At night, Darren dons his secret identity. He becomes the Amazing Quizmo, the Great God of Answers. He presides over bar trivia contests and no one can beat him. Until a girl appears. A pretty girl. A very pretty girl who just might be smarter than Darren. And for Darren, that just won’t do.
“The Amazing Quizmo” by USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and from other online retailers.
The Amazing Quizmo
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Darren works as quizmaster at local bars. He has an empire: five bars rotate his services and one, the Triangle, promotes his appearances heavily. When he works, he is no longer Darren. He is Quizmo The Great God of Answers, and woe to all who doubt his superiority.
In real life, Darren works as a bike messenger, pedaling across Portland to deliver important packages. Usually he leaves his helmet on when he takes a package inside a building, worried that one of his regular quiz participants will see him and realize that the Great God of Answers doesn’t know how to get a Real Job.
The rest of the time, he trolls Internet cafes for esoteric information. He can’t afford an Internet hookup in his two-room apartment (a deluxe studio, the landlord calls it), so he must do his online work elsewhere.
He doesn’t approach anyone. Even when he’s running the quizzes, he doesn’t socialize. Between rounds, he plays music—mostly to annoy—and he rarely leaves the mike stand. When he’s on his bike, he says hello to no one. He delivers his packages and leaves.
This morning’s package goes to a law firm in one of the hoity toity doorman buildings that recently opened in the Pearl. The Pearl used to be the worst section of downtown. Now it’s exclusive, and pretends to be part of a larger city, like New York.
But the Pearl is not New York. Doormen still don’t know how to act. They pretend like their job is important—they half-bow to people coming in, offer to help the residents with baggage, smile at anyone dressed in a suit. They also scowl at the messengers, not realizing that in a real city, bike messengers are treated with respect.
As Darren saunters in, holding up the manila envelope and saying loudly, “Package for Hanley, Hanley, Combs and Whitmore,” he realizes that the doorman scowling at him is Yukio, one of his best players—a member of the team Brainiacs that plays at Buzzard Bill’s on Wednesday nights.
Darren’s stomach turns. Yukio is an excellent observer as well as a good player, a competitive man who seems to blame Darren whenever the Brainiacs lose.
Darren keeps his sunglasses on as well as his helmet, glad he wore the chinstrap today because it hides his trademark wispy goatee.
“Can’t let you in, buddy,” Yukio says in a decidedly unfriendly tone. “I’ll make sure they get the package.”
And you get the tip, Darren thinks but doesn’t say because as a messenger, he tries not to have the same edge he has as Quizmo.
“Sorry,” he says even though he isn’t. Half the messengers in the city fall for this crap from doormen and building security, and it isn’t right. Tips are part of the job. “Got to give it directly to the client.”
Yukio grabs his arm. “No can do, kid. Not without I.D. and approval.”
Darren shakes free, sighs loudly, and hands over his messenger I.D. No photograph—none needed—and his real name, which no one in the bars know. To them, the mighty Quizmo is a person with only one name, like Madonna, only a little prettier and a lot smarter.
Yukio takes the I.D., looks at it for a moment, then hands it back to Darren, the battle lost.
Darren walks to the elevator, his cleated shoes clicking on the brand-new marble. He gets the floor number from the digital information board which lists all the businesses and coyly states that Floors 6-14 are residential, without revealing any resident names at all.
The gold-edged mirrored doors ping open and as he steps on, he sees himself, and realizes that, in his get-up, he doesn’t look like a small Lance Armstrong, but like a subspecies of insect, something with a carapace over its head and probably multiple lenses in its non-human eyes.
No wonder no one smiles and nods at him as he rides by. They see him as something other, something alien, something inexplicably frightening. They don’t realize that under the spandex and messenger company logos is a man who, at thirty-five, still doesn’t know what to do with his life and is hoping that somewhere, somehow, he will be discovered for the genius that he is.
The elevator stops with a bounce that new equipment shouldn’t have. The doors open, and he gets off on a generic floor with 21st century brown carpets and off-white walls, with poster art that someone thoughtfully signed so that it would be more expensive than hotel art, and rows and rows of dark brown fire doors, each with the plaque that announces some corporate name.
He immediately turns right, even though he hasn’t been on this floor before, because law offices with names that big often have the largest door with the most space and the best entry.
He’s not disappointed. Hanley, Hanley, Combs and Whitmore have a wooden plaque on their brown door announcing their extreme importance, and as he pushes the door open, he steps into a world of glass that overlooks the Pearl and all its pie-in-the-sky condo construction. Maybe the view’ll be pretty some day. Right now, it’s just the same as views from high rises in Chicago and Dallas and Los Angeles, except that the receptionist doesn’t wear make-up and has on Birkenstocks that match her simple blue dress.
