 
#2 FEB 2000 |
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Typhoid: Typhoid Mary is plagued with multiple personality disorder, each one possessing different powers. As Mary she possesses no powers. But as Typhoid she possesses pyro-kinetic and telekinetic powers. As Bloody she posseses said powers and a remarkable resistance to pain. She also has a romantic past with Daredevil. |
This issue is recommended for Mature Readers only!
Dear Typhoid,
There is a woman standing in the doorway of my cell. For a second, I forget that the room is bugged and I speak. "Who are you?" But I already know the answer: ||**||
Hope leads me to a vent in the floor with a square opening. She removes the screen to reveal a knotted rope. She motions for me to descend and closes the vent behind us. It is in the darkness that I hear her voice for the first time. "Before The JOSEPHINE Group took over the building...this room was the custodian quarters. Between the noise from the filtration system and the plumbing pipes no one can hear us talk. We wait here for a friend of mine."
"What friend?" I ask.
"You'll see. She'll help us get out and bring us some things. But first you have to loose those bloody clothes and get cleaned up."
She is ranting things: Pyotr Popov was the first Soviet intelligence officer recruited by the CIA. The KGB caught him by following his invisible foot prints left by a chemical put on his shoes. You wash and my friend will bring new clothes. Even though my clothes are bloody Hope folds them into a goldfish. A blood stain makes the eye. I get into the bath. She brings me a cup of water and begins folding paper. "What are you doing?"
"They had a stash of tobacco in here. I've rolled some in this note, which I'm destroying. Want one?"
"We've both lived our misspent youth in the spook business...or ‘intelligence.' During ‘trade craft' you learn that in its pure colorless form one drop of pure nicotine will kill a person. Usually it's put on a scratch needle. You're also trained in ‘field expedience.' You can make poison in a hotel bathroom from mere tobacco products...that yield something very close to pure nicotine. I'm afraid I can't accept."
"Okay mommy, this'll be my last one."
Hope tells me that by the time her last cigarette will go out her friend will arrive. She points out that this measuring of time is another example of the versatility of paper and its metaphor for metamorphosis. Hope sure has a funny way with words.
"I can dig it," I say.
We talk. Her voice is 2-ply cotton thick squeezable soft with aloe.
"I wish I hadn't left that pen behind," she says. "I went through a lot to get it. And it was a real pain in the ass to keep it hidden."
"You have an interesting way of putting things. And interesting places to put them."
"Actually I could learn to live without it. I've learned to live without a lot of things. I had my identity taken away, too. But I miss it about as much as I do my pen. It can be quite liberating."
"I've only known you through this paper image. But your toilet paper telegrams kept me going all those months."
She tells me, "It's time to turn metaphor into reality." That, "This is our moment of transformation. What's it looks like in your cocoon. What did you tell the doctor?"
"I told her about my mother...about actresses...about a little girl's face being destroyed...bleeding to death...I've talked of those things...but I was thinking of folded messages...red penned words...brightly colored sculpted paper...that take me back to childhood memories...making my own origami never looked quite right. All my animals looked disfigured." Like me. Rejects. Abandoned by their parents. I didn't get to hang up my folded animals in kindergarten. Mine were not as good as the other children's. I imagined that all my rejected animals became friends together. So I just drew pictures of them. "When I was little I read a lot. I remember one book about a girl falling down a rabbit hole and talking to people made of cards and chess pieces. Then there was this Greek surgeon: Dr. Zeus...one fish, two fish..."
"Red fish, blue fish."
"And ‘The Emperor With No Clothes'..."
"The Emperor is dead."
"But you remind me of another book. Its by some obscure writer. Who eventually went mad and became a recluse."
"JD Salinger?"
"No. Some nobody. A kid's book. It was called Invisiblities Of Friends. I used to read it to go to sleep. I remember that halfway through the book, I wanted to draw the invisible friend. I scribbled all sorts of pictures...until I found myself drawing my mother over and over... One night I am awakened by the piano. The pianist is dressed in my mother's wedding dress. It is my father. His audience is mannequins dressed in my mother's clothes. One of them wears the dress she wore from ‘West Side Story.' My father has grown stranger since her death. At night he takes to dressing in her clothes. Mannequins and dress maker's dummies fill his closets. Some mannequins are missing their arms and heads. They remind me of statues. I think of the Venus DeMilo. Perfect woman of her era. Goddess of love and beauty. Now she has no arms. Disfigured. Sometime I want to make a museum that displays all the arms and heads missing from the statues in other museums. Maybe put the Sphinx's nose there too. I had a pet dog I named Mitz. One day I found her sleeping and she wouldn't get up. My father, a military general, insisted that she was dead. I insist that she is sleeping. He tries to explain it to me...the raw finality of it. I ask him if I ever died. He doesn't answer. He frowns and takes Mitz into the backyard with a shovel. I've always hoped to see her someday.
