“No, you need a strong narrator,” said Adam. “You're an unruly bunch.” I imagined I heard in his tone a hint of the Vision's selfless patronage of humanity.
According to the rules of Mafia, the group of fourteen comprised a “village”—except that three of us were “mafia” instead: false villagers working to bring the village down. These identities were assigned by dealt cards, black for village, red for mafia. The game then unfolded in cycles of “night” and “day.” Night was when we closed our eyes and lowered our heads—“The village is asleep,” Adam explained — with the exception of the three mafiosi. They instead kept their eyes open, and by an exchange of glances silently conspired to select a villager to kill. The victim would be informed of his or her death by the narrator, when night was over, and then make an orderly exit from the game.
Day, by contrast, was chaos, a period of free talk and paranoia among the sincere and baffled villagers — who, of course, included three dissembling mafiosi. Each day closed with the village agreeing by democratic vote on a suspect to banish. This McCarthyesque ritual lynching brought about night, and another attack from the mafia. And so on. The mafia won if they winnowed the village down to two or three, a number they could dominate in any voting, before the village purged all mafiosi from its ranks. It seemed to me like relentless jargonish nonsense, but I worked on a beer (telling Roberta the wine was “for the cellar”), checked out the women, and allowed myself to be swept into the group's flow. We began our first day in the village, peppered by Adam-the-narrator's portentous reminders, such as “Dead, keep your silence.” I'd drawn a black card: villager.
Our village was young and boisterous, full of hot, beer-bright faces whose attachments I couldn't judge. It was also splendidly bloodthirsty. “It pretty much doesn't matter who we vote out on the first day,” some veteran player announced. “We don't have any information yet.” I wondered how we were meant to gather information at any point in the agitated cross talk, but never mind. A regular named Barth was quickly exiled, on grounds of past performance — he'd proven such a generally deceptive player that he couldn't be trusted now. Roberta, who with her stature and chesty volume was strongly dominant in the village, led this charge. Barth succumbed to our lynch mob under groaning protest. “Night” fell, we “slept,” and when day came again Adam announced that a woman named Kelly had been taken out by the mafia.
Kelly's murder drew shouts and giggles of surprise. Why had they picked her? Perhaps this was the information that would lead us to an informed lynching, instead of Barth's whimsical sacrifice. The village again plunged into an uproar of accusations and deflection. I turned to the woman beside me, a sylphlike girl with dyed-black shortish hair, who hadn't spoken. “Are you in the mafia?” I asked her, not quite whispering.
She blinked at me. “I'm a villager.”
“Me too.” I told her my name, and she told me hers — Doe. Our exchange was easily covered by the shouts of the village leadership, mainly Roberta Jar and a couple of strident men, as they led our next purge.
“First time?” Doe asked.
“Yes.”
“That doesn't mean you aren't lying to me.”
“No, it doesn't,” I said. “But I'm not. Whom do you suspect?”
“I'm hopeless at this.” Unashamed, she met my eye. I felt a pang. Doe was everything Roberta Jar was not: diminutive, vulnerable, and, I began to hope, single.
“We'll work together,” I suggested. “Be watchful.”
Mafia was a kind of fun, I decided. It elicited from us heaps of behavior: embarrassment and self-reproach, chummy consensus building that curdled at a moment's notice to feints of real paranoia and isolation, even measures of self-righteous, persecuted fury. The intensity was enthralling, but it was also strangely hollow, because it lacked any real content. For all the theatrics, we revealed nothing of ourselves, told no tales. It was that for which I yearned.
It was the morning of the third day that I fell under suspicion. Irrevocably, as it turned out. “I think we're ignoring the new people,” said Roberta Jar. “I've seen it again and again, some newcomer draws the mafia card and sits there, playing innocent and silent, just mowing the village down while we argue. I think we ought to look at Joel, for instance. He isn't saying anything.”
“I heard him talking to Doe,” someone volunteered. “They have some little thing going on the side.”
“Both mafia, then,” said one of the leader men, whose every pronouncement was full of unearned certainty. “Take them both out.”
“I'm a villager,” I said. This was the standard protest, despite its deep meaninglessness: Who wouldn't say that? Someone laughed at me sharply for being unpersuasive. Before I'd assembled a better defense, hands shot up all around the circle. Even Doe voted for my banishment.
Adam Cressner then shepherded the village into night. “The dead usually wander off where they can talk without disturbing the village,” he stage-whispered across their bowed heads. I took the hint. As I moved into the hall, Adam returned to narration: “Mafia, open your eyes, and silently agree on someone to kill—” I wondered who the dastards were.
The zombies who'd vacated the parlor were gathered out on the brownstone's stoop, smoking cigarettes and gabbling. They spotted me peering through the front door's doubled glass panes. I made a gesture meant to be interpretable as Be right there, just going for a pee. Someone waved back. I went downstairs.
The half-basement's front room was furnished as a suburban den, with a stereo and large-screen TV, and walls lined with CDs, laser discs, and books, many of them expensive museum catalogues, compendiums of film stills, photo-essays from boutique imprints. I spotted a brightly colored paperback on a shelf of oversized volumes on art and antiquities: Origins, by Stan Lee, a reprint compendium of comic books introducing various Marvel characters: Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four. A sequel, Son of Origins, was shelved beside it. I browsed both, but the Vision wasn't included. He wasn't the sort of character who'd had such a prominent debut — more of a cult figure, I recalled. Like Rhoda or Fraser, he'd been an unplanned star, spun from an ensemble.
The pop-art panels looked thin and fraudulent on white paper, instead of the soft, yellowed rag of the old comics from which they'd been reprinted. Nevertheless, I felt a howling nostalgia rise in me at the sight of the Silver Surfer and Daredevil, characters who'd meant a tremendous amount to me for a brief moment in junior high, then been utterly forgotten. I'd discovered Marvel Comics a year or two after leaving P.S. 29 and Adam Cressner behind. The oddness of Adam's choice in identifying with the Vision had had a troubling chicken-or-egg quality to me then — did the character seem so depressed and diffident to me because of Adam's red face paint? The answer wasn't in Origins, or Son of Origins.
I replaced the books on the shelf and went digging in the walk-in closet instead.
“Hello?” Someone had entered the room behind me. It was Doe, swinging a beer bottle elegantly by the neck.
“Oh, hi,” I said.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for something.”
“Something?”
“A costume, or a cape,” I said. “It's a long story.” I emerged from the closet, which seemed to hold only wool coats and ski gear anyway. “Did you get voted out of the village?”
“Right after you.”
“Sorry. I guess I dragged us both down with that suspicious side talk. A rookie mistake.”