She is authorized to take the package and give him his tip. Apparently Hanley, Hanley, Combs and Whitmore have an account with the messenger service, because all she does is sign the company invoice and hand it to him, tip already tallied.
He suppresses his bitter response. He wouldn’t’ve fought with Yukio if he’d known he’d get the standard tip. It’s low—about seven dollars—and certainly not worth the hassle or the lost time for his other packages.
Still, he says thanks like a good drone and clatters his way to the elevator and Yukio.
Yukio doesn’t even notice Darren as he steps off the elevator and makes his way outside. No good-bye, no sportsman-like “Next Time!”, nothing.
If Darren had known Yukio was this rude, Darren would’ve never let Yukio have an extra thirty seconds in last week’s Impossible Round.
Darren shakes his head as he gets on his bike.
People. They’re never what you want them to be.
***
That night, he appears at the Triangle. The Triangle is Portland’s best gay bar, some say the best gay bar on the entire West Coast. It’s downtown, near the Pearl but not of the Pearl, and has bleached wood tables, found-art glassware and collages hanging on the walls.
It took Darren weeks to get used to working here—the occasional pinch on the ass from men who look like they could break him in half; the kissing women who don’t do it for titillation, like they do on the late night porn programs he pays too much of his messenger money for; the ultra-stylish clothing favored by half the clientele and the worker-bee anti-style clothing favored by the rest.
At first, he thought they’d see him for what he is, an imposter who has no one—gay or straight—waiting for him when he gets home, a man who doesn’t know how to pick up anyone of either gender, a man who isn’t even sure he has a gender because nothing—and no one—has interested him in years.
But once he made it clear he wasn’t there to meet men or influence people, once he took control As A Professional, the clientele of the Triangle accepted him as one of their own—or maybe a little more than one of their own. Here they don’t like calling him Quizmo—they think it’s too country-western. Here they call him the Quizmaster with a little more relish than he would like.
The Triangle also provides his best teams. People pay more attention here; they’re less drunk and better educated than the teams at the other bars. So he always puts on his best material, the stuff that stumped the other players. When he comes to the Triangle late on Thursday nights, he has his A game, practiced and polished and ready to defeat the masses.
Tonight he doesn’t feel on his A game even though he has his A material. It’s been a good week. His favorite teams won at each bar, and he hasn’t helped them along in any way. He found little pieces of information that no one else seems to know on an obscure website from England, and he finally got his DVDs of Remington Steele’s third season, which he’d ordered back in July.
So he should be happy, anticipating the clash of minds that always happens at the Triangle. Instead, he’s still thinking about Yukio, how that man bruised his arm trying to steal his tip, and wondering how he will react when he sees Yukio again.
The Triangle provides Darren with a little booth right in the middle of the dance floor. The booth dates from the 1980s, when the Triangle was a dying disco bar, and with the touch of a button, Darren can fill the place with flashing lights. Before he arrives, the bar turns on a soft red light over his chair. When he’s ready to go, he changes the light to blue. It’s annoying and makes the screen of his laptop hard to read, so he also has a tiny desk light that he places just beside the computer, resting the light on the printout of his questions in case the ancient computer bought on the cheap dies.
The format for the quizzes is easy: Players form teams who then compete to answer five rounds of questions. The first round (which he privately calls the Lull Round) is designed to make everyone feel smart. It’s the only round in which he uses pop culture questions—and those he usually steals from this week’s People, which he doesn’t even buy, but reads on the grocery store stands every Monday morning when he gets his fruit, yogurt, and Grape Nuts for his daily breakfasts.
The second through fourth rounds are middling hard for anyone with a general college degree. He’s found that people who are good in one area (say English Literature) suck at things like Geography and really suck at Science. Still, teams learn to balance such things and long-lasting teams, like the Dominos here or the Brainiacs at Buzzard Bill’s, have a good mix of general interest folks and science nerds.
It’s the final round, the round he calls the Impossible Round, a phrase stolen from one of the great quizmasters in that quizmaster paradise, Philadelphia, which separates the smart from the brilliant. If teams in the Impossible Round get one question right out of ten, they’re doing well. This round benefits only the truly esoteric trivia mind—the kind that, for instance, not only knows the exact date of Stalin’s death, but also the day of the week, the hour, the method and the identities of the suspected killers.
Tonight’s teams are the long-standing Dominoes and Sherlock Holmes Smarter Sisters (or Shiz for short [Shits, some of the other teams call them as the evening devolves into drunkenness]), as well as the fairly new BeBop Babies and the Woodhull Group. Two other quickly assembled teams died in the second round, unable to respond to any questions once pop culture disappears as a category.
The Dominoes and the Shiz have a year-long rivalry, based mostly on gender. Someone issued the age-old challenge—that boys are smarter than girls or vice versa—and ever since, the rivalry has been intense.
