Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  “Interesting,” she said, with an ambiguous smile. “Being on it must be a bit like flying.”

  “Flying,” Bruce repeated, as he tugged his shirt out of his trousers. Something about the way she had uttered the word, flying, echoed in his head. “Strange,” he said. “I’ve known several people in my life who knew how to fly. Superheroes, I mean. And yet I never had any desire to do it myself.”

  The girl said nothing.

  A suspicion surfaced in Bruce’s mind. “You wouldn’t be one of those people who think they can do it… That is, you wouldn’t be one of those people who are convinced they have superpowers, would you? Or even worse, you wouldn’t be one of those who have superpowers, would you?”

  She stopped short in the middle of the bedroom. “Of course not. Why do you ask?”

  Bruce went on unbuttoning his shirt. “Sometimes… sometimes young people come here with that kind of idea. They wait for the opportunity to ask me if I can help them become superheroes. As if there were still something interesting about being a superhero.” Contracting his abs, he took off his shirt; he carefully laid it on the shelf next to the bed. Undressing was almost as much of a ritual as getting dressed. He mulled it over for a few seconds, then he added: “But now that I think about it, not the girls. For as long as I’ve been seeing girls, not one of them has asked me to help her become a superhero.”

  For some reason the girl sighed. “And neither do I,” she said. “I’ve never wanted to be a… to be one of you. I think I have other wishes.”

  Bruce sighed, too. He could feel the anticipation growing in his body, in his stomach, an increasingly hot impelling bubble. He cleared his throat. “Wishes?” he asked with a note of amusement, to show that he was still in control. “Oh, you kids don’t have any wishes,” he teased her. “You have fantasies, which is another matter.”

  The girl smiled nervously, clutching herself. Bruce guessed she must be feeling as impatient as he was, or perhaps afraid. Inexperienced people were often afraid. “All right,” she conceded. “If I can’t say wishes… Let’s just say that I have other ideas about my future.”

  “You kids don’t even have ideas,” Bruce honed in. “At the very most, you have sensations.”

  “All right,” she said again, in exasperation. “Let’s at least say that I have a destiny.”

  “You have a destiny?” Bruce said, like someone uttering an exotic word. “And exactly what would your destiny be?”

  She shrugged. Then she dropped her arms by her sides and stood there before him, in apparent surrender.

  Bruce shivered. He decided the time had come. “Listen,” he said, his voice faltering with a mixture of excitement and sudden tenderness. “This is your destiny in the immediate future.” He leaned against the bed again, trembling slightly. “Now you’re going to go in there, into the bathroom, and wash your hands. The lights are on, leave them that way. From here I’ll be able to see your shadow while you wash your hands. Take your time washing them, and be infinitely thorough. Let the water run for a long time. I want to hear you washing your hands. I’ll be here, I’ll be waiting for you.”

  The girl hesitated, absorbing the orders she’d just received. Then she got moving.

  Bruce heard the sound of running water. He finished undressing and lay down, naked, on the levitating bed.

  He imagined someone watching him. He flexed and relaxed his muscles, all together, quivering to the sound of water from the other room. He could distinguish every tiny splash, the sound of every jet of water in the sink. He closed his eyes and opened them again. He leaned over, picked up a vial of amyl nitrate from the shelf, and snorted. Then he lay down again. The bedroom ceiling seemed to pulsate, above him, like the wall of an immense organ. He lost himself in that pulsation, in that half-light, as everything seemed to become more intense: the density of the bed underneath him, the soft sensation in his stomach, the flow of his blood, the noise of water from the bathroom. When the sound of the tap ceased, his penis leapt instantly erect.

  *

  The girl came back from the bathroom. She stopped about ten feet away from the bed, looking down at Bruce, who lay there waiting. He lifted his head. “Little one, why are you so far away?” he asked, in a gentle, almost fatherly voice. “Don’t worry. It’ll be easy, you’ll see.”

