Reed scrutinised the face of everyone he passed on the strand. Men and women, couples, solitary runners, white-haired men out walking their dogs. He eyed them curiously, unsettled, seized by an unexpected hunger for faces. He watched those people walking on the beach, on an early April day, sensing they were like him and close to him, and yet at the same time light years away. It was like looking at them from some remote standpoint. A motionless observation point, imperturbable, a place from which everything appeared clear and even ordinary: the history of each and every individual was stamped on their faces. He could recognise on the face of a mature person the kind of youngster they had been, he could intuit in the proud young men and women the feeble geriatrics they would someday become. He could see them like so many backlit figures. The life of each of them was there, in its entirety, on that beach, in that light.
Just then, someone came towards them. Reed shook himself out of his reverie. It was a little boy, a child of no more than five, and he was tiptoeing in their direction until coming to a stop in front of them, like an emissary bearing a message. He stood there, staring wide-eyed at Ben. The moment stretched out. Ben restrained himself for a few seconds, and then puffed out his cheeks: “Listen, kid. I know that your parents have told you different, but you’re not the centre of the universe. Was there something you wanted to tell us? Did you want to describe the delight of two-ply Huggies diapers? Because if not, you see, my friend and I were taking a walk.”
“Ben…” Reed admonished him. He leaned down towards the child, worried that Ben had frightened him, though the boy gave no sign of intimidation. “Hi,” said Reed.
The boy finally seemed to notice that he was there, and in a bold voice asked: “Is your friend real?”
Ben puffed out his cheeks again, rolling his eyes.
“I think he wants to know if you’re wearing a costume, Ben.”
“I understand that, you old slab of gum.” Then, to the child: “Of course I’m real, kid. I’m Benjamin Grimm, the Rock Man. Hey, we’re superheroes. You know what a superhero is? Did your mom ever tell you about us?”
Like an actress answering her cue, a young woman broke away from a group not far away and came over to them at a trot. She reached down and took the little boy by the arm. “I’m sorry about this,” she said with a smile.
“No problem at all,” Ben replied, eyeing the young mother’s tight-fitting T-shirt. “In fact, your son was entertaining us in the most delightful way.”
Once they were alone again, the two men exchanged a glance. There was a moment of silence, then they burst into the inevitable laughter. “You realise,” Reed asked, “that this is the kind of thing we’ll remember one day, years from now, when we’re decrepit codgers in a care home somewhere, passing our time reminiscing about old stories?”
“Speak for yourself,” Ben replied. “I’m made of rock, the one thing I’ll never be is a decrepit codger.” He walked whistling through the sand, barefoot, shoes in hand. Apart from the episode with the little boy, most people seemed to pay no particular attention to him. In general, Ben did not pass unobserved. Maybe that day people just failed to recognise him, or like the little boy they assumed he was wearing a costume, or else that his rocky body belonged to just another nameless mutant of the many that filled the airwaves these days. Or maybe everyone recognised him. Maybe everyone recognised Ben, and recognised Reed, but decided to leave them in peace, lost in their thoughts, lost in the embrace of the ocean breeze, in the gentle sensation of being friends. They kept walking, with the sun in their faces, two old heroes in their sixties.
The sand was warm beneath their feet. The sound of the waves crashing on the shore hovered in the air, like a word on the point of blossoming into existence, a sweet and indefinable word, made up of scudding foam and a gleaming nostalgia. Reed took a deep breath, sensing the perfection of the moment. A heartbreaking curtain of calm. He wished he could shout to Ben, shout to all the people on the beach, shout to the open ocean and the row of apartment houses lining the beach. Shout Elaine’s name. Shout the name of she who was absent. If only she were here, he thought, and wondered what she was doing now, and who she was with.
