He nodded with no particular surprise. For some time now, he’d heard that question with increasing frequency. His brother was one of the detectives who had worked on the murder case and he’d appeared on television a few times to comment on this challenging investigation. His brother. Detective De Villa with his bloodshot eyes. Without another word, Bruce pocketed the pass, slipped through the entrance, and headed off across the marble-floored lobby, stepping silently.
The courtroom was pretty crowded. A buzz of voices filled the vast room. A harsh light shone down from the ceiling, illuminating the faces of the eager spectators, making them look like so many fleshy flowers under greenhouse spotlights.
Half a dozen television cameras were roaming through the crowd, hunting for well-known faces. Although the trial had been dragging on for weeks now, most of the networks were still airing daily updates. The inevitable daily updates. After all, this was one of the most sensational trials in recent history. A trial in an obscene and tragic criminal case, the trial for the murder of a giant of superheroism. The trial for the grisly killing of Batman.
Bruce De Villa made his way into the courtroom. He walked past a few rows of seats before someone waved in his direction. He recognised the familiar face of Alyson Rhodes, a colleague as well as a long-time close friend. They’d known each other for years but only recently were they seeing much of each other again, as they were covering the same trial. Bruce edged along the row, stepping on more than one person’s foot, until he reached a seat next to her. “Huh,” he huffed, letting himself down onto the chair. “I thought I was late.”
“Late for what?” was Alyson’s reply. In her voice there was a note of both sarcasm and resignation. She worked for the New York Observer and, like Bruce, she regularly attended the trial hearings. “I can’t imagine there’s about to be a dramatic turn of events here.”
Bruce nodded as he settled in his chair. It wasn’t hard to understand what Alyson meant. Apart from filling the news reports, the trial didn’t seem to be achieving a great deal, dragging on, increasingly slow and fruitless, filled with obstacles and grey areas. The young defendant seemed unwilling to reveal the identity of the masterminds behind the crime, whether or not she even knew who they were. People were starting to talk about the existence of an obscure, deadly group. Bruce had no particular theories on the case, but thanks to his presentiments he did know that this was only the beginning, and that the old world of superheroes had begun to die with a death that was final, definitive, and beyond redemption.
“Bruce?” Alyson questioned him with a glance. “You’re lost in thought, as usual. I know what you’re thinking about.”
“You do?” he challenged her.
“You’re thinking that this trial has turned into a grim circus.”
“Maybe that’s what I was thinking.” He smiled but offered no further explanation.
“Listen, we’re reporters,” she said, taking a pragmatic tone. “That’s how it works. Even when the show turns grim and perverse, as it has with this trial, we need to stay and watch until it’s over.” Alyson was the kind of woman who knows how to frame a topic in direct terms.
Bruce took in Alyson’s words. In that period he was writing for an Italian newspaper. His assignment was to write pieces about the world of America’s ex-superheroes, and the idea of watching the show until it’s over fitted very well with the sensations that by this point the whole scene inspired in him.
The hearing was starting late that day. Bruce accepted the chewing gum that Alyson offered him, and as the taste of some bizarre chemical flavouring spread over his tongue, he scrutinised the audience around him.
The television cameras continued to roam the courtroom, ravening and bored, like fat bluebottle flies. That day, the main star seemed to be Joseph Szepanski. He’d been Batman’s trusted physician. He smiled contentedly under the lights of the television cameras, his skin pulled as tight as sun-baked leather. Among reporters there were rumours that the elderly doctor was about to publish a book of explosive revelations, though the exact subject remained secret. In the meantime, Szepanski never missed a chance to be in the public eye. During the previous court sessions, numerous other characters had popped up in the audience, either because they were friends of the victim or just to take advantage of the attention focused on the trial. The gallery of assorted VIPs had included the artist Nathan Quirst, the former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, an array of directors who were rumoured to be planning the definitive biopic on the Dark Knight’s life, writers with meagre reputations, and even the victor of a recent season of American Idol. All those people. That procession of faces. Just like Alyson had said: a grim circus.
