The first time I saw Amy was the day Dr. Nefarious first got arrested while robbing the Wells Fargo. She was sitting at the bar, watching the news, and I really only got a look at her short, strawberry-blonde hair from across the room. I've always been a corner person. Anyway, I wasn't staring or anything, it was more of how you notice someone particularly pretty and it sticks in your mind. That night I was more interested to hear that for the first time in our city's history we had what amounted to a super-villain in actual custody. I think it might have been Galaxy Girl, or maybe Chessmaster who caught him, but that doesn't matter too much. They got their ceremony. After a pretty short sentencing, Dr. Nefarious became the first super-powered inmate.
It was two weeks later when I saw her again. Same bar, same chair, same head cocked upward to watch the TV on the wall. I'm not sure exactly what made me go up and talk to her. Might have been the way her hair was just sort of fuzzy, in that way it gets when you fix it up with your fingers as you're leaving the house. Gave me a feeling like she wanted someone to talk to. I introduced myself, Martin, and she told me her name was Amy. We talked, small-talk, and then I had to ask why she was so into the news coverage. At that point it was still big political speeches, national, that were all about the whole Dr. Nefarious incident. He called himself that, by the way. Sure it sounded so cliche, but I have to admit that it was catchy. Nowdays the villains have horrible sense in naming, especially with the umlaut craze lately.
Amy startled at that, setting down her third shot of bourbon halfway through drinking it. She asked if it was that obvious. It was either that or I was more boring than I thought. Most women who don't want company are less polite about saying so than quick glances up to the screen every time it came off commercials. Obvious but not odd I said. I only personally stopped watching it because I had an inkling of where things would end up. She was blushing a bit at that point, and while I attributed it more to the liquor at the time, from what I came to know I think it might have been more to do with getting caught peeking at the screen. Girl could hold her liquor, what can I say? What did she think about it, I asked. She started in on pretty much my own reasoning at that point. Said that actual containment wouldn't last long since the jails weren't prepared for it. Maybe the next time, but not this one. At the least there would eventually be jail-breaks from other super-villains just to muck things up for the law. Bad for the economy to keep them in jail anyway.
I was nodding my head along with her until the last part. You might be like me and not know what she was talking about with that last part. Nothing said stable economy to me in bank robbery and attempted coup of local government. Dr. Nefarious was one of the more sane ones, honestly. There was a nutter around that time who went by the name of Penguin Man. Wanted to turn the city into a giant penguin habitat. Crazy. Anyway, it doesn't really match up from what I could see and I said so. Amy gives me the eyebrow at that point. Makes a big theatrical start in on how I was wrong and she would tell me why. Hand gestures and everything. So first, she says, you have to think beyond the immediate cause and effect. Beyond Villain and Hero too she says. Bottom line is that most of the shenanigans recently had limited actual damages. A few bullet holes and broken walls. A broken tree or two and some crushed cars. Most of that was covered by insurance. Kinda crazy not to get it with the way the city was anyway. Next is the jobs created. Lots of repair jobs, protection jobs, super-proofing jobs (though those were mostly scams), and even criminal jobs to pull money into the local business. That's without secondary impact stuff, Amy says. We talked around it more, the whole thing took longer than it did in the retelling of course. More time, more talk, more alcohol.
It became sort of a weekly thing. Friday nights down at the bar. Not the big conversations about the economics of super-crime, though we had a few more of those, but just conversation. She laughed, screwed up her nose at the prospect of fruity alcohols (she deemed them "tainted beverages"), and made my weekend drinking habit less anti-social. I, for my part, cracked bad jokes, listened to her thoughts on the world and its workings, and distracted her from some of the troubles she had been having. It came out a week or two in that she was out of work. Not broke and penniless though, despite the way her bourbon habit and alcohol tolerance fought late into the night. She had some money saved up from past jobs. "Lucrative but not exactly stable" is how she described them once. I didn't pry, at least not too much. Not in an un-friendly way. It mostly just made her glum when she bemoaned having to get back into the job-market. This was when I would turn the subject. Tacos, Roman sculpture, the news. Normal distracting things.
Four months after I introduced myself, the topic was the breakout of Dr. Nefarious. Amy was sure it was some convoluted re-balancing of the criminal infrastructure that involved breaking him and some of his lackeys out, while I was sure it had just taken him time to recuperate before escaping on his own. Long night, loud conversation. I woke up Saturday on an unfamiliar bed that smelled a bit like bourbon. Amy was passed out, arm over my chest, drooling on her pillow.
The room looked organized for comfort and use, though not for looks. Newspapers and a phonebook crowded the top of the nightstand, my glasses resting atop the stack next to a half-empty, red pen. There was a pink-curtained window, just a crack in between the edges that drifted a line of light back and forth across my face as the curtains fluttered from the AC. I recognized some of the clothes that spilled out of the bottom of a half-closed closet, but most of them were more casual than what she put on for her weekly trips to the bar. Grey, black, yellow, brown t-shirts. Jeans, black and blue. What looked like a crumpled up leather jacket. A fuzzy, furry, brown-with-white-trim coat at the end of the outpouring, draped up the foot of the bed. Manila carpet, white walls, brown, wood-finished doors, and white trim. One of them was cracked open just enough to see bathroom tiling. No clock, no TV.
I might have moved, or she just decided to roll over. Either way, she woke up slow, stretching her arms and arching her back a bit. Cute enough to make me blush. When she brushed my chest she made a noise something along the lines of an inquisitive "mnph", followed by an "oh", and then a "coulda been worse".
We had coffee. The living room was just off the bedroom, kitchen separated from it by a counter. Nothing special, just a couch, a recliner, a short coffee table, the kind you have to stoop over a bit, an old lamp, and a wired telephone, which was a bit archaic. Hadn't seen one of those in a few years by then. I took the couch, she took the recliner. It didn't come off as too awkward. She went for a shower; then it was awkward. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be gone or not by the time she was out of it. Phone rings. Her land-line that is. I take it as my cue to leave, poking my head back in the bedroom to make sure I didn't forget something (I almost left my glasses, its a weak prescription), and then it went to voicemail. I have the front door halfway open. "Amy, this is Dr. Nefarious, I need you to gather the rest of the minions, same spot as usual. . ." So I stood there for a moment. Just that moment. It was one of those clarity things. Anyway, maybe it would have been polite to stay and explain myself, but I left. I still can't figure out the etiquette for that situation.
I missed next Friday at the bar. That, I'm pretty sure was impolite in a way. It wasn't really standing her up, I told myself, but I don't believe it. I watched the news, followed the story of the breakout. Dr. Nefarious was back to what he did, namely heists and large scale death-ray threats. There were two or three those two weeks. Up from the one a month or so that it had been before he went in jail. It leveled off in the next few weeks. I had picked up the courage, though that feels like somewhat of a wrong word, and gone to the bar that second week. She had left a note with the bartender. "Thank you. Sorry?" It was on a yellow sticky-note in red-pen.
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