Reed thought back to the day, thousands of years ago, when Raymond Minetta had called him. It happened in the period after he’d seen Elaine for the first time, in passing, and he had little idea of what was waiting for him. How long had it been? Not many months, after all, but it seemed like a day from another lifetime, a fragment scattered in a distant fog.
It seems to me, Franklin went on, that he wants me back at the health club at his hotel. I honestly can’t understand this obsession with health clubs, every time I go back to NY somebody’s asking me where I go to work out or take a sauna. What do I know? Wherever, I tell them. I mean, I spend so little time in NY… But the real reason for this email is to remind you that tonight they’re showing the documentary about me. Even though I know you never watch TV, I thought I’d remind you all the same.
Reed drafted a reply but he wound up deleting it. He felt like writing something true, something intensely sincere, because if there was one thing he had been missing over the last few months it was sincerity, that sensation of something capable of flowing between two people, without hindrance, naked and straightforward. I have a crush on a girl who’s younger than you. I’m getting over it now.
He’d better not. It wasn’t like him to write anything so explicit. So sentimental. The idea of opening up to his son both repelled and attracted him, because like any jilted lover he wanted to be understood, by everyone, but he didn’t want to risk being pitied. Commiseration was a mediocre sentiment.
There were things that mattered more, after all, than the end of an affair. There was his work, his diplomatic meetings. There were dozens of reasons not to think about her. Dozens of reasons to stop waking up at sunrise, with a start, in the livid light of day, incredulous to discover he was alone. Sleeping alone is a crime. There ought to be a law against it. Still, I’ll have to get used to it. I just have to get used to it.
*
That night, after work, he went to dinner in a pretentious restaurant with a functionary from the UN, who talked to him at length about a new scientific training programme in the universities of Eastern Europe. It was pretty boring. He went home early, and since he had no other obligations that day, he turned on the TV.
Lately, he’d been watching it a little more than usual. Generally, he didn’t like it. He believed that television was what had destroyed the old world of the superheroes. As everyone knew, once the superheroes started appearing on television, people stopped thinking of them as heroes and began thinking of them as entertainers. What’s more, he found it embarrassing. It didn’t suit him. He was embarrassed by the idea of a grown man going on television, under the spotlights, with make-up and everything that went with it, and he found equally embarrassing the idea of a grown man watching television, on his sofa, slippers on his feet, and his gaze dead.
But Franklin was on. The documentary seemed to have started a few minutes before. Reed went on watching the reconstruction of his son’s life; the story of the boy with two superheroes for parents, both fodder for the press throughout the Seventies and Eighties, who in his turn developed superpowers as a child but lost them with the onset of puberty. The story of his troubled adolescence, the arrest at sixteen for possession of marijuana, how he left college at eighteen to take passage on a Greenpeace schooner, and finally the sensational kidnapping. Franklin taken hostage by a pirate crew in international waters, off the coast of Indonesia, and the American mass media reporting on the case day and night, the entire nation watching with bated breath. An army special operations force sent to rescue him, another Swedish hostage killed in the rescue attempt, the political earthquake over who exactly had authorised the operation. Franklin returning home, America’s prodigal son, and talk shows receiving incredible ratings whenever he appeared as a guest. Scenes of female admirers laying siege to a restaurant where he was having lunch. An interview with a Hollywood agent who claimed to have offered him a contract. Franklin smiling at everyone he met, inaugurating centres for Alzheimer’s victims, popular with mothers seeking husbands for their daughters, and never missing an opportunity to denounce the government’s environmental policies. An adorable rebel. Franklin the pacifist, marching against the war. Franklin the ecologist, founding his association, in partnership with a famous rock star, and raising millions of dollars to protect the Amazon. When his friend the rock star was arrested for rape, the case did nothing to undermine Franklin’s popularity. America always forgave its favourite sons. Franklin agreed to work for an NGO, began going on missions into combat zones, reporting on the environmental damage caused by warfare. He launched a campaign against the use of depleted uranium. Franklin shown with a helmet on his head. In an elegant shirt during a diplomatic meeting. Bare-chested in the Iraqi desert. Franklin as a special model during a Gucci fashion show in Miami, donating his fee to the environmentalist cause. Franklin living as a globetrotter, making sporadic appearances in New York, just long enough to have his picture taken with some new love interest. He loved young up-and-coming actresses. No one ever seemed to know exactly where he was. Not easy to track him down for an interview. Franklin was a genuine indie star and was on more magazine covers than Johnny Depp.
Reed laughed a lot. The commentator’s voice was reeling off one exaggeration after another: like when he said that Franklin was the last role model left to America’s youth, or when he said that Franklin Richards is a sex idol for an uneasy America. Reed imagined his son laughing, in front of his TV, with his blond shock of hair and his ironic grin, pleased at having pulled it off, having charmed them all, once again. He was thirty years old, but he was still America’s most beloved son, the nation’s golden boy. No doubt about it, America would forgive him his next exploit, whatever it turned out to be.