Over the course of the various hearings, moreover, some ex-superheroes had made their appearance. Personalities like the ageing Thor, the elderly Daredevil, and other has-beens from the old scene. The kind of figures that Bruce and his brother, the future detective, would once have given anything to lay eyes on. So many years ago. When they were two little kids who spent their days collecting articles and press accounts of the exploits of the superheroes. When they memorised the interviews given by their superhero idols. When they lived half an hour outside of New York and they worshipped those people, who seemed to inhabit a world of sophistication, filled with epic and unattainable intensity. So many years ago. Bygone days. So immensely remote.
Bruce took one last look around the courtroom. No sign of his brother, Detective Dennis De Villa. The police officer with the perpetually reddened eyes. Bruce had spotted him in the courtroom during some of the previous hearings. He wondered where he was now and what he was working on… He didn’t know much about his brother. Over the years, he and Dennis had practically become strangers. He stopped looking for him in the courtroom audience, at last, feeling the usual mixture of detachment and distant, lingering regret.
*
According to the findings of the investigation, each girl was given instructions before her night with Batman. Each was informed about what he liked to do. Some of the girls did it for money, others for the thrill of an encounter with the man and the legend. They were generally recruited by old friends of Batman, friends who knew his predilection for young, androgynous, fair-skinned girls. That’s what had happened dozens of times before and that’s what had happened with the defendant. The girl had managed to catch the attention of one of Batman’s old friends, who had arranged an encounter for her with the famous hero, without suspecting her actual intention.
Her name was Mara Jones. She was nineteen years old and was the daughter of the owner of a real estate agency specialising in luxury apartments. She’d been arrested the night of the murder as she wandered through the West Village not far from Batman’s residence, spattered with blood and in a confused state. She had short dirty-blond hair with a honeyed shade. Some freckles, green-grey eyes. She had a sinister beauty and there was something estranged about her gaze, midway between the naïve and the robotic. The television news reports beamed around half the planet tended to show her back, or her profile, or else to focus on details of her face: eyes, mouth, chin, the curve of an ear, as if the direct sight of that face was somehow too unsettling. Or else, more likely, it was a way of exciting the imagination of the viewers, offering single shreds, appetising samples of the young defendant’s appearance.
For months now, the mass media had been buzzing furiously around the case. News reports about the defendant and the circumstances of the bloody murder were mixed with morbid gossip about the life of the victim. Batman was said to have made occasional use of crystal meth. Batman was said to have spent eleven thousand dollars a week at fashion boutiques on Madison Avenue. Batman was said to have tried to seduce the actor Leonardo DiCaprio when he was nineteen. Batman was said to have tried to seduce the actress Chloë Sevigny when she was eighteen. Batman was said to have tried to seduce… That kind of gossip.
The circumstances of the murder, moreover, had obviously fed the ravenous jackals of sarcasm. The internet w
as crawling with sacrilegious hymns to the art of fist-fucking and grotesque porno videos with main characters renamed Mara Jones. A hip-hop singer had a hit record with a corrosive, contemptuous ballad about the death of the former hero.
Old friends serving as pimps, young girls playing along, a stark fixation with himself and with erotic rituals with girls more than forty years younger than him… The life of the man who had once been known as the Dark Knight, one of the most glorious superheroes of the old days, had become in recent years something intensely tragic, intensely ridiculous.
Bruce De Villa agreed on that point. He recognised the pathetic arc of his former idol’s life. But unlike most people, he wasn’t scandalised by the details of Batman’s intimate life, he felt neither a sense of scandal nor a sense of moralistic outrage, or at least not entirely. That wasn’t the point. What he felt was a kind of cold, detached torment.
