Light leaked under my eyelids, hot and bright, and pain wracked my body like an old lover, a lover with a part-time job as a Swedish masseusse who kept getting fired because she thought her job was to cause endless hellish torment.  And yet the pain was familiar, the one constant in my otherwise tumultuous life, and in that sense, at least, I took a measure of comfort from it: I slapped it on the back and called it Shirley and took it out to dinner.

 

I heard the voices next, dark and muffled, arguing, demanding, begging and wailing all at once, a thousand voices, a sweeping orchestra in three movements, all funneled down into a single pencil-point of sound......

 

"Claw?"

 

I didn't realize at first that the voice was speaking to me, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I tried to move. No such luck. Gleaming shards of steel bit into my arm.

 

"Claw?"

 

Again that voice. I tried to answer but all that came out was a tongueless wail with lots of 'n' sounds in it.

 

"You're awake, that's good," said the voice, "Now, don't try to talk, just listen. We're getting outta here, see? You and me and all these mugs are making a break for it."

 

The words rung in my ear like a Christmas bell. Freedom suddenly seemed far away, like the black sand beaches of Tahiti, where a man's troubles melt away in the salt and the brine. But this stiff wasn't a hula girl. He was a man. A man like any other man. A man caught up in something bigger than himself with no way out. "Who...are you?" I manager to say at last.

 

"The name is Seltzer, see? Harry Seltzer. Word on the street is..."

 

A loud clang, and then silence. A silence more than sound, a silence of fear, a fear beyond reason or logic, a fear that turns a man's guts to ice, like going in for a routine physical and finding out that you have a tumor the size of a watermelon in your head.

 

"Ah, so!" another voice this time: "The Claw!!! We meet again!!!" And this time, it is on a battlefield of my own choosing!!! And what do you think about that, my friend?"

 

I found my voice, "Laser Boy?"

 

"There is no Laser Boy!!!" he snapped "Laser Boy died at the eleven o'clock showing of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of The Clones, at Cinema 18 off State Route 20!!! It was there that Laser Boy met his match, in 10-year-old Billy Dugan, whose comments on the nature of the film were so insightful, whose understanding of the Force and the burdens of a Jedi were unparalleled. I struck up a friendship with young Billy, and I discovered that, along with his love of Star Wars and all that it encompasses, he also had one other passion, a passion undreamed of in song or story. It was cheese!!! Cheese, I say!!! And it was young Billy's love of cheese that inspired me with a problem of my own!"

 

I ventured a guess: "Your breath?"

 

"Dorkititude?" said a second voice.

 

"That drool thing you do when you're excited?"

 

"Silence!!!" he thundered, and quickly regained his composure: "It was nothing so mundane, I assure you!!! No, this was a puzzle that has vexed me and others like me for generations!!! A power problem, if you will. You see, when laser science was in its infancy, it wasn't possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix, and the threshold for power output was 4.7 megawatts! But when I apply cheese dynamics, I can extract ten to the twenty-first kilojoules per cubic centimeter, or....one megajoule per liter."

 

"That's hotter than the sun!"

 

"A cheese laser?"

 

At that moment the dampers on my energy eyes were lifted, and I saw it, in the center of the room, surrounded by pathetic men in chains like myself. A gleaming silver monstrosity that looked like a cannon of some sort, and in its center...well, along with my sight, unfortunately, my sense of smell had unfortunately returned. In the center of the field piece was a bowl of milky, runny, gooey mess, a mess so foul and repugnant I started to wretch.

 

"Behold," said Dr. Laser, "The power of cheese!"

 

"And what do you plan to do with it, Laser?"

 

"What else? Acquire money, power, sex, and revenge against my enemies. Starting with you, Claw! You think I'd forgotten how you mocked me as a child? I've been watching you, Claw! Who do you think planted that sleeper agent among your co-workers that you wrote about on your infernal website on June 6, 2002?"

 

"My Arch Nemesis! Of course! Only you, Laser, could have devised such a diabolical scheme!"

 

While Dr. Laser blathered on about his plans, I was busy building up the energy in my claw. "That's it, Dr. Laser! I've had it with you...Cheese Boy...That idiot at work who always asks me how I'm doing!!!"

 

Energy rippled and pulsated from my mutant energy claw and destroyed the cheese laser just as Dr. Laser and Cheese Boy made their escape. As the smoke cleared, I saw a team of government ninjas, led by my old Lithuanian friend from the 6th grade, Agent XJ7.

 

"Nevermind about me!" I yelled at the guy freeing me from my chains, "He's getting away!"

 

"Don't worry, Claw," said my old friend, "The only lasers he'll be using are the kind....um, that they use in prison..."

 

We shared a hearty laugh, and knew that it was over.