Darren likes it: he likes digging deep into his bag of tricks. He’s got the teams figured and he varies the competition. One week, he leans the questions toward the Dominoes, the next toward the Shiz. The win-loss ratio has remained steady, especially in the last six months when he started instituting the alternating week policy.
But tonight, the Shiz have a new team member. Liz is gone, replaced by a woman named Cindy. The name surprises him, which is why he can remember it. She seems too exotic to be a Cindy. She isn’t pretty but she’s not ugly either. She’s arresting and as he stares at her throughout the night, he realizes she looks, as Conan O’Brien might say, like the perfect lovechild of K.D. Lang and Lucy Liu. Only an orange scarf, worn babushka-like over her too-short black hair, gives her any mark of normality at all.
She’s a ringer. She can answer pop culture questions, science questions, math questions, esoteric religion questions, and history questions, as well as questions about literature, art, and music.
Her knowledge seems as encyclopedic as his and, from a distance, more vast. By the end of round five, she hasn’t missed a single question.
This makes him grouchy. He puts on Poison between Round Five and the Impossible Round because he knows the music will piss off everyone in the place. Then he climbs off his chair, steps out of the booth, and heads to the bar.
Everyone watches in surprise. He never goes to the bar.
He can’t decide what to order. Should he order liquor straight up? Or should he order a wimpy-ass drink that has umbrellas and lots of sugar to hide the taste?
In the end, he realizes he should order what he wants. In this bar, as opposed to all the other bars in which he works, no one cares what everyone else does.
He gets, of all things, seltzer water because he wants to keep his brain clear, and he gives the bartender a ridiculously large tip. As he turns around, he finds himself surrounded by the Dominoes.
“Cindy shouldn’t be allowed to play,” says their leader, Genghis. Genghis, of course, isn’t his real name, but it’s his stage name, just like Quizmo is Darren’s.
Darren isn’t going to get into this kind of pissing contest. He learned early in his quizmastering days that the composition of the teams—so long as each has no more than six players—is none of his business.
He clutches his seltzer water and tries to push past. Genghis’s second, Kubilai steps in front of him. Genghis doesn’t scare him—he’s smaller than Darren with no muscles to speak of, but Kubilai had been a biker in a previous life and still has the tattoos. He still has the muscles as well, and the shaved head over which Darren had once seen him break a chair.
“Cindy ain’t no queer,” Kubilai says. “She don’t belong here.”
“Teams are teams,” Darren says, knowing it sounds lame.
He pushes past, remembering now why he never goes to the bar. Usually a cocktail waitress brings him something when he signals. But he felt trapped and a little surprised that Cindy could answer all of his questions. He needed to move to shake off the unease that she had engendered in him.
As he starts up the stairs, she appears beside him. She is big, with huge muscles in her arms, and large breasts that sag the way that real breasts sag. Up close, she looks a little familiar.
“I like your game,” she says, leaning on the railing beside the stairs like a groupie.
“Thanks.” He keeps his head down. He doesn’t want to play favorites.
“I heard it was hard.”
He shrugs.
She grins. “Maybe it’s just my night.”
He feels a flare of anger which he would normally indulge in, but he’s still off-balance from the conversation with the Dominoes. Besides, from her perspective, she’s right; the game has been easy.
He climbs up the stairs and doesn’t look at her. Instead, he punches a few keys on his laptop, calling up the Truly Impossible File, the questions that no one has been able to answer in two years of the game.
He pulls twenty at random, then checks to make sure they cover at least half his categories. He shuts off Poison, changes the lights, and forces everyone back in their seats.
Then he fires off the questions in rapid succession:
—What was the name of Dorothy Parker’s first dog?
—What was the chief export of Rome in 1433?
—In what language did the word zenith originate? What was the word’s original use and meaning?
Cindy answers all three of the first three questions, but the fourth stops her: What is Fermat’s Last Theorem and why is it famous?
Most math people can answer the second part. The theorem is famous because the proof disappeared. But very few people have memorized the theorem itself. Someone on the Shiz thinks she remembers the theorem. The Dominoes argue quietly among themselves.
He hits the timer when no one rings in after four minutes, and for the agonizingly slow sixty seconds that remain, he finds himself twisting his fingers together like an evil wizard.
At least four players in Bailey’s Saloon would have been able to answer this question. The only reason it remains in the Truly Impossible File is because the night he asked the question, those players had gotten exceedingly drunk.
In fact, a lot of questions in the Truly Impossible File remain because the teams had too much to drink, something that would never happen here at the Triangle.
The buzzer sounds. Curses echo through the bar and some other patrons applaud, happy to see that not even the Shiz know all the answers this night.
He smiles, feeling superior once more.
Then he leans into his microphone.
