Chapter Text
In a supermarket in LA, a group of jumping and screaming teen girls held up their phones to record a cashier and bagger. Flocks of other shoppers gravitated towards them, gasping. “It’s Lockwood and George!” Some asked, “Where is Lucy!” and “Why are they here?” Little kids tugged on their mothers’ hands, pointing to magazine covers of Cosmopolitan, Time, and People that read: Lockwood and Lucy Engaged? Monolith Diamond on Her Finger, Anthony Lockwood’s Tips for a Thriving Sex Life, and Shocking: Lockwood and Lucy’s Vacation in the Bahamas Disturbed by Ravenous Paparazzi. “There he is, Mommy! He’s here and there!”
The manager only held up their phone, too, doing nothing to keep Lockwood and George from being mobbed. Contrary to store policy, George, the bagger, was on his phone, calling LA Police Department. Almost immediately, officers carrying guns ran to form a perimeter around the checkout counter. The crowd only offered more resistance, screeching, “I love you, Anthony Lockwood!” and, “I sleep with your poster under my pillow!”
Lockwood turned to George. “How much longer is our shift?” He had stopped carrying his watch with him to the grocery store long ago, when he had realized that looking at his watch only made the time go slower.
“You’re the one with the fucking time sense of a dog at meal-times,” George hissed.
“Mr. Lockwood,” the LA Sheriff interrupted. “We’re here to escort you out.”
“Are you sure?” Anthony asked. “It would be such a pity to disappoint the fans.” He smiled and gave a little wave.
“You are the object of a public disturbance,” the Sheriff said. “You’re leaving whether you want to or not. People have suffocated and been trampled in conditions like this when movie stars down the street have been mobbed.”
Pausing to hug a little kid’s proffered teddy before handing it back to him, Anthony followed the officer. The cadets had to physically restrain him from writing autographs. “I’ve always wanted to be a public servant!” he yelled to George as they jostled through at risk of falling.
“Then become a fucking politician or lawyer!” George yelled back.
“Foreign-born residents can’t become president!” Anthony returned.
“Then let’s go back to England and you’ll be Prime Minister.”
“Oh, George, you know me well: don’t you know I want to stay here in California forever?”
“There’s more than one way to serve: become a social worker.” Lockwood’s face fell and George laughed. “I know, no glamor.”
“And no crowds. I love crowds. I fucking love crowds. You get this feeling – you touch so many people’s lives at once – you know life is worth living because it’s so BIG and you do SO MUCH.”
“A dangerous mixture of altruism and power hunger,” George muttered. “This is NOT the cure for your depression.”
“Who could be depressed with this all around?” Lockwood heaved a sigh of contentment from the back of the police vehicle, seeing lights flashing, hearing sirens wailing, feeling the reverberation of the crowds’ voices and running engines.
“ADD,” George crossed his arms, pouting, but too aware of his own grumpiness to make his friend feel bad by weaponing a potential diagnosis. That would be discrimination, and friends, as close as they were, shouldn’t even joke about that sort of thing.
They were still wearing their Walmart vests, and as usual, George was the first to pull his off.
The vehicle took five minutes to take off as the police were afraid of running over the people pressing up against the windshield.
“Mr. Lockwood, do you happen to have any weapons on you?” the driving officer asked.
“No, why?”
The officer grinned. “I wanted to tell my daughter that I saw Anthony Lockwood’s rapier, but I guess that will have to wait.”
“Only step inside once we arrive home –”
George interrupted. “We are not heading straight home. Do we want to leave a fucking trail of breadcrumbs and destroy any privacy we might have left?”
Lockwood smirked. “With your literary metaphors, you’re beginning to sound a bit like Lucy.”
The two officers kept looking back. The sidewalks were lined with curious onlookers at what had turned into a parade of police, and nearly everyone was filming. Anthony preened. “We’re on the news, George,” he said. “Everything we say or do is being recorded for history. We could turn this into more than a job: we could sponsor products – for example, Satchell’s rapiers. They are the best, you know.”
George had this annoyed look on his face that he got only when Lockwood started to talk to him as if they were head genius and subordinate instead of friend and friend. This was particularly irritating to someone who viewed himself as a genius and had a hidden type, one for sitting in dusty libraries instead of marketing and labeling.
Lockwood abruptly switched subjects. “Lucy would love this.”
“No she wouldn’t,” George snapped. “She hates publicity.”
“But she loves heroism. Glory!”
“She loves a story.”
“You’re right there,” Lockwood sighed. “Spending all her time locked up in her room with Skull, writing her five books.”
“And who knows if it will be only five,” George said, half-maliciously heaping on more misery. “It’s actually a good thing. It will help me get started on my own academic monographs: Type Threes and Their Silence: The Danger Behind the Grinning Ectoplasm – Cats and Dogs: Their Heredity, Breeding, and Listening Traits – can they be bred for ghost-hunting, that’s the question. And the implications for transhumanism, for the concept of the cyborg, for the investigation of whether animals have souls that can participate in the afterlife . . . and –” George’s monologue had subdued Lockwood, but he still added, “And Lucy’s metaphors will inspire you to write metaphysical poetry in your old age.”
Lockwood frowned. “Why not now?”
“You’re too busy thinking about being a lawyer.”
“Politician.”
“Social worker.”
“Prime minister.”
“Half-assed American president.”
“Oh shut up. I’m not a citizen, by the way.”
“Everyone knows you were born on Celia and Donald Lockwood’s expedition to North America – or was it South America?”
“Shut up!” Lockwood growled softly.
“As sweet and adventurous as a moose, beaver, skunk, or other American animal. You grew up with them, you know.”
“I take that as a compliment,” Lockwood replied to George’s made-up history, and adeptly changing the subject to – “Your imagination and metaphors are so Lucy.”
“And so you. You made up the orange juice whale, after all; Lucy’s never going to let you forget that.”
“I didn’t think she’d view it as a remarkably romantic phrase.”
“You put it in the original poem that you used to propose to her. What is she supposed to think?”
“That it was endearing but goofy?”
“No. You hung the moon and stars for her, Lockwood.” George paused and got off the mushy topic. “Her literary sense is way ahead of her young age and education. Those Amazon Audible books are helping her a lot with learning to write.”
“Don’t turn this into an advert for Audible, George,” Lockwood laughed, gesturing towards a covey of adoring kids and adults as they pushed through the sedan door towards the police station.
“Why not? It could get us into the YouTubing scene.”
Lockwood’s ears almost perked up like a golden retriever’s. “Talk on.”