Reed had no idea what kind of a father he’d been. If your worth as a parent can be measured by your appreciation of what your son has become, then I must have been a good father. He was happy with the way Franklin had grown up. But it had been a challenging task. Reed, who was so rubbery, so elastic, who for many years had a personality that matched his body perfectly, smooth and elusive, had found it difficult to raise another person. To know how to treat him. A person who depended on you without actually being you, a person who had a body of their own, demands of their own, and an unmistakable need to have solid figures around them. Solid figures around them! Franklin had had the Rubber Man as a father and the Invisible Woman as a mother. A fine couple of parents…
In the old days, when there was still a feeling of fellowship among the superheroes, someone had proposed founding an association of superhero fathers, to share their experiences and discuss their problems. But it never came to be. The superheroes had been incapable of presenting a united front. Reed had learned how to deal with it on his own, to reconcile the conflicting needs of being a paragon of normality, like all fathers, and a paragon of exceptionality, as a superhero.
He remembered when Franklin was small, and father and son showered together: every time, Franklin waited for him to perform one of his marvels under the spray of water. Daddy’s head is shaped like an umbrella. Daddy’s arm is shaped like a drainpipe.
Reed had loved his son’s laughter more than anything else in the world. The laughter of his child. He’d loved Franklin’s body as it grew day by day, the way you love a miracle or a fabulous mystery: with adoration, with pride, with an astonishment so vast that it verged on terror. Franklin. As long as the two of them had lived together, Reed had never felt he was alone, because feeling you’re alone means feeling that you have no meaning, and Franklin filled his life with meaning. Even when the heroic exploits began to thin out. Even when the world started to change.
Once Franklin had become independent, Reed dreamed for years of seeing him come home, and maybe taking the second floor as his headquarters. Reed didn’t need that second floor, he used it—if at all—as a storage area for old equipment. He would have been happy to give it to Franklin. But his son wasn’t interested. Reed had been forced to strip his dreams
, little by little, away from his son’s dreams, as in a delicate operation of ungluing.
Franklin had his own plans. All things considered, Franklin was like Elaine. They were both out in the world, masters of their fate, happy and free.
*
Elaine’s message came in a couple of days later. Reed felt the vibration of his cell phone, tucked away in some jacket pocket, transmitted to his chest with a shiver. He pulled it out and stared in disbelief at the words on the small luminous screen. I watched the documentary about your son. It made me think of you.
At first he decided to ignore it. After all, it wasn’t the kind of message that required an answer. And by now he felt he was leaving their story behind him. Elaine’s smile, Elaine’s flesh, Elaine’s liquid voice, her unattainable youth, the white scent of her sex: it was all fading away, Reed felt certain, like the symptoms of a disease. Soon he too would be free again. He would begin waking up without those scathing depressions, and go out once a month with some paid-for girlfriend. That’s what would happen. That’s what was about to happen.
But there was the message on his phone. He had no idea what it signified, and the smartest thing would be to delete it. When something seems to be too ambiguous, don’t force yourself to interpret it. Forget it.
By that evening he’d read it dozens of times, each time feeling even more confused. Outside, darkness had fallen long ago. The tip of the Chrysler Building was illuminated on the horizon, and one by one the buildings around it had lit up, silent, impassive like giant guardsmen.
By the light of his desk lamp, Reed studied the message. More than once he’d been on the verge of deleting it. More than once on the verge of responding. He kept rereading it with all the focus of a scholar perusing an ancient scroll, until he realised how late it had become, and that a long report he needed to finish by morning was waiting on his computer screen. To hell with it. Incredible that he was devoting so much energy to such a trivial decision. In exasperation, he pecked out a response: I’ve thought about you sometimes, too.
Elaine replied. He wrote to her again. They wound up exchanging messages all evening like a couple of teenagers. Reed had to stay in the office until two in the morning to finish his report.
When he woke up a few hours later, his mind was fuzzy and his memory of the text messages hovered like a dream, like a nocturnal illusion. In fact, they hadn’t said anything compromising. They’d exchanged news on their lives, they’d confessed that they missed each other. Normal things. Very natural things, in the end, for two people who had been lovers. In the silence of the early morning, Reed checked his cell phone, reflexively, with a predictable mixture of anxiety and desire, but there were no other messages. That’s that. It was just a passing moment, an interlude of weakness. The day stretched out ahead of him. A productive day in late autumn, a day made up of emails to be sent, new phone calls from Washington, his participation in a videoconference with, among others, Tim Berners-Lee. Reed generally didn’t let himself be impressed by other people’s celebrity, but he still had a certain admiration for the gurus of the tech world. He focused deeply on the videoconference, then he cleared a thousand other tasks and a thousand other messages off his desk. No more text messages on his cell phone. The day went by, as busy as any other, as nondescript as any other but for two unexpected things.
Towards the end of the afternoon, Reed walked over to Annabel’s desk. “Could you scan this for me?” he asked as he handed her a sketch of a micro-device he planned to patent. In his spare time, he sometimes came up with ideas of this kind. Nothing revolutionary, just small devices that the micro-technology industry was always happy to take under consideration.
