The Defenders
an excerpt

Let’s start with joy.

Joy is a nice thing. It’s better than ecstasy, in a way, and not just because it’s shorter and easier to spell. Joy is sweet and round and full, whereas ecstasy is sharp and spiky. The high of ecstasy may be higher than that of joy, but it’s not as deep.

When you’re in ecstasy, and they show you the cliff they’re going to throw you off, you don’t even notice it. You don’t see the cliff, because you’re in ecstasy. You’re IN it. Enveloped, wrapped, cloaked, and you can’t see out to be bothered by that cliff. Your high is too high to notice anything but your high.

When you’re feeling joy, you see the cliff. You see it, but suddenly realize that you’ve always wanted to go over it. It dawns on you that your entire life has been one long struggle to get to that cliff and be thrown off of it. To tumble and flail and sink. When you’re feeling joy, you notice everything, but it’s all ok. It’s cool. It’s just as it should be.

Let’s start with joy. And if we start with joy, we have to start with Mr. Paul Gesh, 32 years old and feeling as joyful as he never thought he could.

We’ll be with him a while, so we’ll call him Paul. Skip the fancy stuff. Paul. Paul, sitting in his smallish, cleanish, mostly empty apartment in a town he hated was about to take a journey. Already reason enough for joy, but in this case, he had every reason to believe that his journey would be paid for, completely, by any newspaper he cared to give the time of day to. And in this case, the journey wasn’t to see relatives in Detroit or Madison, but to see the historic awakening of the One Hundred.

The One Hundred. They were coming into daylight after one hundred days of secrecy. Even the location of their awakening was a secret that only an extremely small club of the most powerful people alive were privy to.

Oh, and Mr. Paul Gesh. This is important, so the formality fits. Mr. Paul Gesh knew the exact spot and time to watch the One Hundred walk out of their little cocoon, or whatever it was. It wasn’t a cocoon, really, but a warehouse. And the warehouse was in Madrid.

And in 20 hours, the buoyantly joyful Paul would be there.