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  The Amazing Quizmo

  April 4th, 2011

  Darren has a secret identity. At night, 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.

  A short story by award-winning writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Available for 99 cents on Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Smashwords, and in other e-bookstores. Also available in the collection Five Oregon Stories, available for $2.99 on Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Smashwords and in other e-bookstores.

  The Amazing Quizmo

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Copyright © 2010 by 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 on-line 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 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 play 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 ther
e 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 Lu. 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?

  —W
hat 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.