“Certainly,” Annabel said. She took the sketch and laid it on top of a pile of letters, documents, and other papers she needed to deal with.
“Hold on,” Reed said. Something had caught his attention. He grabbed a sheet of paper that lay on top of another pile, in the same corner of her desk.
“Oh, right,” said Annabel, without understanding the sudden change in Reed’s voice. “That came in the mail a couple of days ago. Don’t worry: it’s just nonsense. A meaningless prank. I meant to throw it in the trash, but I forgot.”
Reed froze to the spot. He stood there, reading and rereading that phrase, the sole phrase written on that sheet of paper, printed in capitals. Something stirred in his memory, blurry at first, and then swimming into focus, until he remembered where he’d read it before. That phrase. Those bizarre words:
SO LONG, MY MISTER FANTASTIC
Annabel was baffled. “Something wrong?” she asked, fearful she’d made a mistake. “It hardly seemed worth bothering you about such an absurd note.”
“How did it get here?” Reed asked.
Annabel rummaged through the pile of mail where Reed had found the note, and extracted a stamped envelope. “In this,” she said.
Naturally, there was no evidence. The envelope was white, the stamp standard postage, no return address. The printer used for Reed’s address was the same as the one used for the phrase. Reed shook his head. What an incomprehensible prank. He decided that this time he couldn’t ignore it. Could that anonymous sheet of paper be considered a suspicious development? Was that phrase a threat of some kind? “No problem, don’t think twice about it,” he reassured Annabel, walking back to his office with envelope and note in his hand.
Now it was his turn to rummage through various piles of paper. He started with the desk drawer where he kept his business cards, but didn’t find the card he was looking for. He went on with various piles of documents on his desk, but didn’t find anything there either. What was the name of that detective? He had an Italian surname. Where could I have put his card? Usually, his desk was in impeccable order. It rarely happened that he had to look for anything for more than a few seconds.
Just then, Annabel put through an incoming phone call. As soon as he finished that call, another one came in. Reed wound up spending the rest of the afternoon on the phone, without a break and, when he was finally free, the issue of the anonymous note seemed less urgent. Absurd, yes, but less serious. Once again, he tried to find the card of the detective who had come to see him some time ago. That he wasn’t able to find it could mean he’d just thrown it away. He started to wonder what he might say to him. Oh, detective! This is the second time that someone sent a note to me with an enigmatic phrase of farewell! I’m so frightened, Mr. Detective Man, please help me!
Ridiculous, he thought. The note was ridiculous, the situation was ridiculous, and the idea of asking for help from the police was ridiculous. He’d always taken care of his own protection. Or, if there was any protecting to be done, it was him protecting others. Basically, more than a threat, that phrase continued to strike him as a sort of hail and farewell on the part of some nutcase. He tossed the note into the bin. He heaved a sigh, his body relaxed, and almost as a comment on the situation his belly produced an unmistakable sound. It even happens to Mister Fantastic every once in a while.
Annabel had left. Another workday was drawing to a close. He knew that it was time to turn off his computer, his desk lamp, time to take a shower and think about his own concerns. They called me Mister Fantastic because I did fantastic things. I can’t even remember what I expected in those years, what I imagined would happen when I finally stopped feeling superhuman. Now, that moment is here. In this sequence of days, in this flow of data to transmit, broadband connections, videoconferences with Tim Berners-Lee, inventions to patent, seminars on astrophysics, intercontinental conversations, time zones to take into account, and sentimental depressions.
There’s nothing so bad about getting old. I just wish I could be sure I’m doing it the right way.
He turned off the light. In the protective darkness he left the office and went into his private rooms, where he started undressing in the dim light.
It was then, as the sad touch of evening wrapped around him like a cape, and the muffled buzz of the city filtered in th
rough the window, that the second unexpected event of the day happened.
He heard the elevator stop at his floor. He heard the door slide open. Reed threw his clothes back on, with a sense of alarm, wondering who the hell that could be. Someone that the doorman had let in. Someone who had the code to stop the elevator at his floor. He strode through the rooms of the apartment, in silence and still in the dark, ready to spring into action and defend himself, if that proved necessary, with all the strength of his rubbery old body. He reached the last room, took a deep breath, flipped on the light switch, and in the sudden glare he saw a person. He saw her standing there, in front of him, one hand thrown up to shield her eyes. “Reed!” Elaine exclaimed. “Turn off that light, you’re blinding me.”
*
“You’ve come back,” Reed whispered as they embraced on the bed, undressing each other, and their breathing grew heavier. “You’re here, in my arms.”
Reed kept brushing against her body, shoulders, arms, breasts, the flat line of her belly, exerting only the slightest pressure, like a doctor examining a patient. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that her body was real. He tried to look into her eyes. She kept them closed, breathing harder and harder, and his voice eventually turned dubious, his repeated words almost becoming a question: “You’ve come back?”
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 7