“Since none of you losers even tried to answer that question in the time allowed, we’ll subtract ten points from both sides.”
The groans around the bar please him. He’s in his groove again. He asks the next five questions, satisfied that Cindy only gets one right.
Maybe it’s just my night indeed. Maybe it was.
But it is no longer.
***
His good mood lasts until three p.m. the next afternoon, a half an hour before his shift ends. He’s gets his last package, and realizes that again it goes to Hanley, Hanley, Combs and Whitmore.
He doesn’t want to see Yukio, but he has no choice, he’s already answered the first half of the call. As he peddles across downtown toward the Pearl, Darren realizes he could simply forego the tip—after all, it’s on account, and not very much.
But forgoing the tip also means losing face, and if Yukio ever finds out who he is, then he’ll never live this down—not that he could live it down anyway. His days as Quizmo of Portland would be over; everyone would laugh at a seemingly all-powerful man with a brilliant mind who rides a bicycle for a living.
He tries not to think about the upcoming encounter. He tucks the package in his bag and hurries across the streets. In Portland, drivers obey the rules of the road, so he takes advantage of red lights, stop signs and polite drivers stopping for pedestrians.
He makes it across the downtown in less than five minutes. When he reaches the outside of the Hanley, Hanley, Combs and Whitmore building, he padlocks his bike illegally to a parking meter, grabs the package and heads for the door.
Yukio isn’t there. The doorman is a middle-aged man whom Darren hasn’t seen before. When the doorman offers to take the package upstairs, Darren lets him, willing to lose the tip to add a few more minutes to his weekend.
All he has to do is ride back to headquarters, drop off his bike bag and his payment log, and then head home. He has the entire weekend ahead of him—no bars host quiz programs on Fridays or Saturdays; he doesn’t have to be back to work until 9 p.m. on Sunday night and then at the easiest bar on his list.
He unlocks the bike and sees a movement near the alleyway. Yukio, in his doorman’s blues, tosses a still-burning cigarette into the gutter.
Darren fumbles with the lock, his fingers suddenly shaking. He has to focus on the combination; for a brief moment, he cannot remember it.
When he finally snaps the lock open, he looks up. Yukio has gone back inside.
Darren hates that one of his players is on his regular route. It’d be so easy for the player to out him, and a player like Yukio, who can’t take responsibility for his own losses, is the very sort of man who would do so.
Darren rides back to headquarters so distracted that he nearly rear-ends a Volkswagen stopped at the light near Waterfront Park.
On the way home, he picks up a six-pack of Budweiser but forgets to stop at the video store. He’s stuck with O Brother Where Art Thou, which he has already seen twice.
He watches it again that night, then follows it with the director’s commentary. He listens to the music, looks at the trailer, wonders if George Clooney is too thin, if the Coen Brothers are as whacked as they seem. Over the course of the weekend—a weekend that he had planned to spend in Portland State University’s library, looking up information in newly minted doctoral theses—he sees O Brother a total of five times (the director’s commentary three times, which really takes his total to eight times).
By Sunday night, he’s so woozy he considers taking 1930s bluegrass out of the pop culture category and putting it in the general category. Then he realizes his mistake. He’s not sure he can handle a quiz crowd, even a quiz crowd at Buster’s Bar and Rodeo.
Still, he shows up. He hasn’t missed a night at any of his bars, not even when he had the Martian death flu two winters back—the kind that had him yacking every fifteen minutes or so into a bucket beside announcer’s booth.
He goes and he works, ignoring the screams from the mechanical bull riders two rooms over, glad that this crowd muffs most of the questions while trying to answer them because that means the contest ends quicker.
But somewhere around round three, he realizes that one team is getting its questions. He squints through DVD-blurred eyes and sees a woman with a purple kerchief, worn babushka style. She’s toward the back and she’s not ringing in, but she’s supplying answers to her team—the Great American Cowgirls.
He’s half tempted to get off the chair behind the dance platform, leaving the mike off, and get a drink, just so that he can see if she’s as square as he remembered, her arms as thick, and her breasts as saggy.
But he shakes himself free of the impulse and continues as if she’s not there at all. While he plays half of Billy Ray Cyrus’s only platinum album during the break after Round Five (Billy Ray in quantity is guaranteed to piss off any good country loving crowd), he pads the Impossible Round with as many esoteric math questions as he can get away with, much more esoteric than the math questions that stumped Cindy at the Triangle.
He starts the round just as the crowd gets surly, and for the first time, he wonders if he’s lost them. A woman down front starts screaming for Alan Jackson until someone shuts her up, reminding her that Request Night isn’t until Tuesday. One good ole boy punches another near the bar, and the bar back, a former high school linebacker nicknamed Dumbbell (for both his weight and his IQ), drags both men out by their ears so that the punches don’t turn into an out-and-out brawl.
