Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by

  Salammbo Press

  39A Belsize Avenue

  London NW3 4BN

  www.salammbopress.com

  Copyright © 2008 Marco Mancassola

  First published in Italy in 2008 by Rizzoli,

  an imprint of RCS Libri, S.p.A, Milan

  This edition published by agreement with PNLA/Piergiorgio

  Nicolazzini Literary Agency

  This English translation copyright © Antony Shugaar, 2013

  The moral right of Marco Mancassola to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Special thanks to Daniel Morris

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Cover design by mecompany.com, London

  Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

  ISBN 978-0-9568082-3-3

  eBook ISBN 978-0-9568082-8-8

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ‌

  Contents

  BOOK ONE · Mister Fantastic

  BOOK TWO · Batman

  BOOK THREE · Bruce De Villa

  BOOK FOUR · Mystique

  EPILOGUE · Superman

  Other titles from Salammbo Press

  Book One

  Mister Fantastic

  May 2005 – April 2006

  ‌

  There was a time when it was the centre of the world, a bouquet of concrete stalks hammered into granite, a grid of streets dotted with manholes from which there issued, in a never-ending stream, the vapour of dreams. Once this had been his city, a place where he performed great exploits, where he designed wonders, where his wife loved him unconditionally and where every word he uttered rang perfectly true.

  Manhattan glistened like a mirage, at his feet, in the late morning light. Reed Richards ran a hand over his forehead. He was looking out at the city through the plate glass window of the panoramic sauna on the twenty-ninth floor of the George Hotel. The temperature was rising and his skin was exuding a sheen of sweat and an elusive, fluid sense of disquiet that even he couldn’t put into words. He squinted. This was New York. This was his city, luminous and distant, on the far side of a sheet of glass, outside the panoramic sauna of a luxury hotel.

  He tried to relax. After all, this was a place designed for relaxation. Reed used the sauna frequently: he came here to shed toxins and tensions, and to sit, gazing out, in the state of contemplation that view always inspired in him. Around him, other men lay on the wooden benches, silent in the half-shadows, their gazes lost in the view outside. There was nothing here but peace, sweat, and a discreet reciprocal indifference. At least, that’s how it usually was. Today, though, things seemed to be different.

  There were four men. When he walked into the sauna, Reed had sensed the sudden, unmistakable silence of a conversation interrupted, and once he sat down, he could feel their eyes begin to brush over him, in the half-light, like curious tentacles. Reed felt a slight edge of annoyance. He didn’t like being recognised. He hadn’t appeared on television for twenty years now, but he knew his picture was sometimes published in pieces about the glories of bygone decades, or in an article about his son Franklin.

  Years ago, Reed chose to step out of the spotlight and let Franklin be the famous one. It was with a sense of relief that he had rid himself of other people’s eyes. He’d freed himself of the attention of the media, the buzz of gossip, the morbid quivering vibration that clusters around people who are too famous. He’d freed himself of the annoyance of being recognised everywhere he went. So now he felt uneasy, being eyed in the sauna, as the sweat slid down his elastic body.

  The wood was scalding hot. A ridiculous awkwardness kept him pinned to the bench. Pretending to be captivated by the view, he let time slide by, minutes and seconds, a succession of instants stretching out in the heat. The men surrounding him were all younger, a piece of data that he found himself registering, unwillingly, more and more these days. What’s more, they seemed resistant: no one made a move to leave the sauna. He could hear them breathing in the fiery silence.

  He knew it was late and a car was waiting downstairs, in the street, to take him out of town. He knew he had important things to do, that all this was foolish, that the challenge of outlasting the others was senseless. The heat had grown intolerable. He lurched to his feet. The sweat surged down his body as he stood there, his head spinning, trying to picture himself as the others saw him: there’s Reed Richards, Mister Fantastic, the Rubber Man, the fading glory of the chronicles of the twentieth century’s superheroes. Watch him as he struggles to keep his balance there by the window, naked, dehydrated, with all Manhattan as a glowing backdrop.

  Outside the sauna he found the salvation of cool air and of a cooling shower. He clutched the wall, letting the water pour over him. He almost felt as if he would melt. Staying that long in the sauna had been a foolhardy act, the kind of reckless behaviour his doctors had been warning him against for years now. Your body is special, Reed. It requires special care.

  It took a few minutes before he began to feel better, before his heartbeat began to slow down. His doctors also recommended against using his powers, except for a weekly regimen of exercises performed under the supervision of specialist trainers. In the shower, all the same, he carefully elongated his arms. He stretched them down to the floor and then back up. He felt a slight burning sensation. He did the same with his neck, upwards, and expanded his chest like an accordion. He started stretching out his head, too, trying to give it the rudimentary shape of an umbrella: an old trick he used to do for Franklin when he was a little boy, a trick he sometimes still did under the shower. The effort caused him a sharp stab of pain.