  She came closer. Bruce writhed on the bed. In the liquid light he made the muscles in his chest and abdomen ripple, he took his penis and aimed it, in jest, straight at her like a weapon. She didn’t seem to be especially impressed. She stayed there staring at the tattoo that Bruce had on his left pectoral. “When I saw it in the picture on the calendar,” she said, “I didn’t understand. I thought it was a scar.”

  “Oh no,” he said, touching his chest. “It’s my tattoo. A souvenir from the old days,” he sighed, in a faraway voice. Reality around him had started to change. He heard the sounds growing remote. He could sense things slipping into the distance, he could feel the air becoming rarefied, as he hovered in that sea of arousal and anxious expectancy.

  She went on staring raptly at the tattoo on Bruce’s flesh. It depicted a small black bat. “Batman,” she uttered. “Batman.”

  “Listen,” he panted, very slowly, as though they had now lurched into another level of reality, a slippery, unprecedented level, where everything had to be explained with care. “Listen closely,” he said. “There’s some lubricant on that shelf.”

  She shook herself, and followed the direction of his gaze. “This?” she asked.

  “Squeeze some out and lubricate your hand,” he panted.

  The girl seemed to hesitate. “Shouldn’t I wear a glove?”

  “Don’t worry,” Bruce replied. He writhed again on the bed. He explained: “Tonight you’ve washed your hands enough. I looked at your fingernails, they’re nicely trimmed.” And since she was still hesitating: “Don’t worry, it’s all okay in there. I get myself checked out often. It’s all safe and soft, and it’s just waiting for your hand.”

  She looked at her right hand, with an incredulous gaze, as though awakening from a strange dream. Then she nodded and picked up the lubricant.

  Her fingers slid in first. They slipped in, joined together in a point, exploring forwards like curious probes. When the main knuckles reached the ring of the anus, the girl stopped.

  “Add more lubricant,” Bruce exhaled. “Turn your hand slightly.”

  “I can’t do it,” the girl whined, her voice cracking with something that, for an instant, sounded like a quake of panic.

  “Turn your hand,” Bruce moaned.

  The taste of amyl nitrate filled his throat. He was holding his legs high, his feet resting on her shoulders. When her hand was inside, he breathed hard and relaxed completely. The hand impaled him like a tender crochet hook. He could feel it pushing deeper into the intimacy of his body. His heart seemed to fall mute as if surprised by the intrusion, then resumed beating with a new, almost aching awareness. “Now make a fist,” he begged her. “Gently!” he moaned straight afterwards.

  All that remained in the bedroom was their breathing. The music from the other room had stopped. In the enveloping silence he looked at the girl, obscure and dazzling in the dim light, disfigured from the tension and intensity of the moment. He swallowed and sought out her gaze. “Little one, why won’t you look at me?” he invoked. “Where are you, little one? Stay here, stay here with me, I beg you…” She raised her eyes, her gaze plunging into his, and that contact felt to Bruce like a moist, immensely physical thing. “That’s it,” he said. He was starting to sweat in a pleasurable way. “It’s beautiful to look at you now.”

  She was sweating too. The panic seemed to have fled, leaving her in a sort of unruffled astonishment. “Batman,” she said with a strange smile. “I can’t believe this is happening…”

  “Here with me. Concentrate, stay with me.”

  “Why didn’t you want me to use a glove?” she breathed, moving her fingers ever so slightly in his intestine.
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  “Oh,” Bruce moaned. “To feel you. Because I want to feel you.”

  “And why didn’t you get in the opposite position, on all fours? It would have been easier,” she went on.

  Bruce had the impression he wasn’t perceiving her words through his hearing. He could sense them vibrate throughout his body. He could sense them reaching him through their locked gaze, through her hand, diffusing throughout him, vibrating through his organs. “To see you. To feel you,” he went on moaning.

  “Batman,” the girl repeated. She tried to look away, then went back to looking at Bruce through hooded eyes. “What do you feel?” she asked.

  Bruce made a grimace that almost resembled a smile: “Oh, baby. I’m yours, I’m simply yours.”

  “You’re mine?”