As a boy, he’d idolised Batman as the hero he loved best. Bruce De Villa remembered the excitement whenever he found some slender article about the appearances of the Dark Knight. He remembered how he’d adored the chronicles of that mysterious figure, who back then avoided photographers and microphones. Who could ever imagine that one day… As a boy, he was far from imagining that the heroic exploits that captured his fancy were the last sensational deeds of a world already slipping away. Far from imagining that one day he’d be a journalist covering a trial for the murder of the great hero, and that his brother Dennis would take part as a detective.
And yet, now that the death of the former hero had happened, Bruce considered it without astonishment. Truly without astonishment. He contemplated that death as if he were observing the ruins of a landscape after watching it wobble for a long time, from a distance, until the ineluctable collapse. He’d long felt a presentiment of that death. He’d known about Batman’s murder months before it happened, just as he could now feel a presentiment that fatal events were about to take place in the lives of other ex-superheroes.
He supposed that this capacity for presentiment was a kind of odd superpower. He also supposed he knew where that power might come from. It was, he supposed, a sort of inheritance.
*
“You have a secret,” Alyson declared as they emerged from the courtroom at the end of the day’s session. They walked out onto the sidewalk and into the sunlight of late morning. They crossed the street, zigzagging through the waiting taxis while a warm breeze gusted towards them. “I’ve been watching you. You’ve been walking around for weeks now with that thoughtful, distant look on your face.”
“I get it,” Bruce tried to laugh it off. Next to them, the sidewalk was partly occupied by a construction site. In the air there was a scent of freshly poured cement. High above, a crane was manoeuvring with impassive gracefulness. “Are you trying to say that there was a time in my life when I didn’t have a thoughtful, distant look on my face?”
Alyson gave a short laugh and didn’t push further. “Bruce De Villa. The most mysterious man I’ve ever met.” The sunlight glinted on her glasses. She was a good-looking woman and hadn’t changed much since Bruce first met her, back in college. Of the two, he was the one who had taken on a lived-in look, with his white-sprinkled hair and his large unquiet eyes.
It must be more or less lunchtime. Alyson dragged him to one of her usual restaurants, a place on the second floor of a building not far from Chinatown, where they sat at a table near a window. They studied the menu, printed in a round typeface on recycled paper. It was a vegan restaurant. One of those restaurants where the name of every dish seemed to be stamped with the seal of approval guaranteeing that this food won’t make you sick, the seal of approval that this food is good for your soul, one of those restaurants from which animal pain, and by extension, all the guilty pain of the world, had been rigorously excluded.
“Anyway,” Alyson said, after they’d ordered. She took off her glasses, laid them on the table, and sat looking at him with her limpid gaze. “At least tell me how your articles are going. Are you a big hit in the Italian press?”
“I guess so. I hear they like my pieces in Rome.” Bruce worked for both American and Italian papers and had written his most recent articles for La Repubblica. Before he could say anything more, the waiter arrived with their drinks. Bruce had ordered an organic beer and Alyson had opted for a freshly squeezed juice of some Amazonian fruit he’d never heard of.
“What are you putting into your articles?” Alyson sampled her juice and nodded with satisfaction.
“Well,” he said, without much enthusiasm. “Just what’s happening. All this. Old glories on the sunset road. American heroes dying with a forearm up their ass.”
“Bruce, don’t try to be a cynic. It doesn’t suit you.” Alyson tilted her head to one side as if to study him more closely. She wore dangly silver earrings, which swung with every movement of her head. “I meant, what are you reporting about the investigations? More important, how do you think they are going?”
Bruce didn’t answer straight away. He took a swallow of beer and let his throat absorb the cool foamy flavour. “For the moment, I don’t know what to think.”
“I don’t understand why you don’t ask your brother for information,” she pressed him. Her earrings were swinging like tiny church bells. “Any other journalist would try to take advantage of having a brother involved in the investigation.”
“I’ve never taken advantage of my brother’s work. It would seem odd to start now.” Bruce flashed a reticent smile and slumped back in his chair. Apart from brief, chance meetings during the hearings of the trial, he and Dennis hadn’t talked in months. Or maybe he should say in years. Maybe he should say: since the day their mother died, many years ago, they’d never been able to talk seriously.
