The telephone rang again, emitting a couple of beeps. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go now,” Szepanski said. “You understand, a patient’s been waiting and I’m going to have to see her.”
“Of course. Good to see you, Joseph.” Reed put on his jacket and left. He glanced into the waiting room. He saw a woman with a cascade of tawny hair, about forty or so, dressed expensively, and blessed with a shamelessly healthy appearance. Reed doubted she was a patient and wondered whether she was one of the doctor’s lovers. He’d heard rumours that Szepanski cheated on his wife with his female patients, both superwomen and other women. The thought of the elderly doctor’s rebuilt face sweating in the throes of intercourse made Reed queasy. He preferred to think she was just a patient. One of the numerous millionaires that Szepanski had acquired as clients over the years, thanks to his reputation as physician to the superheroes. Rich people liked having that kind of a doctor. Being touched by hands that a few minutes earlier might have palpated the belly of some former superhero. Or maybe even Mister Fantastic’s balls.
He still felt the viscous chill of the ultrasound gel on his skin. He shivered as he hurried towards the elevator. Once at the ground floor, he walked out onto the street and was taken aback by the violent glare of daylight. He took a few steps across the sidewalk, amazed to find himself there, in the flow of foot traffic, fully dressed and standing erect, officially pronounced healthy. A car was waiting for him. But he felt like going back. He felt like running back into the doctor’s consulting room and confronting Joseph Szepanski, the celebrity and luminary, doctor to the superheroes, the man whose skin was pulled tighter than a drum, and shouting the truth into his face. The razor-sharp truth. Telling him that what he felt had a name and this name was burning in his hip, in his body.
*
He got into the car. His brain was too rational to accept all this. To admit that unhappiness in love could clamp his body the way a hand clenches a glass, and that what had reduced him to his present state were the months of emotional highs and lows, torment, and jealousy, since the day he first heard Elaine’s name. Elaine. Elaine. Reed had believed that the day of the committee meeting in Washington was the darkest abyss, the most miserable emotional bedrock he was likely to hit, but ever since she left for Houston matters had only got worse.
It was a state of constant agony. He felt sleepless, exhausted, and it hurt him to move, it hurt him to think. It hurt him to smile, talk, look out of the window. Part of him realised, with lucid clarity, that he had crossed a border of some kind, and what at first had been a limited, surmountable malaise had begun to grow into a limitless, open-ended sickness. Nearly infinite. Reed suspected he was suffering from depression. He refused to admit it to himself—as he refused to admit that he had fallen down there, into the black hole, into the quicksand where fate led all those who had pursued stupidly, obtusely, the fatal path of obsession with another person.
*
He opened his eyes. A burning sensation. The light was stabbing them with a thousand tiny blades. He found himself immersed in a white light, between white sheets, on a hard bed that smelt of whiteness. There was a needle stuck into his arm. The room he was lying in looked unfamiliar, but as soon as he was capable of looking around, it wasn’t hard to figure out where he was. The neon light on the wall, the nondescript furniture. He was in a hospital room.
The silence was soothing. He closed his eyes for a moment. The moment must have been a long one, because when he opened them he was no longer alone. “There you are,” Doctor Szepanski said to him. He was standing next to the bed. “You had us worried there, Reed.”
Reed did his best to understand. He tried to establish some order to his thoughts, fit together what data he had. The effort was pointless. He had no data. Everything was immersed in a white glow. A terrible hollowness in his head. “What’s that?” was all he could get out, in a whisper, gesturing to the IV bottle and the tube taped to his arm.
“Just a little glucose and mineral salts,” Szepanski said. “You were unconscious for a while,” he explained. He moved a little closer to the bed and looked at Reed as though he’d never seen him before: “For God’s sake, when you were in my office you should have told me, Reed. You should have told me that you were abusing your body that way.”