  “I am,” he said, taking a breath and letting the air out slowly. “Peace,” he declared. “I feel a clear, tender sense of peace. Fulfilment. It isn’t just sex,” he added, nodding towards his penis, which by now lay supine, pallid, and inert against his lower belly. “It’s something more profound. Something much more intense.” He stared at the girl and noticed a drop of sweat cutting down the open space of her forehead, fast, like the first drop of a summer downpour. “And you,” he breathed dreamily. “What do you feel?”

  The girl seemed to concentrate. “I feel moisture. Tightness. I feel the beat of your heart,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, and at that point they stopped talking and just looked at one another, in a state of abandonment. Bruce sensed the hand pulsing inside him, or perhaps it was his entire body that was pulsating, with both violence and tenderness, around her hand. It was all there, it was all inside him, an instant of naked and perfect fulfilment. He let himself float in that peace, in that absence of desire, well aware that those sensations would not last forever, well aware that they always dissipated. He lay there in that state, in stillness, even after she started to talk again.

  He didn’t allow himself to be taken by surprise at the words the girl spoke. In a certain sense, he immediately knew what it was about. In a certain sense, her words didn’t strike him as all that absurd, or all that upsetting, as though a part of him had known those words from the very beginning.

  “There’s something you should know,” she said. Her face seemed to keep on fading into the shadows of the room. Once again, Bruce seemed to see other faces bob to the surface, like wreckage emerging from the ocean depths, on the skin of her face. He even thought he saw the Robin of the earliest years, or perhaps the face of some other boy, or some girl he’d met over time, or maybe someone he’d never even met, only dreamed of. Even her voice had become arcane, impersonal, a voice that announced at last, solemnly: “I’m here to kill you.”

  Bruce’s body had a spasm. The hand inside him felt sharper. And yet he continued to feel no fear. He went on breathing at the same pace; apparently, there had been no transition, no break between the fulfilment of before and this new awareness. He waited for something more noticeable to change inside him, or else in the girl, something that would herald unequivocally the seriousness of her words. “So I’m about to die,” he mused in a hesitant voice. “Who sent you?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” she replied. “Your friend, who I persuaded to introduce me… He has nothing to do with it. He was acting in good faith.”

  “Then who?”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said, wearily. “You don’t need to know. Don’t ask questions. What good would that do?”

  Bruce felt his thoughts spreading out in all directions. He could feel them braiding into weird spirals. If someone wants me dead, that means I still count for something, he told himself with a foolish, final burst of pride. “Who talked you into doing this? Were you sent by the same people who killed Robin?”

  Suddenly, the corpse with its eyes wide open appeared in his mind. He saw the morning frost on Robin’s rigid, almost amazed face, and the scratch marks that Robin’s fingers had left, before he died, on the hard soil of the park. He saw the frozen eyes that seemed to gleam with an undying love for Bruce. He saw all this. That was when he felt utterly lost. Robin was dead and he was about to follow him. Love squandered would remain squandered, the world’s loneliness would remain unchanged, there was no more time and no redemption—no final glory. I’m going to die naked on a magnetic bed.

  “You were recruited by the people who murdered Robin,” he ventured. “Are you some kind of group or something like that?” The hand was icy inside him. Bruce felt it make a brusque, not yet definitive, movement, a movement that caused a deep and dark pain to spread, like a foam, through his body. “They’ll catch you. You’ll spend your life in prison.”

  “I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “Wait,” he implored her, sensing with a spasm that all this was real, abysmally true. “You’re the last person who’ll ever see me alive,” he said, as if that could change anything. He received no reply. “I guess I deserve this. I was a hero. I promised to free the world, I promised to rescue other people. But I never loved them. I don’t think I did. I don’t think I ever loved anyone,” he reflected in his panic, as in a confession, thinking he could detect something, deep down, in the girl’s gaze. It was the spirit. That sort of soul that Bruce had pursued, over the years, from one person to the next.

