She speared with her fork a piece of fresh, moist vegetable, and lifted it to her lips. The flavour invaded her mouth. She recalled that yesterday morning she’d thought about that man, or to be exact, she had transformed herself into that man, as she writhed beneath the sheets. She kept her eyes on her plate. She wondered whether that’s what he actually did when he woke up in the morning. Whether he touched himself under the sheets, in the dawn’s early light, moaning and thrusting his head into his pillow. She peeked at his hands. No wedding band. If he lived alone, who knows, maybe he did.
“Mrs. Darkholme…” the detective was saying. “That’s your real name, isn’t it? Raven Darkholme.”
Mystique swallowed. Every lascivious thought fled from her mind, making way for a new wave of annoyance. Damn it. That man had a gift for putting his foot in it over and over. “No one calls me that,” she hissed. “The last time I was called that name I was in prison.”
“Oh,” he said, increasingly abashed. “I guess this just isn’t my day, is it?” he said, trying to laugh it off. There was something melancholy about his laugh. The reddened capillaries branched out, around his irises, in rivulets like a river delta. On the table, his ringless hands looked strong. “Any other notes in the past few days?” he asked.
“No notes,” Mystique replied as she went on eating. She vaguely thought of asking the detective if he’d already eaten lunch, but she had no intention of offering him any courteous gestures. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t any more notes. I think we’ve seen the last of them. Whoever was writing them, he must have got sick of the prank.”
Dennis De Villa listened thoughtfully to her words. “I hope you’re right,” he said. “But just in case another note does come, or in case you notice anything suspicious, or in case someone around you behaves in some odd way, or in case you have any ideas of who might be behind this prank…” He cleared his throat over the buzz of the cafeteria: “I’d like you to promise that you’ll call me. Immediately. No matter the time of day or night.”
Mystique bit her lip. For a moment she thought she would suffocate. A few yards away, behind the detective’s back, Horace and Chad were putting on a little skit for her benefit. Horace had smeared his eyelids and the skin under his eyes with ketchup, making a clear reference to the detective’s conjunctivitis, and was flashing winning smiles at her while Chad, pretending to be her, picked at a leaf of lettuce and fluttered his eyelashes haughtily.
It was a totally surreal scene. Mystique gulped. She covered her mouth with her napkin and just managed not to laugh. She took a drink of water to stifle the laughter that was bubbling in her stomach. It would be hard to stifle it much longer. She hoped that the detective was about to leave.
“I was wondering…” he said, oblivious to the scene being acted out behind him. He seemed to caress the tabletop for a moment, as if it were the back of a little household pet. “Well, it’s just idle curiosity. But I was wondering how you can transform yourself into someone else. I mean, could you transform into anyone at all? Even someone you’d never met?”
In the meantime, Horace and Chad were going wild. Horace had smeared even more ketchup onto his eyes and Chad was throwing lettuce leaves at him as though to chase him away. Mystique let a smile escape. She regained control and forced herself not to watch her two colleagues. “Okay,” she said. Even though she didn’t like providing explanations on the topic, she decided that talking about it would help her to remain serious. “Sometimes, all I need is a photo. It’s better if I can see part of the body… Old Vladimir, for example. The Russian president loves to be immortalised with his shirt off. I only needed a single bare-chested picture of him… I look at a person’s skin, I concentrate on a piece of the body. The rest comes by itself. The other parts of the body, their way of doing things. A single piece of a body can tell you everything about a person.” She took another drink of water and concluded: “In other cases, I have to see the person face to face. At least see them. In the most challenging cases, shake hands with them.”
“Fascinating,” said her visitor, attentive, still caressing the surface of the table. His smile really did remind her of a little boy, one of those serious boys who had for some reason grown up far too young. “I hope you don’t think that’s a stupid question. This kind of thing has always caught my interest. The way certain superpowers work.”
The detective’s serious demeanour increased her need to laugh. Laughter boiled up in her stomach, so urgent it was almost painful, not so funny any more, not even making sense, just an automatic and somewhat guilty movement. “I understand,” she did her best to continue. “Now why would you be so curious about such a thing?”
He shrugged and seemed to hesitate. “When I was a boy…” He mentioned something about his childhood and a brother who collected newspaper clippings about superheroes. By this point, Mystique had stopped listening to him. She was absorbed in the bizarre vignette: those two clowns behind him trying to make her laugh, and the serious detective facing her. That detective with his captivating smile. With his moments of awkwardness, his abrupt questions, and his body, a body with which she had made much closer acquaintance, yesterday morning, than he would ever suspect. She held De Villa’s gaze and thought back on what it had felt like to turn herself into him. His sturdy body. His turgid penis. She felt like laughing. She found that man sexy, there was no denying it, but she wanted to see him leave as soon as possible.
The cafeteria was emptying, and she had barely eaten half of her salad. When Dennis De Villa stood up, Horace and Chad turned away to avoid being noticed. Once he was gone, they looked over at Mystique. After a moment, the three of them burst out laughing, a hearty, liberating laugh, almost furious, contaminated by a streak of strange sadness.
