I could repeat it for anyone who wanted to walk in and deal with M— dry-retching in the corner. And I did. Everyone had to come watch, the whole gang. And by then …
He said, By then it was easy. By then I had Titania and Ulysses sitting up. By the end of the day they were walking around with me, sitting down when I sat or standing when I stood. It gave the others the absolute shits. Again, I didn’t mean to be a creep. I just wanted them close so I could look after them—it seemed so important. And A— was right, I wasn’t operating on a lot of food or sleep.
He said, Everyone had a big fight over what it meant. C— and G— took it fine. Funny in hindsight that they were the ones who were the least weirded out. C— had been raised little-England Anglican and G— ’s grandparents who raised him had been religious as hell, White Sunday and suit and tie for church, that kind of thing. It was M— who couldn’t take it. M— had been hard atheist since she was twelve. But she got over it; she was a walking contradiction anyway. Her best friend in the whole world was a nun. Also, at some point A— gave her a benzo and a shot of whiskey, so that helped.
He said, But you know what? They wanted to believe. All of them. We all wanted a miracle. Everyone wants to believe that God’s randomly made them one of the X-Men. We all thought of you right away, what it could mean for you. P— was worried that this was some kind of zombie apocalypse, but Titania and Ulysses weren’t zombies. They were … extensions. Constructions without a soul. They hadn’t woken up, they hadn’t resurrected in that sense of the word. Their bodies moved when I wanted them to move. And then I stopped having to hold the strings—I could say, Go here, or, Go there, and they’d go like I’d programmed them to. You had to make sure you told them to stop, or they’d keep walking into things. It wasn’t like they could talk or bite you, you know? I wished they could’ve. But they were just me.
For a moment they were both silent, brushing ash off their faces, their hair. It was falling thick and fast like snow. They took shelter beneath a burnt-out tree and watched the ash hump up against the rocks and branches. Some of it got in their mouths.
After a moment, he said: I knew it was fine. I knew I’d touched something, come away with something, that could be used for good. Could be used to fix everything, used for you. I only had to figure out how. There was so much to figure out. But I’d got a dream team on tap, eh? People who could think. C—’s N—， she was on board. C— was still pretending they weren’t dating—she was an artist, so that was cool. If you have two scientists and an engineer and a detective and a lawyer and an artist you’re pretty much sweet as. Sounds like the start of a joke, right? Two scientists, an engineer, a detective, a lawyer, and an artist walk into a bar to help me become God.
He said: They put me through my paces. I was exhausted all the time. We all came up with trials to figure out what I could do, what I couldn’t do. There was too much to go on. We figured out early that what really helped was if I was near the dead bodies, if I was in the facility. Back then we thought maybe there was something about the ground, something about our particular patch in the Wairarapas, but if we loaded up the ute with a bunch of bodies and looked out for the cops we could do the same thing anywhere else. The corpses were what mattered. They were my batteries.
He said, So of course, what do M— and A— do, they go raid a fucking graveyard. I was pissed off with them about that. So was P— but, like, mainly because it was illegal and she had to cover it up. But that proved it wasn’t that we had a load of specific magical corpses on our hands. I could take a body that had been dead for twenty years and do the same thing. Can’t believe we didn’t get caught.
He said, At that point we knew that was the biggest risk: getting caught. Getting hushed up. Getting flown to some government facility in America. Or weaponised—given to another group of stakeholders or bought by another magnate son of a bitch. I guess we’d seen too many movies. We assumed that we’d all go missing. Get disappeared. Get used for evil.
He said, So we figured that what we had to do was make as big a noise as humanly possible, turn to the public. Find out if anyone else was like me, if there was someone out there who could do the same thing. And there was a way we could do just that. It was a different time back then. I didn’t want to do it. It felt too—kill switch, too awful to contemplate. Too grisly. Too shitty. But it was the only trick we had up our sleeves.