This Impossible Round matches Round Four at the Triangle in degrees of difficulty. Sure enough, Cindy—or the woman who looks stunningly like her—manages to answer the first ten questions covering everything from astronomy to microbiology to the development of the pillow book in premodern Japanese literature.
But she misses the math questions. All of them. And that oversight brings the only remaining competitive team—the Beer Goggles—into first place. They win a gift certificate for Powell’s Books, some free beers that they don’t need, and five rides on the mechanical bull as well as a little computerized award sheet that looks oddly like a diploma that the manager of the bar insists on making up after each Sunday night competition.
By the time Darren finishes his announcements on the prizes, Cindy—or her look-alike—is gone, vanished into the crowd or off to try her luck on the mechanical bull.
Darren feels oddly relieved. He doesn’t want to think about her.
He doesn’t want to think about anything except tomorrow’s quiz.
Darren packs up his gear and slides his laptop under his arm, walking out to his piece-of-crap car (no bike on quiz nights) before remembering that he hasn’t gone to the bar manager for his check and his cut of the night’s proceedings.
He gets woozy sometimes, and he’s gone into the job sick, but never before has he forgotten to pick up his check. He’s still not on his A game.
***
For the next two days, he manages to avoid deliveries to Hanley, Hanley, Combs and Whitmore. He conducts his quizzes, stocking his Impossible Rounds with math questions because he feels like he’s being stalked by Cindy the Trivia Wonder Creature.
Finally, on Wednesday, he can’t avoid another trip to Hanley. Yukio is there, cupping an unlit cigarette in his hand as Darren locks his bike to the nearest parking meter.
“You can’t park there,” Yukio says.
“I can’t park anywhere else either,” Darren snaps. “You people won’t guard it for me.”
He puts a nasty emphasis on you people that surprises even himself. Yukio frowns at him, and Darren’s breath catches. In that biting sentence, Yukio probably heard the voice of Quizmo. Yukio probably recognized it.
Yukio puts one hand on his hip, tilts his head, and says, “You’re that bike messenger who snuck in here last week.”
Darren’s relieved. Yukio has recognized him, but not as Quizmo.
“I didn’t sneak,” Darren says. “I was doing my job. I showed you my identification.”
And then because he must retain his power in this relationship, Darren stalks into the building.
The second doorman, the middle-aged loser, reaches for the package, but Darren doesn’t give it to him. Even though he will only get a seven-dollar tip, even though he will lose time on his next (and bigger paying) job, he must do this. He must show Yukio who is in charge.
His cleats click on the marble. The package is clammy beneath his arm, probably from his own sweat. He watches reflections in the mirrored glass of the elevator, hoping for Yukio, but Yukio doesn’t come after him.
As he puts the package in the hand of the Birkenstocked receptionist and takes his paltry signed form, indicating his tiny tip, he realizes just how petty he’s become, playing games no one else participates in, games no one else even knows are going on.
He feels, for the first time in his aimless life, as if he’s trapped in a Coen Brothers’ movie, and he has no idea how to get out.
***
The Brainiacs always show up early at Buzzard Bill’s on Wednesday night. They eat dinner together, have a beer or two, and relax before the quizzing starts.
As Darren sets up, he stares at their table. Yukio is there, wearing a faded blue shirt over ripped jeans. He seems shorter, squatter, than he does in his uniform—and not as exotic.
Yukio clutches a book—Great Minds’ Trivia Challenge—something Darren only used in his first year of quizzing and has since moved beyond, preferring to draw up his own questions.
Something niggles at him, something he’s missed in his assumptions, something that has bothered him from the start. Darren sets his sheets out for the first round as the door opens. In Buzzard Bill’s, the mike stand is only a few feet from the door and early in the evening—particularly in the summer—he gets blinded whenever the light shines in.
It is no different now. But as the door eases closed, he sees the scarf first—this one a loud yellow and green—and then the rest of her, done up in green pants with a yellow blouse, and weird yellow sandals.
She grins at him, and he feels surprise. She has tracked him down. For a week—maybe more—she has followed him from bar to bar, playing the quizzes and doing better than most.
But for the math questions…
Math questions Yukio usually aces.
Darren’s frown grows deeper. She walks across the bar floor after waving three fingers of her right hand at him and then slides into the booth beside Yukio.
There is a resemblance, the resemblance of siblings or cousins, the kind that leaves no doubt that these two people have sprung from the same gene pool.
Darren’s stomach flops over. Is Cindy somehow involved in Yukio’s obsession or is she just humoring him?
I heard it was hard, she’d said to Darren that first night. Heard from Yukio? Was she practicing? Scouting? Or trying to show Yukio up?
In the end, Darren decides it’s none of his business. He’s going to do what he always does: He’s going to put on the best quiz show possible for everyone involved.