"He raised me the best he could. He meant well. He was a good man. But he had a one track mind. He could only think in cold militaristic terms. He wasn't a father. He was a soldier. He raised me the only way he knew. I was schooled in the feminine graces...gymnastics...ballet classes...and of course piano. Until I was eight. It's just as well. The concept of raising a girl was foreign to him. Then of course I met my real father. My father's brother...the one who scarred me. Looking at him into his eyes was like looking into my future. I was a flesh and blood reminder of what he did to my mother. The idea that his blood and my mother's mingled in my veins disgusted him, was absolute horror to him. I was the scarlet letter incarnate. So he labeled me. Death became me. When I was revived I could no longer play the piano. I was too ugly for ballet. Or to be seen by the other teachers. I was flawed like my origami pets. I was immersed in training until my mind collapsed with all the knowledge and my mother's ghost whispering to me. From that point on I've lived in the shadows trying to get out from Typhoid and Bloody's shadow. Then I joined my father's elite group of assassins after a brief time in New York City. I was part of a group. Now the others are sent to kill me. I've been replaced. My replacement gets a mask like mine, their face half painted. I lose my face and my identity. Who am I?"
"Get over it. If it can be taken from you then it was never yours to begin with. After they take away all they can all that remains is you. You are you and I am your invisible friend."
"That's very sweet." We turn to see a figure in the entrance. In the uniform of a JOSEPHINE Group guard. But it is a woman. "I found you." I've seen her before. In a different place...when I wore...another face. Before they gave me my identity and took it away. I was a fly on the wall at a costume ball when I saw her face with no facade in the masquerade. She moved unmasked in slow motion. As if she's cloaked in the commotion. I watched her looking for answers. She stopped time and lit a cigarette. When she pulled her gun and exhaled I observed, served, reserved judgement. Just the facts. I remember that she had bangs back then. Bang.
This time I don't watch I act quickly. Jumping on her back I knock her down. And I hear Hope shouting at me: "She's our ally!"
"She's carrying something!" I say back.
"She brought our change of clothes. This is Drew. My friend."
"What?"
"Yeah you might want to put some on," Drew interrupts. "Do you want to frisk me too?" She drops her jacket and reveals her tattoo letting me know that she was part of another group, not The TEN. I ask if she knows Bork.
"Yup. Only now her name is Typhoid and she's been transferred out of here."
"After I took out the guard," Hope explains pulling on her pants, "and we came here...Drew ran by and stole his uniform."
"I also retrieved this."
"My pen."
"How did you open the elevator door?" I ask.
"I've got his hand in my bag," Drew answers, sticking her tongue out to reveal a razor blade on it.
"I feel left out. I'm the only one not hiding something in one of my crevices."
"Give it time," Hope states.
"So now that we have the guard's threads and hand you can make a break for it. The orderlies in the men's wing are women and the orderlies in the women's wing are men. So you go out impersonating orderlies through the women's wing," states Drew.
"No. That's what they'd expect us to do. The outside door still demands retina scan and it is hard to get a dead man's eye to register. I've arranged...something. They will find the fallen guards in Typhoid's cell. His clothes and hand missing. The only prints in their belong to Typhoid and the guards. You retrieved my pen so they don't know that we are involved. It will appear that Typhoid took the hand, the uniform and the taser. When they track the taser they will find it on the elevator to the men's wing. This gives them reason to suspect that Typhoid is there, impersonating a female orderly. The hunt will focus on the men's wing. This gives us slack to make the real break out through the female wing. Fake out and the crowd goes wild."
Drew gives me an old cast to put on my arm to hide the cuts and bullet wounds I received when the Board of Directors of The TEN fought back at me when I snapped.
We use the vents to travel through the hospital out of the old maintenance room to the women's wing. We know that the walls have ears so we use tapping sounds and The TEN hand speak. Drew is staying behind. She likes it here. I don't see why. We travel creating small talk and Hope begins to tell me her story when we end up outside the women's ward. She stops talking and takes my cast from me and hands it to a guard who gives her his prosthetic cybernetic eye for us to use to get out. She explains to me after we leave him of his fetish.
We stay in the women's ward for awhile, laying low and letting the guards find the body to give us our time. Here I see a nurse and tell Hope that she is observing her.
"She does that. That's the doctor that used to interrogate me. Did you get a good look at what she's writing? If you did, you'd know it is nothing for us to be concerned about. She was always trying to classify me, label me, pick my brain. So I gave her a piece. I opened up to her and she went mad. They put her with the rest of the populace hoping to sort her out. She follows the inmates around, especially me, recording our every fart, burp and twitch on that yellow pad."
"So what happened?"
"I just talked a lot. I lifted the veil. I took away the gird through which she viewed me. I unfolded reality for her. I'm a talker. So I use it to my advantage. Sometimes misinformation, disinformation and arbitrary communication is more effective at disorienting your opponent than silence. It's all a verbal chess game. Language is a grid which attempts to present abstract thoughts into definable data. And this doctor had so much data of me at her fingertips..."
Doctor's Case #1969. Subject: Hope. Page 79
Her recent notes have abandoned the previous conventional order of her lines. Her words no longer make sense. And yet, they don't seem the least bit random. I'm sure that if I can somehow decipher the eccentric geometry of the subject's word placement the notes will serve as a psychological portrait. They must be encrypted. If only I could put the pieces together. I'm sure there is a bigger picture.