“After our phone call, I kept thinking,” Ben said at that point, as if he’d guessed Reed’s thoughts. His voice seemed to merge with the hypnotic sound of the tide. “I felt like I no longer recognised you, my friend, I told myself that you had never loved little darlings that were just too damned young, and that you’d always mocked guys who wound up with girls thirty years younger than them. That’s what I told myself. Not because I wanted to accuse you of anything, but because I wanted to figure out where all this was coming from. I mean, with all the years we spent together… Whatever you do, it seems like it reflects on me, somehow. You know what I’m saying, Reed?”
Reed nodded in silence.
“I thought about the old days,” Ben resumed, as his rocky feet sank into the sand. “I wondered whether this part of you had always been there… Even when you had everyone by the balls, and you were giving orders to the highest officials in the police department, and you went to the White House for dinner every other month. Even when you were Mister Fantastic, the leader of our group, the global superstar on the superhero scene. Even then, maybe there was this part of you, soft, almost feminine…” He stopped. “Don’t get me wrong!” he said, slapping Reed’s shoulder. “I’m not saying you’re a girly man. I’m just wondering whether even then there was a part of you that was just waiting to…ahem…die for love.”
Reed was rubbing the shoulder where his friend had brought down his hand. “Ben, you don’t exactly have a light touch.” He shook his head and commented: “Thanks for thinking so much about me, but I don’t really know what to say to you. With Sue, I don’t think I ever showed this aspect you’re talking about…”
Ben seemed to think that over, and burst out laughing: “Of course not! Sue would have punched you if you’d acted all romantic. She would have flipped a force field right in your face.” With an amused smile, he walked on. “You and Sue were busy doing other things,” he added. “You worked together. I imagine that what kept you together wasn’t your obsession with one another as much as with your mission. You were convinced…”
“…that we were freeing the world,” Reed finished the sentence. “Just like you, and like all the other superheroes.” Reed sniffed the smell of the ocean. The noise of the waves crashing onto the shore kept getting louder. He went on walking next to his friend, at a steady pace, in the slowly declining afternoon light. “It was a long time ago, Ben. To think back on it now, it seems to me that we were all just playing a role. Each had their part to play. We believed in our ideal, and our lives were bent to fit it. The reporters told our stories and often exaggerated, the screenwriters made movies inspired by our lives. Half the kids on the planet adored us. There were student groups and politicians who sang our praises and there were others who opposed us, police chiefs who loved us and police chiefs who detested us. We stirred up a lot of passion. Maybe you’re right, there was already a certain weakness in me, and yet the way I remember things, it was a whole different sensation. I felt like I was at the centre of something.”
“Hey! I sure didn’t mean to suggest that you’re a weakling somehow. You’re an example to me and you’re like a brother, Reed. You always will be.” Ben adjusted his hat, and pulled one of his cigars out of a pocket. “Hell. I’m not used to all this soppy talk. And all these people parading up and down the beach with smiles on their faces. Is that what our faces look like, too? They all look like they’re on Xanax.” He shook his head, put on his usual sarcastic smile, but immediately went back to a heartfelt tone: “Let me tell you something. You and me, our group and very few others, we managed to get out with our dignity intact. Without recycling ourselves as paid clowns on TV or idiots on some reality show, the way plenty of the old guard wound up doing.” Reed nodded again. He wished he could just walk along in silence, now, and listen to the sound of th
e wind, but he let his friend go on: “If only there was someone who could take our place, we could stop worrying. We could put our hearts at rest.”
“Times have changed,” Reed pointed out. “Young people nowadays are different. I imagine that it is we who are often incapable of recognising what they can do.”
Ben chomped his cigar. The topic of young people invariably started his heart fibrillating. “You know what I think? They don’t know how to do a thing,” he decreed.
Reed stood looking along the beach. “I hear that old Superman has opened a centre or a school of some sort around Park Slope,” he ventured. “A place for young people with superpowers and with serious intentions.”
“Serious intentions?” Ben’s voice was more sceptical than ever. “Don’t make me laugh. For years, people have been whispering about this idea of old Superman’s.” He stopped again, as the sun lit up his rocky face. “The truth is that the quality of kids has been declining over time, cut in half with each new generation, like some kind of radioactive isotope. Each new generation is worth half of the previous one. Which I’m sorry to say, seeing as you have a son.”