It isn’t until the middle of the first round that he realizes he’s in trouble.
Cindy has joined the Brainiacs, bringing their number to the requisite six. Technically, that wouldn’t be a problem except that she can answer every question he throws at them.
Except the math questions.
Which he has loaded heavily into the last three rounds.
Math questions Yukio can answer in his sleep.
Quizmo will no longer be all knowing, the great god of information, champion of the geek Olympics, smartest man in the room.
He will become worse than his losers—a man who can be beaten at his own game.
He will become, in the space of an evening, absolutely nothing.
***
By the end of round two, he knows he must find other questions, new subjects, some way to defeat the juggernaut that is Yukio and his sister.
Darren knows that Cindy is Yukio’s sister because one of the Brainiacs hits on her, and Yukio looms over him, warning the would-be Lothario to leave his sister alone.
At the end of round three, Darren has exhausted his laptop’s deep files—all the information he’s hidden over the years of running quizzes has risen to the surface, and is now part of the game.
He cannot use any questions from earlier in the week, because Cindy has participated in every round.
He is stuck, and he knows it.
Sweat breaks out on his forehead. His fingertips are slick with condensation from his glass of water mixed with the weird stuff that coats Goldfish crackers. He’s been eating those by the handful, trying to calm himself. All he’s managed to do is turn his hands yellow and make his stomach feel like mush.
As he heads for the men’s restroom in the now-closed restaurant, a hand grabs his arm. He recognizes the grip. It hits the same bruises that formed a week ago, after Yukio tried to stop him from getting into the Hanley, Hanley, Combs and Whitmore building.
“We’re going to beat you,” Yukio says. “We’re going to leave your brain battered and bloody, exposed for all to see.”
Then he releases Darren’s arm and it is all Darren can do to keep from rubbing the newly aggravated bruises. He staggers into the private section of the restaurant, where only employees can go after ten p.m., and disappears into the men’s room. He almost shoves the large metal garbage can against the door, but decides against it. All that will do is show his own fear.
Why does Yukio hate him so? What has he done, really? All he’s been doing is running a little game.
At least Yukio still doesn’t recognize him.
Yet in both places – in the bars and at the Hanley building—they have ended up in pissing contests, and so far, Darren has won.
At the thought of pissing, his bladder reminds him of the reason for his trip across the bar. He heads to the urinal, braces himself with one hand against the spotless wall because he’s still a little too shaky to remain upright, and relieves himself.
Threats of violence usually didn’t shake him. He’s small but he’s tough thanks to all those years of cycling. But that image—his brain bloody, battered and exposed—won’t leave him.
He washes his hands, splashes water on his face, and peers at himself in the mirror. The Brainiacs are going to beat him—Yukio and Cindy are going to beat him.
He doesn’t know how to stop them.
He makes himself breathe. It’s one night. One night of one game. It’s not as if he’s going to lose his entire empire.
Except that Cindy has scoped out every bar, learned the names of his favorite teams in all of his weekly haunts. If she and Yukio defeat him here, they can—and perhaps will—defeat him everywhere.
He doesn’t know what to do.
But he knows he has to do something.
***
By the end of Round Five, Yukio is smirking. Cindy isn’t even pretending to be a part of the Brainiacs’ backup team. She buzzes in quicker than anyone else, even her brother.
The other teams have already been eliminated, and so there is no need for the Impossible Round.
The crowd is getting surly. They want to see a competition, not one team crushing another. Darren’s asked all his most difficult questions, wasting years of the Truly Impossible File on a single game. He can’t even go back to the questions from earlier in the week because Cindy has heard them all.
Still, he leans into the mike and says, “Believe it or not, folks, we are going to have an Impossible Round. It’ll just take a moment to get it organized.”
He is so angry that he puts Olivia Newton John’s last album on the sound system, forcing the crowd to listen to whining songs about inappropriate lovers while he tries to come up with a solution.
Yukio and Cindy are laughing with the Brainiacs. The other teams have crowded the bar, demanding even more alcohol. For Buzzard Bill’s, the night is still good.
It’s only going badly for Darren.
Cindy looks up, grins at Darren and then winks, as if they share a secret. She takes the ugly scarf off her hair, and he finally understands why she wore it. Without it, her resemblance to her brother is startling.
Darren clenches his fist. Yukio and Cindy have made a point to know all sorts of esoteric information about all sorts of things. They have minds that capture inane facts and save them for no apparent reason. They’re smart people with unsmart jobs—at least in the case of Yukio—and they probably wonder, deep down, why they aren’t running the world.
In short, they’re like him.
But they’re not like him. A doorman has no practical function. He’s not a janitor or a plumber, someone with hands-on skill. All a doorman has to do is scrutinize people who come and go from a building. And when Darren confronted Yukio, even though Yukio got physical, he backed down.