A few minutes later their orders were brought to the table. The dishes emitted an appetising aroma. It was the sacred time of food. They seized their forks, both of them, every organ in their digestive system eager to do its work, jaws, organs, enzymes, glands, a biological mechanism millions of years old and ready to spring into action, for the umpteenth time, in the muffled atmosphere of a New York restaurant. They had both ordered wheat steaks and fried squash sticks. It might not have been Bruce’s favourite cuisine, but he was enough of an omnivore to adapt to Alyson’s tastes.
He sat there, looking at the woman in front of him. Many years ago, they’d had a relationship and had lived together in a small apartment in the East Village. Sensing his gaze, she raised her eyes. Their gazes met and remained locked in a tranquil, friendly sense of intimacy. “My God,” she said. “I remember the first times I cooked vegan food for you. You were so suspicious.”
“I was not suspicious at all,” he did his best to defend himself.
“Oh yes you were,” she maintained. “You even made me call your mother to ask for some Italian recipes.” Alyson smiled, then tilted her head to one side again, squinting her eyes with the expression of someone who was sliding down a long and not always easy chain of memories. “Bruce, living with you really was odd,” she ventured, without resentment, in a tone of affectionate bafflement. “So many years have gone by, and I still don’t know what was happening with you at that time. Or, for that matter, exactly what happened to your mother.”
Bruce drank the last gulp of beer. Even now, when he thought about his mother, his throat burned as though he’d been shouting for a long time.
He concealed his emotions and shrugged. Inside him, the taste of the meal merged with the pungent flavour of memories. The time he lived with Alyson in the East Village, his parents’ old house in Clifton, the old box in which he and his brother collected newspaper articles about superheroes, his father, his mother, the untroubled Italian family they seemed to constitute. The end of his mother…
He was grateful that Alyson pushed away from the table and stood up, just then, breaking the silence and suggesting that they go and have—why not—a delicious and conclusive cup of coffee.
*
When the day was over, he returned to his tiny bachelor apartment and took a shower. He stood sighing under the hot stream of water, motionless, eyes closed, until the hot water ran out. He dried off with a bath towel and studied himself in the mirror, two Bruce De Villas that seemed to eye one another, naked, from opposing and irreconcilable worlds. He wandered through the apartment with the towel wrapped around his waist, waiting for the unease he could feel clinging to him to evaporate into the evening air. It had been a gruelling day. The day’s trial hearing, his lunch with Alyson, the afternoon spent in the New York newsroom of the paper he was writing for, doing his best to speak in fluent Italian.
Even though he had mail to deal with, he gave himself a break on the sofa.
On TV he ran into the usual late updates on the trial. He preferred to turn the channel and stumbled onto an episode of Come Take a Plunge with Namor, that talk show whose host, with a conceited air, spoke from inside an enormous glass bowl filled with multicoloured fish. Old Namor. The Prince of Atlantis, the old glory of the seven seas. The programme on the next channel was the show featuring Mystique, the female mutant who once seemed to frighten the nation, and who now entertained it. Bruce sat and watched her host the show, sinking deeper into a reverie, until the end of the programme.
He shut his eyes. He couldn’t stop thinking about superheroes. The living ones and the ones already dead. He tried to relax and finally lost himself in the rhythm of his own respiration, until everything seemed to quieten down and the sound of the TV became distant. He bobbed for a few minutes in a pleasurable void. The sofa was a yielding mass beneath him, so soft, almost liquid, and for a few gentle minutes he had the impression of floating in Namor’s fish tank. How long would this phase of his life go on, this extended chapter of regret, yearning, and separation from the heroes he had once adored, and from the events of his childhood and youth? He lifted his head from the sofa. There was someone else in the room. A woman was crouching under the table, like a little girl playing hide-and-seek, and was looking in his direction with a bewildered smile. Bruce rubbed his eyes. He felt his heart shrivel. “Mama. What are you doing there?”
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 26