Reed felt like telling him to go away. He felt like closing his eyes again. He wanted to burrow comfortably into that emptiness, that distance, because he knew it wouldn’t last long, that soon everything would resurface into his mind: what had happened, and the reason why it had happened. He tried to hoist himself up on his pillows. He was very weak. His body had taken on a curious consistency, like something that had melted and then congealed again. “Annabel,” he uttered. “Where’s Annabel? I need my diary.”
“Don’t worry about your diary,” Szepanski said. “You won’t be able to work for at least a couple of days. Don’t even think about it.” He went on staring at Reed, giving him an odd, almost aghast look. “It was Annabel who found you this morning. You’d been lying on the floor of your room for who knows how many hours. Your body was an unholy mess. I don’t want to know what you were trying to do, but I do want to tell you this: your body was a mess.”
Reed nodded, uncertain about any other reaction. The memories were starting to condense in his head, like a sort of slow haematoma. Everything still seemed unreal, and sufficiently distant for him to confess: “Joseph, did you know that I don’t even know how long my own cock is?”
Szepanski’s inexpressive face seemed to crumble. No matter how tight his skin might be pulled, you could sense a grimace of discomfort. “You need rest,” he said. “I’m going to leave you alone.”
“Weren’t you the one who was so interested in my secrets?” Reed insisted. He couldn’t even say why, but it seemed a matter of fundamental importance to tell him about it: “One day I downloaded a porn movie from the internet. I know everyone says the same thing, but it really was an accident. I don’t like pornography.”
“Reed, this hardly seems like the time,” said Szepanski, though he still remained at the bedside, his eyes increasingly glassy.
“When I opened it,” Reed went on, appalled at his own flow of sincerity, “it took me a few seconds to realise what it was. Long enough to get a good look at the actor’s cock. It was big, hefty.” Reed closed his eyes in exhaustion and went on talking: “You won’t believe this. The next time I had sex, my cock took on the same shape, without my having any say in the matter.” He knew that there was no point to confessing these things, not now, not to this man, and yet he felt the need to say something true, something secret, as some kind of offering to thank destiny for the fact that he was still here, still alive, still conscious. A tribute to the god of intimacy, to the lord of sincerity. “I have no control over that part of my body. It extends and contracts in response to every slightest nuance of my thoughts, even my subconscious thoughts. Especially my subconscious ones. My cock follows the secret flows of my thoughts and of my paranoia. My cock is made of paranoia. It happens even if I’m alone. I can’t tell its original size any more.”
There was a moment of profound silence.
“Now you rest,” Szepanski said. It was impossible to tell from his tone whether he was satisfied or appalled. Probably both. Reed heard him move away and then say again, from the doorway: “Rest.”
It wasn’t difficult to follow his advice.
*
In the hours that followed he fell asleep and reawakened several times, leaving and returning to the world around him, in waves, like the movement of a rip tide. With each reawakening the memory grew sharper. The memory of the reason he’d wound up in that hospital. The memory came back to him with all its weight, with all its embarrassing details.
It had happened the day before. Reed had spent a frantic afternoon, working furiously, in an attempt to make up for how distracted he’d been recently and to show that he was the usual Reed. He had told off Annabel for the way she ans
wered the telephone, with an emphasis that he considered inappropriate, asking her maliciously whether she had by any chance a little excess blood sugar to metabolise. He’d upbraided a consultant who was guilty of turning a report in late, reading him, at a sadistically slow speed, a list of the dozens of consultants over the course of the foundation’s existence who had all turned their reports in with admirable punctuality. He’d called the cell phone of the president of the company that provided the office with computer tech assistance, reaching him of all places in the middle of a Basque pelota game. Reed had been quite sarcastic about the recent lapses and shortcomings in the service that the company provided, forcing a promise of a full quarter’s free service, while in the background he could hear the audience roar as a player scored a point. ¡Viva la pelota!
He’d done that, and it had made him feel better. I can do it. I can still take charge of situations. My will hasn’t lost its grip on the world. I can push, I can persuade. I can act, achieve, and feel. Give me a day and I’ll make full use of it.