“You gonna shut that crap off soon?” The cocktail waitress stands behind him. She sets down a bottled water and a glass of ice, just like he requested at the beginning of the night. And another bowl of Goldfish crackers. “I never liked this stuff when it was popular twenty years ago.”
“Me, either,” Darren says.
“So do something, would you?” She makes a face at him, as if he’s the most stupid person on earth, and then she wades back into the crowd.
Do something.
Of course. That’s the problem with Brainiacs. People who spend all their time learning useless facts have no practical side. That’s what he’s been groping for, that’s what he needs.
He has to ask questions smart people will miss—simple questions, questions that are about practical things. Yet they have to seem esoteric.
If only he can think of questions like that.
He turns the sound down on that horrible music, then grabs the mike so hard that feedback echoes through the bar.
The crowd grows instantly silent.
“The Brainiacs win tonight’s prize,” he says—and there’s a groan from the other teams, who somehow hoped for a lightning elimination round or something—“but we have an extra special prize, a once-in-a-lifetime prize, that goes to the winner of the Impossible Round.”
He has the crowd now. They’re staring at him.
His heart pounds as if he’s pedaled all across Portland. If he screws this up, he’s done.
“Since we all know that the Brainiacs won because of their two team members, Yukio and Cindy, who answered every one of tonight’s questions, I’m making the Impossible Round their round. Only Yukio or Cindy may answer a question. No one may help them. The rest of you Brainiacs, get yourselves a beer and absent yourselves from the team table. If anyone helps Yukio or Cindy, they forfeit and their team forfeits—”
“What if someone from another team helps?” a Brainiac shouts, clearly worried.
“Then the team’s barred from the game here at Buzzard Bill’s.”
The bartender looks up in panic. Darren isn’t authorized to make these kinds of rules or those kinds of decisions. He hopes it won’t come to that.
“Ten questions,” he says, “with ten subheadings.”
“Do they get the special prize or do all the Brainiacs?” another Brainiac shouts.
He makes a quick decision. “You all do. Yukio and Cindy are playing for the whole team.”
The Brainiacs cross their arms, but they move away from the team table. Suddenly Yukio and Cindy are in the spotlight, and for the first time that night, they look nervous.
“Yukio and Cindy, are you ready?” Darren asks.
“Sure,” Yukio says, his bravado back.
Darren clears his throat, takes a deep breath, and asks, “Question One: What is the albedo of the earth, in aggregate?”
“I’ll take that.” Cindy grins at her brother. He shrugs. She presses her handheld buzzer, then says, “It’s zero-point-three.”
“Subquestion A,” Darren says, “How is the albedo calculated?”
“Oh, shit,” Cindy says without hitting the buzzer. “Who really cares?”
“I do,” Yukio says. He buzzes in. “If you have a spectoradiometer and you face it toward the sun…”
Darren listens but he doesn’t really hear. He pays just enough attention to know that they are getting each question and the following subquestions. And as he suspected, Yukio takes the math questions while Cindy handles all the rest.
She destroys the history section. And the literature section. Finally, Darren gets to his most esoteric question, the one he doubts even a collector or an antique dealer can answer.
“What is…” he asks slowly “…a Caron Derringer?”
Yukio hits the buzzer. “It’s a gun manufactured in—”
“It’s a perfume atomizer,” Cindy says over the top of him. Darren’s stomach does a flip-flop.
“Yukio buzzed in,” Darren says. “He has to give the complete answer.”
She turns to her brother, whispers to him.
Darren bangs a hand on the counter, making the mike reverberate. “Yukio has to answer on his own.”
“We’re playing as a team,” she says. “Team members can consult.”
Darren supposes he can challenge that. They’re playing as a truncated team. He can disqualify this question, and make sure they don’t work together again.
But he doesn’t want to defeat them by default. He wants the win to be fair and square, so that no one, particularly not Yukio, can say he cheated.
“Okay,” Darren says. “Yukio, give me the answer.”
“It’s a perfume atomizer marketed in 1963 under the Caron brand. It’s so small it can fit into a purse or a lipstick case. It doesn’t look like a derringer, but rather like a derringer’s bullet.”
Complete, accurate, and devastating. A question like that would demolish even the better-than-average player. Cindy isn’t better than average. She’s the best Darren’s seen. Her math weakness is her only flaw.
Darren’s hands continue to shake. He’s not sure he can keep up this game much longer. His head is throbbing and he feels slightly woozy. If she can answer the Caron Derringer question, she can answer almost anything. And his own math skills aren’t great enough to take on Yukio—at least not on the highest levels.
He hasn’t thought of any real world questions, not any he’s sure of the answers to. He doesn’t know much about plumbing or construction either.
But he does know biking. Only, if he asks a bicycle question, will Yukio realize that the Great Quizmo is really a lowly bike messenger?