*
She’d never wanted to cause any pain. Certainly not to innocent people. She’d never taken part in deadly activities, and all she was trying to do was change the system, yes: she’d just wanted to make sure that everything changed. In those days, that’s what lots of people wanted, and she had wanted it more than others. She’d fooled herself into believing she could do it. She’d fooled herself that it was right to try. Mystique the mutant, the political activist, under suspicion of subversive beliefs, accused of complicity in the illegal operations of a group of armed mutants in the Seventies and early Eighties.
They’d framed her on charges of taking part in an armed robbery. There were no witnesses to her involvement in that robbery. They’d just claimed that she took part with a semblance different from her own. The perfect accusation for the perfect defendant.
She remembered the twenty-hour interrogation after her arrest, the hard chair that cut into her back, the scornful voices of the police detectives who questioned her. They had framed her for political interests, that much was clear, and during her trial a bunch of intellectuals and even a few superheroes had intervened on her behalf with public appeals. There had been that famous article by Susan Sontag. There had been petitions, but all in vain.
The time of her trial and the years leading up to it. The political discussions, the protest rallies, the hazy ideas of social liberation, the gang of mutant pseudo-revolutionaries that she and Sabrina, her old comrade in militant activism, had got involved with. She had no idea what had ever become of most of those people: in prison, or fugitives in some exotic country, or else dead or who knows what. The robberies and the arson attacks that she certainly hadn’t taken part in, but which she had known about from time to time. The days when the world was split between superheroes and alleged supervillains, or supersubversives or whatever they were called. All of it belonged to the past. Obsolete ideological claptrap that by now people could barely remember.
The past was down there in the distance. The past was a muddled mass, with blurry outlines, almost dreamlike, searing and nearly invisible like a gigantic jellyfish, a shape hovering behind her back that seemed, by some sinister effect, to cast a muggy light on what she had now be
come. The queen of the show, the slave of the show.
She’d spent sixteen years in the high security section of Lexington. Some people thought it was too long, others thought it wasn’t long enough. She couldn’t tell whether she had paid the right price, she didn’t even know what it was she was paying for: for her own illusions, for something she had done, for something she hadn’t done, for what she had been or for what she had stopped being.
One thing she knew for sure was that the past had remained over there, on the other side of her life, a life cut in two by the abyss of prison. Now, the idea that anyone might go to the trouble of conspiring against her made her smile. Conspiring against a woman whose life had been cut in two. Conspiring against who? Against the woman from before or the woman she was now? Conspiring in the name of what? For the reasons of the past, for the senselessness of the present?
In the days that followed, as things began to fall apart, she would keep asking herself those questions. She would ask herself why someone was sentencing her to death. Unless it was because someone had decided to blame her for the most unforgivable mistake. The mistake of still being alive. The past was dead, she was alive. Could this possibly be her fatal mistake?
*
The event was scheduled for a Barnes & Noble book store, and by early afternoon there were hundreds of people queuing outside the front door, each holding a copy of the book. Chad had spent a couple of hours in that queue, in the heat of the afternoon, his massive body bathed in sweat. Once he got through the door, he could at least enjoy the air conditioning inside.
Doctor Szepanski was way down there. He was sitting at a table, flanked by a pair of glowering security guards, ready to hustle away any overeager readers. The doctor was signing copies of his book with a flourish of his wrist, scattering unsettling smiles in all directions. His skin had the chilly gleam of a fleshy plant. The queue was slowly inching forward, and Chad was becoming unsteady on his feet, wearied by his own weight, but he toughed it out until he was near the table. Now it was his turn. He handed his copy to the elderly doctor and looked him straight in the face. It was a hard face to read. The plastic surgery had rendered it smooth, too taut, as elusive as an abstract sculpture.
Without warning, the doctor lifted his eyes and responded with an equally penetrating stare. A frisson seemed to pass between them. Oh hell. Could the doctor have guessed? After all, that man had experience of people with superpowers, and he might have developed an instinct or something of the sort to sense when he met one. “So,” Szepanski asked as he handed back the signed book. “Did you enjoy reading it?”
Mystique-Chad took the book, brushing the doctor’s warm, slightly sticky fingertips. “Unquestionably,” she-he lied. “I devoured every single page.”
Szepanski didn’t take the trouble to smile. He sat there motionless and expressionless. Maybe his face was starting to hurt, or maybe he had in fact guessed who he was talking to.
Mystique-Chad crossed the carpeted floor and emerged again into the scorching street, where she stood heaving in the afternoon heat. She really had to stop going around disguised as Chad when she went out incognito. She should find someone a little lighter. Putting on that shape and all that mass was more work than anyone needed to do in summer.
She grabbed her shirt at chest level and started flapping it to let in a little air. Two hours queuing to get close to that damned doctor, and the meeting was over in less than a minute. She felt like tossing the book in the bin. She resisted the impulse, remembering she’d promised to give it back to Chad. That is to say, to the real Chad.
In any case, I suppose I should be pretty happy. I managed to get a close look at the doctor.
More people kept lining up outside the book store door, with copies of the questionable bestseller in their hands, waiting patiently like a crowd of extras. Mystique-Chad huffed and walked along the sidewalk, mingling with the flow of passersby.