But later, in the silence of his apartment, all that force of will slid off him. The evening lay before him, empty and tedious. Lately, things had been going that way: the energy of the day tumbled into the apathy of the night, daytime confidence turned into nocturnal malaise. The more he instilled his will into his work, the greater grew the yearning to strip himself of that will, annul himself, become putty in someone else’s hands. Elaine’s hands.
She wasn’t there. She was in some absolute, distant elsewhere. Houston seemed like another dimension. She was down there, as if she had fallen through the looking glass, to a place where other rules applied, other thoughts prevailed. Reed knew she wasn’t thinking about him. Every night he waited for her to call. He avoided going out or making plans. He knew she wouldn’t call, and that in the end he would be the one who called, and yet that night too he had waited, without being able to sit down, or even eat dinner, his appetite killed by the flavour of his own obsession. He just wandered from room to room in his apartment, raving, dizzy with excitement, his body on high alert, while his head went on fantasising.
He’d fantasised about her hands, her mouth, the soft folds between her toes, the hollow behind her knees, the map of freckles on her back. He could almost draw that map from memory. He was happy to remember every bit of that body, and yet aghast at the way he was scattering himself into the recollection of a thousand details. A thousand images. There was one Elaine; there were millions of images inside him. He could see her through the thousands of reflections of his imagination as if he were looking through the multifaceted eyes of an insect.
Elaine didn’t love him, that much was clear, unmistakable on the face of it. It was all over, and yet no final, definitive words had been uttered. Even though he knew well that it was pointless to hope—not again, not any longer—something inside him kept hoping. To start over again, to be reborn. To die and be reborn, isn’t that what he was hoping for? He kept thinking about her, incessantly, invoking the thought of her body the way a sorcerer invokes a spell.
Years earlier, he remembered, when the group of superheroes that he and his wife had led for decades broke up, and the two of them realised there wasn’t much else keeping them both together, Reed had spent a period when, every night before going to sleep, he deformed his face for hours, stretching it every which way. He could extend his cheekbones for yards, stretch his forehead like a chest expander, and he could press his hand on his face until he was able to feel the back of his head. It was horrifying. It hurt. What no one understood, what no one thought, was that a rubber face did have feelings. An elastic flesh was a flesh filled with tense nerves, flaring like wooden matches. Reed kept doing it, all the same, because it was the only way to get some rest, in the end: with his face reborn, identical to the way it was before. He needed to work on his face, annihilate it and reassemble it dozens of times, until he felt that there was nothing left on it. Not a trace, no expression of sorrow. His face, remodelled, virgin again. Deforming his face had been his form of self-destructive behaviour, his self-inflicted damage and his therapy at the same time, his method of dealing with his marriage breakup. I must destroy my face. I must destroy it and reassemble it.
At the time, he had told himself that that would be the last crisis in his life. Reed clearly remembered his resolution, I will never feel pain again, not like this, the next time I’ll just prevent the pain. Thinking back on it now, it almost seemed funny. Prevent the pain? Pain springs up out of nowhere, it comes at you like a car hurtling out of the fog. It’s a hard thing to dodge. Actually, he had to admit, the emotional state of that long-ago time seemed to vanish in comparison with the way he felt now. The fresh pain made the old pain fade into insignificance. It turned it into a blurry, amusing memory. All things considered, Sue leaving him after years of reciprocal indifference couldn’t have hurt him that badly. Giving up Elaine now, in the midst of the raging flame, was quite another matter.
I could try it again. I could try breaking down and reassembling my face, it had occurred to him that evening, while he was still hoping for a phone call from Elaine. But he didn’t want to focus on his own body. It was Elaine’s body that he wanted to think about, that body that was now absent, that body that had once lain in his bed, and yet left no trace. It seemed impossible that he had once touched that body. Impossible that he had held it in his arms. He’d twisted on the bed, alone, incredulous, as a ravaging tension seized him. He’d wound up staring at his hand in the lamplight, and then he’d started shaping it, transforming it from memory to make it identical to her hand. Fingers, knuckles. Elaine’s hand. He’d started to touch himself, with that hand, on the clean white sheets, breathing harder and harder.