Yukio is staring at him. So is the rest of the bar, waiting for the next question.
Either Yukio and Cindy defeat him here, defeat him now, or Yukio defeats him later—should he recognize Darren.
The risk is Darren’s.
And he takes it.
He says, “In cycling, what was Kryptonite’s kryptonite?”
The entire bar gasps. The Kryptonite lock, the best of all bike locks, supposedly undefeatable, impossible to break into, turned out to be easily opened with a ballpoint pen. Because Portland has such a large cycling community, the story made front-page news in the Oregonian a few years ago. The company that makes Kryptonite fixed the flaw immediately and offered every cyclist who had purchased a Kryptonite lock a replacement.
Yukio is looking down. Cindy frowns. Around them, people squirm in their chairs. A few of the Brainiacs, sitting as far from the competitors’ tables as possible, whisper to each other, obviously shocked at their teammates silence.
The whole bar knows the answer.
“It was in the paper,” Yukio says without buzzing in. “I saw it.”
Cindy studies him as if she can will the answer out of him.
“Something picks that lock,” Yukio says.
Cindy remains quiet.
Yukio turns toward the bar, but Darren clears his throat into the microphone. No one says anything, even though a few people clearly want to.
Then Yukio looks at Cindy, who shrugs.
“Your first four minutes are nearly up,” Darren says. He wonders if he can live with himself if he sets the final minute timer at thirty seconds.
But he doesn’t have to cheat. Instead, Yukio buzzes in. “It’s a paperclip!”
The entire bar groans. Darren allows himself a small triumphant smile, then leans toward the mike. “You people want to tell him what he did wrong?”
In unison, the patrons shout, “A ballpoint pen!”
Yukio looks stunned, Cindy confused.
Darren’s heart is still pounding, but the pounding comes from an unfamiliar elation. He’s never felt like this—at least not in quizzing. Once or twice when he’s had to beat the clock messengering, he’s hit a biker’s high. That’s what this feels like. The quizmaster’s high.
“And that’s it for tonight’s game. If you losers are still feeling confident, come back for next week’s tournament, and see whose brain ends up bloody, battered, and exposed for the weak muscle that it is. Until then, this is Quizmo, reminding you all that my mind is greater than yours.”
Yukio cringes, but looks defeated. He doesn’t seem like a man who has recognized a bike messenger. He seems like a man whose brain has been exposed.
If Yukio was going to do anything, he would have done it the moment he lost the question.
But he didn’t.
Darren’s won. He wants to jump with his arms overhead like a football player who has just made a touchdown.
Instead, he settles for blaring Queen’s “We are the Champions” over the sound system.
Yukio’s teammates have surrounded his table, battering him with questions—How could he miss that? It was so easy. Darren smiles. Yukio looks lost, clearly wondering why one missed easy question destroys his entire reputation as a brainiac.
Because, Darren can tell him but won’t, the easy questions show the posturers for the real-life losers that they are.
“My brother thought he could beat you.” Cindy’s standing near the back of the mike stand. Darren looks for the cocktail waitress, the bouncer, someone in authority to tell Cindy to move out of the way, but they’re busy.
He’s alone.
“No one beats the amazing Quizmo,” Darren says, but there isn’t as much heart in the words as there was a few minutes ago.
She gives him a saucy grin. “I’d like to.”
It takes him a minute to realize she’s making a double entendre. Then it takes another minute to realize she’s serious. He blushes so deeply that the heat in his face actually hurts.
Her dark eyes meet his. He studies her for a moment. He’s beginning to get used to her exotic look and he’s starting to think she’s handsome in a way that only improves with age.
Her mind is compatible with his—right down to the level of trivial interests and her inability to go to higher levels in math. If he says yes, he could be with her for a very long time. They’d be perfect together—the kind of couple who would build a geeky life in this geeky town.
He’d quit quizzing and take a job at Intel or one of the other remaining high tech firms. She’d continue doing whatever it is that keeps her in beer and potato chips.
Together they’d have two scarily brilliant children, a few cats, and a house in the West Hills. Eventually, he’d gain weight because he can’t cycle any more, and he’d start frequenting bars like this one just once a week, coming for the “entertainment” and not for the escape, wondering what it would’ve been like if he’d continued in his quest for fame.
He would never know, but he would fantasize about it, like all of these people here, people who leave every week and go back to their average lives in their average houses with their average spouses.
He can’t believe he’s thinking of dating her. He can’t believe he’s thinking of sleeping with her.
For a moment—just a brief moment—he forgot he is the Amazing Quizmo, Master of All He Sees.
“Sorry,” he says to Cindy as he pushes past her, “but the only person who can beat me is myself.”
Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in The North American Review, May-August, 2009
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Swinnerrr/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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