  He stopped trying. Anyone watching him would have had the impression that invisible hands were playing with him, manipulating his body, stretching and twisting it only to restore it each time to its original shape. His shape. His body. Over the years, Reed Richards had come to believe that his real talent, his real superpower, was not the ability to deform his body but rather the ability to restore it to its original shape. The rubbery material he was made of had worn out a little as he aged, lost elasticity and become much more sensitive. And yet, in spite of the work of time, in spite of the thousand ways in which it had been elongated and stretched and deformed, his shape had remained roughly unchanged. That was the miracle of Reed Richards. Or perhaps his curse. I’m still the same. I’m still me, he said to himself, as his body’s temperature slowly dropped.

  *

  A short while later, he emerged into the changing room, comfortably wrapped in a bathrobe and surrounded by the soft sound of the music that filled the entire floor. A feeling of melancholy satisfaction swept over him. Maybe it was the way the last traces of water vanished, molecule by molecule, from the surface of his skin, or else the feeling of cleanliness that spread through his body, or even just the pure, elementary fact that he had a body: My arms. My belly. My cock. He stood motionless next to the wooden locker where he’d left his clothes. He shook his head. He could never resign himself to the sequence of clashing sensations, nameless desires, and
obscure instincts that came with ageing. For example, his embarrassment in the sauna just now: so absurd. For him—a mature former superhero, a respected scientist, the chairman of the Richards Foundation—to react in such a paranoid way. Like a fearful little boy. He thought all this over, in the warm air of the changing room, while his skin dried off. Then he opened the locker and saw what someone had left him.

  There was a piece of paper inside. It was white, folded in half, perched on top of his trousers. Reed looked at it while his body tensed instinctively, ready to lash out against any potential danger. The world changed consistency around him, turning into a stark list of facts. The light in the room. The sound of a shower. The hum of the ventilation system. Reed had been a warrior, he had survived a thousand ambushes, and he knew that kind of moment. The moment when reality is transformed, and everything becomes important. Everything is a signal. Everything is other than it seems, everything could conceal a threat, or else help to understand the sudden fragment, now, the out-of-place object that had triggered the alarm.

  A sheet of paper. In his locker. Reed picked it up, holding it cautiously between his fingertips. He elongated his arm several yards, setting it down at a safe distance. He left it there, in the far corner of the changing room, as if it were a piece of infectious waste. He focused his attention on his clothes. He examined them one by one, carefully, without finding a thing. No suspicious stitching, no evidence of tiny listening devices, no minute drops of epidermic poison, none of the other diabolical contrivances he had encountered in the past, when he was the target of constant attacks. It looked to him that his clothes had not actually been touched. He sighed. The only thing left to do was to stretch out his arm again and pick up the paper. It was a simple white sheet, nothing more, and at last he unfolded it, to read the message written inside:

  SO LONG, MY MISTER FANTASTIC

  Just that simple phrase, run off by a computer printer in capital letters. Reed couldn’t understand. Such a simple phrase; yet at the same time so obscure. Who could have broken into his locker, in the time it took for a sauna, to leave him such a message?

  He stood there staring at the words, as though waiting for other phrases, other words to materialise. Was there some reference he was missing? His scientist’s brain worked methodically. He tested every conceivable anagram, code, and secret cipher that could be concealed behind that phrase. Over the course of his lifetime, he’d worked with languages of all kinds, real and invented, living or lost, but that message resembled nothing in his experience.

  SO LONG, MY MISTER FANTASTIC

  Reed gave up. It seemed to be nothing more than a bizarre salutation. Some loony had decided to send him a personal farewell. Maybe it was a longtime fan crossing the line into stalkerdom, someone who believed they’d had a relationship of some kind with him? He refolded the paper and slipped it into his trouser pocket, wondering whether it was worth worrying about this odd prank. Maybe not. He couldn’t say. In the solitude of the changing room he began to dress.

  *

  He heard a noise. It took him a second or two to identify it and associate that sound with a specific thought, a possible source. Tapping. Glass. Reed moved hesitantly, retracing his steps from the changing room back to the sauna. There was no one in sight, complete silence. Only that tapping sound.

  He found himself again at the door to the sauna, breathless, incredulous. Someone was knocking on the door from inside. Reed saw the hand against the glass. He had a vague notion that someone might have been locked in and was asking for help. He decided he had to help that person, he had to save a life, exactly the kind of thing he had once done routinely—or at least believed he did. To save someone’s life. And yet—that tapping didn’t seem like a call for help. It was too unruffled, too inviting.

  When he opened the door the wave of heat caught him head-on, once again, like a breath from a giant mouth. He was barely able to make out the shape of the person, who had in the meantime moved further into the half-light of the sauna. A woman’s shape. Reed waited by the door uneasily, wondering what a woman was doing in a men’s sauna, where the men who’d been there earlier had gone, and whether it was safe to go back into the sauna after already spending so much time in there. He hesitated, transfixed by these rational thoughts, until he felt them fade like a dying whisper. He stepped in and shut the door behind him. The silence in the sauna was even more powerful. Only the sound of his own breathing, and the woman’s.