He’d kissed his hand. He’d sucked on its fingers. It wasn’t enough. Where was Elaine, where was her body? He’d gone on twisting and turning, possessed, so frenzied that he couldn’t feel the burning sensation come over him. He’d started shaping his chest. He’d thrust it out, manipulating it, until he made it look like a pair of female breasts. He’d touched them. They were too hard. A flash of self-awareness swept over him, at that point, and he’d glimpsed himself on the bed, a naked man with the breasts of his lost lover, and he’d burst into laughter, in horror and bafflement. Ladies and gentlemen, Reed Richards with tits.
The laughter had turned into contractions in his belly, something close to labour pains, as he continued to twist himself, lying on his side, lifting his legs to twist his body into a U-shape. He’d joined his legs together. He’d fused their rubbery mass, and he’d started modelling that mass, laboriously, cursing at the first stabbing pains. A second body attached to his own. Two bodies looking at one another, legless, lying on the bed, joined by a single curve of flesh. He realised he was doing something demented, improbable, something he had never done before, something that would cost him dearly… But he went on. He wanted to recreate Elaine. He’d continued modelling that rudimentary body, doing his best to impress upon it the desired shape, face, breasts, extruding the arms, but it wasn’t easy, and once again he started laughing, looking at that shapeless body, that sort of monster, that ridiculous foetus.
Something was awakening in him. A mass of icy, sinister pain, a pain so intense that it could only be guessed at, for now, only hinted at. He hadn’t stopped. He had continued, trembling, laughing, hiccoughing, drooling from the effort, panting in excitement, his penis hard, his muscles straining, his hands shaping that twin body. Elaine’s neck. Elaine’s abdomen. Reed remained in that position, touching Elaine, and for an instant he had felt her, under his hands, it was her, Elaine’s body, her soft, tenacious body, her warmth, and Reed tried to hold her, to keep her form from escaping, even if Elaine was already crumbling, vanishing like a mirage.
Something new was about to happen. Something immense, beyond pain, beyond any sensation. Reed had felt it from afar. It was the echo of an impending event, the heralding of some approaching thing, in his nerves, in his flesh on the verge
of snapping. His vision was blurred, his body had lost all sensation. He understood that he had ventured too far, beyond limit, that there was no going back, and before he passed out, a phrase had resurfaced inside him: in a shock of lucidity, an unexpected phrase popped into his head. So long, my Mister Fantastic, he had whispered with his last voice. Then the reality around him had blanked out, and a flowing darkness had carried him away.
*
He had requested that no one be informed of his condition. Not Franklin, not Sue, and especially not Elaine. He didn’t want to worry anyone. He didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for him. He couldn’t bear the idea of being so weak, so needy, in Elaine’s eyes. He made a point of not calling during his time in the hospital, painfully aware that she was unlikely to notice the absence of his calls. She was in the midst of the training for her mission, and as far as she was concerned nothing else existed in the world.
Only Annabel knew. For a couple of days she shuttled back and forth between the office and the hospital, bringing documents and conveying messages, so that Reed could deal with the most urgent matters and no one, from outside, would be able to tell that he wasn’t in the office.
On the third day he was able to get dressed, gather his things, and leave the hospital. He left the building alone, with an apparently nonchalant step, like a friend come to visit a patient. Only his little overnight bag gave away that he himself had been a patient. Someone who had been or was still sick. The hustle and bustle of pedestrians in the street at first prompted his resentment, as though he couldn’t accept that the world was the same—exactly the same—as before. But by the time he’d walked a short distance and felt the blood circulate in his legs, he began to have different feelings. He was strangely and deeply moved. He had no idea why. He looked at the bodies around him. Those bodies, so complex, so vulnerable, that would one day malfunction and break. The bodies of the pedestrians around him. The men’s bodies covered by their coats, the women’s bodies with their legs lengthened by high heels, the bodies of the policemen on the street corners, those mortal bodies, without superpowers, so defenceless that they were pitiable. Moving.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 12