  A shiver cut through his body. A disconcerting void sank down in him. He imagined the people who would find him, the policemen who would walk into this room, maybe it would be that Detective De Villa, he imagined him staring down at his naked corpse, coldly, or with pity, or who could say what reaction. So he opened his mouth and, as though that audience were already there in the bedroom, shouted out his last lines, in a tone that verged on an absurd triumph: “You’re not enough for me. No one’s enough for me.”

  He deluded himself that the girl was about to speak again. He felt a new wave of pain growing, he felt it arrive from a distance, he felt it spring up like the breath of a dawn breeze. “Wait,” he tried to add, but before he could get out the word he felt the ripping tear in his belly.

  Book Three

  Bruce De Villa

  March 2006

  &

  1970s – Early 1990s

  ‌

  The days followed each other in an apparently orderly manner. They dropped one on top of another like tumbling dominoes, so fast and mechanical that it was almost possible to hear the sequence of their fall. Months before, the nation had taken in the news of the death of Bruce Wayne, the renowned Batman, with a certain amount of shock and obscure scandal. Even though the young murderess was arrested immediately, the trial hadn’t begun until a few weeks ago.

  In the press, articles on the trial featured the inevitable wire service photographs, pictures of a tanned Bruce Wayne, clearly posing with a contrived air. Sometimes the newspapers preferred to use a close-up of a famous black resin sculpture that portrayed the Dark Knight staring straight ahead, with a leering grin, the mouth twisted into a grimace that verged on the obscene. He’d been an egocentric when he was alive. He was still monopolising the stage now that he was dead.

  No one suspected that another event would soon shift the nation’s attention away from the notorious trial. An even more spectacular and tragic event. An event that would drive a thorn, once and for all, into the country’s heart, into the whole planet’s heart.

  In just a few weeks’ time, traffic would stop in the streets of New York. People would get out of their cars, stream from the buildings, shudder as they raised their eyes to the pillar of smoke pouring out of the building of a famous hotel. It would happen in just a few weeks. A gory explosive attack would kill Franklin Richards, America’s most beloved son, the perfect blond young man, the icon of the last possible youth, as he sat helpless in a sauna. The country would shed tears as it lost one of the last crumbs of its innocence.

  The event was lurking, unknown, close at hand. It was imminent. It was about to lacerate the curtain of unexpected occurrences, and boun
d onto the stage of collective pain.

  For now, no one suspected a thing. Or, perhaps, almost no one. In fact, there was one man who had a number of presentiments. This man was another Bruce. His name was Bruce De Villa and he worked as a journalist. He was about thirty-five, of average height, with short prematurely greying hair and large dark eyes, always midway between an expression of irony and a form of melancholy, mysterious awareness. Bruce De Villa. He often appeared lost in thought. He could feel the flow of presentiments vibrate with growing frequency, he could sense it in his lungs and his stomach and in some other indefinite region of himself. He couldn’t say with precision what was about to happen. He could perceive a dense, menacing event drawing closer, and wondered how it could be that everyone else around him failed to sense it. Couldn’t they sense the looming disquiet, drawing ever closer, like a threatening storm front?

  What this man knew in advance was that death was looming on the horizon for a couple of famous ex-superheroes. That was his knowledge. He could foresee the deaths of superheroes. He’d never asked for that knowledge and didn’t really know what to do with it. To have such knowledge was a bizarre power and, for now, he preferred not to speculate too much about it.

  *

  The façade of the courthouse rose up, luminous, glowing an intense white in the early spring sunshine. The waves of traffic noise seemed to bounce off the façade like the echo of a rip tide, as journalists and spectators lined up at the entrance to make their way through security. Among them was Bruce De Villa. After waiting his turn, he held out his press pass and stood, with slight impatience, under the eyes of a security guard. He was wearing a brown heavy cotton suit and a pale blue shirt. He had Italian shoes on his feet and overall he gave the impression of knowing how to preserve a certain style even on the tight budget of a freelance journalist. The guard handed back his pass and asked with a trace of a smile: “De Villa. You wouldn’t happen to be any relation to that detective?”