“Franklin has no superpowers. He’s not a real superhero, strictly speaking.”
“I know that. I mean to say… You know how I feel about that boy. I’d sell my soul for him. Still, I can’t stand the things he does, I don’t like his image as a harmless alternative star, good for nothing but providing copy for the gossip columns. In his position, there’s so much more he could do. He really could shatter the system.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Reed sighed. He furrowed his brow and added, in a firm voice: “At times, I’ve found myself thinking exactly like you. But given the times we live in, I think that Franklin is even too active. The environmental movement is very grateful to him. And anyway, we can’t expect everybody to be a revolutionary. Not now, not here.”
At that point, Ben stared at him with a satisfied expression.
“What?” asked Reed.
“Nothing,” Ben replied. “I don’t agree with what you’re saying, but let’s just say that this is what I wanted. I wanted to talk with the old Reed. To hear him making sense, the way he used to.”
Reed looked away. He didn’t know whether he should feel complimented or offended. “Oh, Ben. I just went off the rails over a girl. It’s not like I had a massive stroke or anything.”
Ben’s smile broadened. “Excellent,” he said, like a doctor pronouncing a diagnosis. “You seem about to get back on your feet.”
They turned around and headed back, taking their time, as the sun sank behind them. Their shadows stretched out before them. Reed stared at the sand, looking for the footprints of their previous walk in the opposite direction, trying to capture the sensations: the wind, the heat on his back, his closeness with Ben, that sense of timelessness. It seemed impossible that an afternoon like that could ever come to an end. Impossible that everyone was about to leave, the walkers on the beach, the little boy from before, the youngsters with their surfboards.
Reed sighed. Sunsets always saddened him. He knew that everyone was leaving. He knew that all he could expect at home was an empty apartment. Still, he could do it, even Ben had told him so. Get back on his feet. He kept listening to the sound of the ocean. He tried to impress it on his memory, to capture it like a seashell, and to keep from shivering, now, as the sun sank into the horizon.
*
It was April 11th, and although that day was destined to go down in history, it started like any other day. The dawn came up suddenly, setting fire to the few smoke-grey clouds that had been caught napping in the sky. Aeroplanes glided slowly out of the east, fresh from their crossings over the watery wastes of the Atlantic, bringing with them the melancholy of old Europe. Ferry boats heavy with freight docked at the wharfs of the harbour, their bows glowing in the fiery dawn, as the East River and the Hudson flowed past impassively, absorbing the heat of the new day.
Up and down the riverbanks the first runners appeared, chests puffed out, already panting, lungs working to burn oxygen. Oxygen was burning in the apartments, too, in the gas flames of the hobs cooking breakfast, in the ovens of the thousand bakeries of downtown Manhattan. The bus engines coughed into life in chorus. The taxis slid along the artery of Broadway, agile as so many fish swimming upstream, leaving a trail of small puffs of smog in the morning air, transporting their human cargo of travellers, early-rising managers, journalists with laptops already on their knees, lovers returning home after the night’s adventure. Police officers at the end of their shift were driving home, eager to strip off and climb into bed next to the warm body of their woman, or their man, while others who were just starting their shift roamed the streets, observing the world with a vague disgust.
The hum of the city grew louder. The animals in the Central Park Zoo listened with amazement, unable to grasp the mystery of that man-made world, so alien to them, whose noises came from beyond the trees of the park. The animals in the Bronx Zoo cried out in chorus, in the morning, and so did the animals in the Queens Zoo and the Prospect Park Zoo, perhaps torn by the yearning for their lost freedom, and possibly sensing the tragedy around them. The unmistakable vibration of the human tragedy. Unhappy lovers stirred uneasily side by side, in their sweat, lost in the last dreams of the night, while lonely men woke up between cold sheets, or at the table where they’d fallen asleep in front of their computers, with a message still blinking on the screen from some anonymous chat-room user. Those who had stayed up all night now jerked to attention, and studied the light filtering into the room, with weary eyes and feverish foreheads. Day had dawned. Thousands of cell phones were being turned on, thousands of computers awakened from their sleep, and thousands of television screens were being illuminated, as if by enchantment, to spit out their stream of news.