  They were alone. She withdrew still further, into the hottest alcove at the far end of the sauna, and from that position sat watching him, calmly, as though she’d always been waiting for him. Reed drew closer. He sat down next to her. In the dim light he couldn’t distinguish her features. He saw her legs gleaming with sweat, and the blurred sheen of her pubic hair, and the triangle of white flesh left by a swimsuit. He saw her slender arms, the shape of her breasts. They sat there, side by side, sweating and breathing, quivering, each looking at the other’s body. Reed felt confusion and heat, a heat that gripped him tighter and tighter, squeezing his chest until he began panting. Against the flesh of his thigh, his penis was a seething rock.

  He knew she was smiling. Even though he couldn’t really see her, he knew. And he knew he wanted to touch her, and so he reached out a hand, and it struck him as a beautiful thing, deeply moving, that there could be such a simple bond between desire and action. So immediate. His fingers brushed her breast. He followed the curving flesh with astonishment, shyly at first, and then he grasped her. When she reached for his penis he felt firm in her grasp, so real, so definitive, here I am, here’s my body, there’s no need for me to stretch or deform myself. Here’s my cock in your hands. Here’s your crotch under my palm… Here’s your soft thatch, the opening fissure. Even our breathing seems solid, scarily heavy, in the extreme heat…

  He awoke with a start. His eyelids fluttered. He was in the back seat of a car. Outside, an impassive landscape was streaming by. Greenery. Trees. They were already deep into New Jersey. Reed took a dazed breath and tried to accommodate this new reality. The car was sailing along a semi-deserted road. He must have fallen asleep the minute the driver picked him up from the front door of the George Hotel, heading out of Manhattan.

  He’d been fast asleep the whole way. His eyes met the driver’s smiling glance in the rear-view mirror, prompting an unpleasant doubt in Reed’s mind. Had Reed sighed once too often as he dreamed about going back into the sauna? Had the driver guessed? He sat up a little straighter, shifting uncomfortably, doing his best to camouflage the partial erection that still jutted between his legs.

  “We managed it,” said the driver, continuing to smile at him in the mirror. He had a Hispanic accent and the face of a man of about thirty. It wasn’t the first time he’d had this driver. Reed knew he was from Ecuador but couldn’t retrieve his name.

  “What?” he replied, in confusion, still dazed from the force of his dream.

  “We managed to make up the time,” the driver went on. “When we left you told me we were running late, remember?”

  Reed nodded, somewhat reassured, even though everything still struck him as strange and vaguely distorted. The driver’s voice. His own voice. The excessive light flooding the roadway. The sunshine pouring in the car windows, imposing a sense of suffocating heat. Reed looked at the other man again, making an effort, as though regaining full possession of reality depended on his ability to remember the man’s name. He couldn’t do it. He was too stunned. “I shouldn’t have fallen asleep,” he murmured.

  “No, it was good for you,” the driver responded. Then he slowed down, following the arc of a curve in the road. Only once they were back on a straight stretch did he add, with a sigh, “Sleep heals the soul. If only I could get some.”

  Their eyes met again in the rear-view mirror. Reed noticed the young man’s face: it was open, but marked by unmistakable signs of torment. “Woman trouble,” Reed said instinctively, in an almost fatherly tone, like a doctor diagnosing a
patient’s illness.

  “My wife,” the driver agreed. After another sigh, he went to the heart of the matter: “It’s not the same as it used to be with us. New York has gone to her head.”

  Reed nodded. He didn’t have much to add. Unhappy love stories all struck him as sad, and all more or less alike. All made up of urgent confessions, all just so much torment marking the face.

  Reed touched his own face, at that point, amidst the vibration of the moving car. He’d always been satisfied with his appearance. He’d experienced a thousand triumphant victories but his features had never twisted into arrogance; he’d encountered a thousand disappointments, including a divorce, without taking on any marks of bitterness. Nothing ever sticks to a rubber face. Everything slides off it without leaving marks.

  And yet he was worried. He wondered whether he looked sleepy, he wondered if any trace of that absorbing dream had congealed on his features. I have to get a grip on myself, he thought. I have an intense afternoon ahead of me. He lowered the window to get a little oxygen, letting the rushing wind blow everything away: the last traces of sleep, hangovers from erotic dreams, and the melancholy notes of the driver’s voice.

  They remained silent for the rest of the trip. Two men immersed in their respective anxieties. Then the car turned into a service road running through the woods and Reed recognised, in the distance, the peculiar structure of the space centre.

  *

  It looked like an enormous mushroom without a stalk. A nipple jutting up from the line of the land. A sort of swollen blister. Every time he came here, Reed found new comparisons for the space centre’s shape: a low, flattened hemisphere that rose out of nowhere, in the midst of the green countryside. A strange place. You spontaneously found yourself wondering what on earth the designers had in mind, and it was just as spontaneous, just as inevitable, to leap to conclusions about the era in which it was built. The Seventies—too much LSD on the street.