"...The graph serves as a pointer to ideas - such as the metaphors I'm using now. Metaphors are my language, metamorphosis my religion, metaphysics my natural laws..."
Doctor's Case #1969. Subject: Hope. Page 84
"...That night I lay in my bare cell. I decided that I didn't want to be pinned down and categorized and labeled as part of the collection in this human zoo. Hopis Disturbus. I stopped writing messages to her in my origami creatures. For many sessions I just sat there for what she thought was complete silence not communicating. It wasn't until she reviewed the tapes from the camera's eagle eye angle she realized that I was speaking to her. In one session she noticed my eyes blinking irregularly. Morse code...">
Doctor's Case #1969. Subject: Hope. Page 95
"...Then the next day I spoke to her. It disorientated her so much she had two guards sit on either side of me. But I spoke so long that they eventually fell asleep. I spoke for days...inventing quite and autobiography. I constructed a wall of information using truth and mortar and bricking it together with outlandish falsehoods..."
Doctor's Case #1969. Subject: Hope. Page 95 cont...
She has exactly 209 eyelashes on each eye. This she uses to her own advantage as she flashes secret messages at me while simultaneously speak of something else. I study her lips and notice that I hear her voice even when her lips aren't moving. Even when her mouth is closed! I have concluded (after further analysis) that she is communicating with me telepathically. Her voice continues in my mind even as the guards escort her from my office.
"...First I played her graph game. I communicated to her through the coordinates that could be charted. Once she caught on to the rhythm of the coordinates...I changed them. C-5, C-4, C-3, C-2, see one. B-4, B-3, B-2, be one. I-3, I-2, I won. I sank her battleships. Then I pulled the graph away multiplying the possibilities instead of narrowing them down. These possibilities, whole and unlabeled, were too much for her to cope with in her rational scientific manner. Once she began to operate in the realm of irrational, she became an inmate herself."
"That's quite a doctor story. My doctor took my face."
"Drew mentioned she saw you in your face at costume ball. She said you were talking to some guy."
"The guy was asking me to dance. It was back when I lived in New York."
"So what did you do?"
"I declined him. I had a job to do. But he was insistent. I did not want to blow my cover or draw attention to myself so I said ‘Just one dance.'" As I describe the memory I find myself falling into it more signing and saying the words for dance and fun and joy. Before I can get to the part when I first met Drew I pause.
"So what happened to Prince Charming?"
"Drew shot him."
"What?!"
Yeah. He was the hit. When we were dancing he tried to kiss my lips. It reminded me that I wore a mask and I pulled away. After I saw what Drew did to him, I wished I had let him kiss me. He had a grace that belied his boyishness. And I was reminded of a purity of moment I hadn't had since my days in ballet class when I was a little girl. Drew had bangs back then. Perhaps he wouldn't have been interesting to me if it was outside the situation. It's just the only memory I have...dancing with someone. I didn't have much of a real social life."
"You've never been really kissed?"
"No." She looks at me for a moment and I watch as she leans in and I feel her lips on mine.
"Now you have. Let's go.
As we inch out the door we are surprised by a sentry standing only meters from us. "You!" Hope is about to ad lip but he has recognized me and there is no turning back. She rushes the guard...bu his taser hits her in mid leap. She's thrown into the door...cracking the reflective window with her head. Her body falls limp on the floor. He aims for me but misses. He's yelling for back-up when I crush his windpipe. He gets out three fourths of a scream that turns into bloody bubbles. His breathing sputters to a soft rattle. Above it, I hear the echo of footsteps - many footsteps - like a hundred horses getting closer. "Hope! Hope wake up!" She doesn't move. She's not breathing. No heart beat. Frantically I give her CPR, almost breaking her rips with the effort. I'm dragging her body when I look up and see them. They are closing in. Their synchronized footsteps are like the heartbeat of God...a rhythm I still can't find in Hope. Everything is wrong. Everything is backwards. Behind my back, I grip the taser when it all goes black.
To be continued...
In TYPHOID #3: Typhoid, Hope and Josephine Part 3 "Break(ing) Out Break(ing) In" The action picks up as Typhoid must defend her self from an onslaught of guards and from the agents of The TEN closing in on her. Will Typhoid be recaptured by The JOSEPHINE Group or killed by The TEN? All that and with the power cut and the guards after Typhoid who's watching the inmates as a riot errupts!
Author's Notes:
Wow! This is the second issue of the mini and I'm having too much fun. I've worked really long and hard on this one and wanted it to feel different and the same as the first issue but give it a different texture as we learn a little bit more on Hope and just how great she is. That was the main focus. I hope that when you read this it isn't too confusing for you. If it is I would suggest going back to issue one and re-reading that and then reading this one slower. I also liked the idea of Typhoid exposing herself like that to Hope, and I'd love to hear what you think of the developing relationship between the two women.
Thanks.
Daniel Holmes.