She spotted a snow cone stand and decided it was exactly what she wanted. She crossed the street and walked up to the stand, ordering a medium snow cone, then changed her mind and made it a large. If she was going to go around in Chad’s body, she might as well order for Chad’s metabolism.
The crushed ice was thirst-quenching and sugary, but its flavour did nothing to assuage the slight annoyance that lingered inside her. She couldn’t stop thinking of those people standing in line. Thinking of all the book stores under siege in the entire country, of all those readers eager to learn the trove of details in the notorious bestseller. Oh, the thousands of ridiculous and morbid details. Details about Batman’s perversions, about the sexual sagas of Captain America, about Wonder Woman’s augmentation mammoplasty, about Wolverine’s youthful erotic adventures, about the unreliable prowess of Namor, about Ben Grimm’s cement penis, about the size of Reed Richards’ penis, and about anecdotes concerning the innumerable minor superheroes recounted by Szepanski.
In fact, it was rumoured that the juicy chapter about Reed Richards had been popped in at the last minute, when the book was ready to go to print. And because of that chapter, Reed’s private life was now the subject of discussion in magazines and on radio and TV shows. Self-proclaimed experts on sexology and male psychology chattered on about an alleged Mister Fantastic syndrome, which had to do with the impossibility for any sufferer, whether or not he was a superhero, to have a realistic idea of the size of his own penis. That Reed Richards had been a very private person when he was alive, sober in his personal style, and that he would never have wanted his intimate life to be discussed in public, seemed to be of no concern to anyone.
Under Mystique-Chad’s arm, the book was creating a patch of sweat on her shirt. Puffs of heat were issuing from the sidewalk. A police car hurtled past down a side street, siren wailing, leaving an unpleasant stain of anxiety in the air. Mystique-Chad gulped down a slurp of icy liquid and pressed the cup against her forehead. Air surged into her nostrils, hot, heavy, in large gasps, while the bodies of passersby brushed distractedly against hers, just as hot, damp, and exhausted as she was, trailing behind them the aromas of recent showers, or else the scent of their perspiration.
Clever move. New York is suffocating, it feels like the world is on fire, and I’m walking around with a 260-pound body. She tossed the plastic cup, now empty, into a rubbish bin. She kept wanting to toss the book in as well. There was a time when people didn’t feel the need to know certain things, she mused. A time when people didn’t need to talk about the sex life of the superheroes. They didn’t seem to need to know anything about superheroes, they let them act in the shadows, almost in the realm of mythology. And they acted. Superheroes. The ones who seemed to protect the world, or the ones like me, who were accused of threatening it.
She wished she was at home, in the cool comfort of her bedroom.
She accelerated her pace under the cutting shafts of sunlight, thinking about the book under her arm, and thinking of the people who wondered why there was nothing about her in that book. Nothing about Mystique. The answer is simple. Simpler than anyone imagines. There wouldn’t be much to say any more about my sex life. Practically speaking, there wouldn’t be a thing.
*
After her outing to Barnes & Noble, after the snow cone and a short cab ride, followed by another few blocks on foot, Mystique-Chad looked around furtively and slipped through her front door. The front door of her apartment in Morningside Heights.
She put Szepanski’s book down on the hall table, next to that day’s mail, which must have been left there by the cleaning lady who came in the mornings. She trudged to the bathroom and started to undress. Gratified though she was to have got near the notorious doctor, she kept feeling that mixture of sensations. A sort of ill-defined bitterness. An imprint of intensifying anxiety. She could feel those sensations fluctuating, like fish in an aquarium, in the big body whose shape she still kept.
It was time to go back to being herself. Time to abandon Chad’s physical shape and regain her own petite physique, he
r bluish skin, her luxuriant hair. She neatly folded the voluminous clothes she had worn and put them in the closet, where a special armoire stored the clothes she used for that kind of outing: men’s clothes, women’s clothes, in all styles and sizes. Shoes. Belts. Baseball caps. There were plenty of XXL men’s clothes. Countless oversized shirts, short-sleeved, garishly coloured, each on its own hanger. Mystique-Chad sniffed the clothes she had just taken off. They’d better go into the dirty clothes hamper.
She headed for the kitchen to get a glass of water. She would drink a glass of water and then she’d head back to the bathroom, she’d resume her own shape, and she’d gratefully indulge in the blessings of a nice shower. The sunshine penetrated through the flimsy curtains, casting on the floor a shadow of the naked, obese male body that wandered through the silent apartment. Her body. His body. Mystique-Chad.
As she went past the table in the hallway, she noticed that day’s mail. She picked it up and continued towards the kitchen, leafing through the sheaf of envelopes. Bank statements. Bureaucracy. Correspondence from her agent. An invitation to an opening at a gallery in Chelsea. And last… The sun seemed to grow more intense, outside, violently pressing against the curtains.
She stopped in the middle of the light-drenched kitchen. Her respiration grew heavy, a blend of apprehension and dull rage, as she handled the envelope without a return address. She already knew what she would find inside. The sheet of paper was white and nondescript, and it bore the usual message:
SO LONG, MY MYSTIQUE
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 35