Reed opened his eyes around six, drifting in the tail end of some tangled dream. He’d been dreaming about Elaine, of that he was certain, because his penis was pulsating, lolling on his belly, dreary, useless, and he sensed that his body was slightly deformed, his arms extended by an inch or two, or perhaps his chest larger than normal. He breathed deeply and whipped the sheet aside. Every morning, in the fragile instant of the first awakening, the thought of Elaine struck him like a slap in the face.
He took refuge in the shower, trying to rinse away all traces of nocturnal melancholy, though a sense of anxiety persisted. He barely managed to gulp down a little food. Small stabs of panic pricked at his stomach, inexplicably, and he decided that as usual it must be about her. The thought of her absence. The thought that Elaine wasn’t near him, eating breakfast, eating the food that he had prepared. Without her, Reed’s kitchen resembled an empty stage set. Cut it out, he told himself. Even if she were here, she wouldn’t be eating your food. She’s certainly on some special pre-mission diet.
He forced his thoughts to change direction, and yet that anxiety persisted. He could feel his heart beating unnaturally, his throat tied in a knot, and tiny shivers running up from his hip. Reed didn’t understand. It was as if his body knew something that he didn’t know yet. Afterwards, he would think back to those last hours, that last morning of blissful unawareness, that blind disquiet that ran through him. He’d think back to those moments, wondering how he could have failed to see what was coming. That event that was drawing closer, heading straight at him, fatal as a house fire, silent as an eclipse.
He spent the following hours in a sort of limbo, incapable of concentrating, losing the thread of his thoughts, leaving even the simplest sentences half-finished. He finally told Annabel just to hold all calls. Late that morning he took a car, travelling across the city, whose streets were immersed in a dreamlike glow. A white sun scattered an elusive liquid light, and in that light reality seemed to flicker, like a mirage, in every gust of wind. Deep-reaching shivers shook Reed when he got out of the car. The wind was sneaking under his clothes. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a paparazzo loitering around a few y
ards away.
For the past few days, Reed had regained the interest of the gossip columns. Reports of his relationship with a younger woman must have reached a newsroom somewhere. How odd that it should have happened just as that relationship was at its bitter end, and when Elaine had in fact left New York. The paparazzo wouldn’t be getting many compromising photos today. Reed let out a sigh. Throughout his career, he’d been very skilful at eluding those columns. He’d taken care not to toss his name into the cauldron of their vapid chatter, their overimaginative ravings, not to offer his likeness to their greedy pages. Even at the height of his exploits as a superhero, he had never been fond of that kind of attention. He’d never liked having a lot of eyes on him, never even particularly enjoyed being the object of applause. That was why more than one person had called him paranoid, but Reed felt sure that he was anything but. People didn’t understand the difference between paranoia and discretion. People didn’t understand the meaning of dignity.
The paparazzo loitered for another few minutes, like a hesitant shark, lurking outside the plate glass windows of the restaurant that Reed had entered. Then he vanished. Inside, Reed had joined the members of the scientific advisory board of a research institute where he sat as an honorary member. A dozen elderly luminaries who wouldn’t look that sexy, all things considered, to the readers of a gossip column. Reed took a seat between two ancient professors. The presence of the paparazzo had distracted him for a moment from his restlessness, but now his mind began wandering again. It was impossible to concentrate on the conversations of his fellow diners. Impossible to focus on their faces. Impossible to focus on their manicured hands, dotted with liver spots, as they waved in the air in elegant emphasis, underscoring some concept. Impossible to listen to the amusing anecdotes recounted by one of them, impossible even to fix his eyes on the menu. Reed wound up ordering ginger chicken and a salad, the first two items he noticed on the day’s specials, without knowing that the flavour of those two dishes would remain in his throat, for the rest of his days, like the taste of a last meal.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 15