Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  *

  The arrest had been carried out at dawn, with an intimidating deployment of police forces, whole squadrons of officers in anti-riot gear and helicopters roaring overhead. They were doing things on a grand scale. They handcuffed her and hustled her into a police van. Then came a gap in her memory. The next scene was in a windowless police interrogation room, in which a lethal chill reigned. When Mystique asked for something to cover herself, the detectives had broken out in mocking laughter. The hard cold chair that hurt her back. She had responded with an equally mocking smile, a heroic, superior smile, a martyr’s smile, convinced that they might have managed to arrest her, all right, but they hadn’t yet succeeded in bending her.

  Those were the memories of her arrest. The scene seemed to shift forward again. Maybe she’d just passed out. Opening her eyes in the chilly light, she saw that the police officers had vanished, and there was just one man in front of her now. The man was sitting on the edge of the table. His body seemed to exude a stream of ambiguous, concealed menace. Mystique knew what awaited her. Long hours of questioning, admittance into prison, the humiliating medical examination.

  When the man stood up from the table, she recognised his hands, his ringless fingers, his light grey suit, even his reddened eyes. She let out a moan. Oh no. That’s not the way things had gone. What did that man have to do with any of this? Detective De Villa had never been in the room where she was questioned. Back then, he must have been just a boy. The scene was no longer a memory. A dream, it must have turned into a dream, she told herself, but that wasn’t enough to give her any sense of relief: if anything, it increased her sense of dread.

  Dennis De Villa walked towards her.

  Mystique realised her wrists were free, unfettered by handcuffs. She raised one hand in his direction, instinctively, to ward him off or perhaps to touch him. She touched the man’s body and felt its stunning heat. He drew closer. He said nothing, made no gestures, he just came closer. They both sighed, in unison, a sigh that filled every corner of the room.

  When she opened her eyes the breeze was blowing through the window in a clean flow, piercing as a knife. She was awake. She stretched out one arm along the mattress. Her face was damp. She felt excited or perhaps upset, and she twisted under the sheets, undecided, tempted to close her eyes and plunge back into that torrid dream. Detective De Villa was even colonising her dreams at night.

  She could transform herself into him, now, the same way as she had done a couple of days ago. Transform herself into him and touch herself a little and start the day with a lovely, lonely orgasm. She could certainly do it. Instead, she chose to leave the soft shell of her bed. She decided to go out for a run in the park. She felt a vague sense of guilt about the dream she’d had, guilt about herself and even guilt towards that man. Wasn’t there something wrong, some kind of violation in involving another person in your own torrid dreams? Or was the violation on the part of the other person, who unconsciously, without knowing it, proved capable of breaking into such dreams?

  She looked for her running clothes. She put them on with little enthusiasm, her breathing still irregular, while outside dawn grew brighter once again, muggy and impassive.

  *

  That day she locked herself in her dressing room and started rehearsing the character of Szepanski. The studio was immersed in silence. It was one of those days when nothing was in production and no one was rehearsing, and the whole studio floor remained motionless, uninhabited, echoing like a giant seashell.

  In the secrecy of her dressing room she took off her clothes. She did a few breathing exercises and focused on the image of the doctor. Szepanski’s smooth face, his cheekbones like those of a plastic doll. The flourish of his wrist as he signed copies in that book store. Mystique understood immediately, instinctively, that assuming the shape of the elderly doctor wouldn’t be easy, that it would be one of the biggest challenges of her career.

  Over the course of her life, she had transformed herself into hundreds of people. She had transformed herself into men, into women. In her time working in TV she had transformed herself into the most astonishing array of individuals, into Vladimir and Oprah and the other characters in the current line-up, and dozens of others like Mike Tyson, the Dalai Lama, Jimmy Carter, Yoko Ono, and Donald Trump… She had transformed herself into Sophia Loren, a radiant septuagenarian who wore dresses with plunging necklines, her tits prominently displayed. She had transformed herself into Al Gore, who strolled onto the stage with his imposing physique, striding like an overweight former basketball player, always prompting a roar from the audience. She had transformed herself into males, females, the young and the aged, withstanding the effort of that perpetual body-change, falling back on her precious breathing exercises, enduring time after time the burden of weariness it brought. She had continued to change her body. She had continued to make them laugh. She had done all this, but now it was Joseph Szepanski’s turn, and for the first time she realised she had a problem on her hands.

  She made a couple of unsuccessful attempts, both times transforming herself into a little old man with a swollen, imprecise, unrecognisable face, far from the unnaturally taut features of Szepanski. On the third attempt, she felt her body burn and waver, rebelling against the strain. She flopped down onto the sofa. She sat there pondering, feeling overwhelmed. That artificial face. That rigid, expressionless, repugnant and yet at the same time perfect skin. How the hell can I take on that same consistency?

  She was gathering her strength for a new attempt when someone knocked at the door. For some reason she thought of Detective Dennis De Villa. She felt a shiver of anxiety. She considered pretending not to be there, or transforming herself into someone else, maybe little Susie or a cleaning woman, to avoid whoever might be on the other side of that door. They knocked again. She resigned herself to throwing on a bathrobe. She pulled the sash tight and opened the door.

  “There you are!” Chad exclaimed. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I looked upstairs in your office and everywhere in the studio. I had to show you the latest,” he said, walking into the dressing room and positioning himself in the middle of the room. He executed a pirouette and asked: “How do you like me?”

  Relieved, Mystique shut the door and turned to look at him. Chad was in the midst of his weekly costume fittings and was wearing a garish green tailcoat made of some shiny material, and as always, a couple of sizes too small. The trousers clung to his thighs and looked dangerously close to bursting. Just then, he was wearing no shoes and his bare feet had a pink and puffy appearance. “Hey. I came to show you my costume, stop looking at my feet,” he whined.

  Mystique looked up. “Well,” she said. “I’d say you look like an enormous kiwi-flavoured hard candy.” She walked back to the sofa and sank into the cushion. “Didn’t you ask for costumes a little less form-fitting?”

  “I did,” he said, eyeing himself in the mirror. “You know, that costumier hates me. But really, all things considered, I don’t look half bad, do I? I think it shows how much weight I’ve lost,” he declared, with a hint of unjustified optimism, as he went on studying himself. “How’s it going with you?”

  “It couldn’t go much worse,” Mystique replied. She brushed a lock of hair off her forehead and did her best to smile. “I just can’t transform myself into Szepanski.”

  “Oh come on. Aren’t you the one who is able to transform herself into any living human being?”

  “That’s just it. I can turn myself into any human being. Not into a pile of leftovers from an operating table,” she said, with all the sarcasm she could muster, though she couldn’t quite hide her concern. “I wonder whether we ought to consider a change of plan. Maybe we still have enough time to think of another personality.”

  Chad’s eyes opened wide. “You must be kidding,” he said. “It would be the first time you gave up on a character. Plus, the producers would never let you off the hook. Everybody’s anticipating this. Gary already gave the sponsor
s a heads-up on the news.”

  “Gary,” she echoed with a grimace.

  Chad started stroking his chin. “By the way,” he said, almost sullen, clearly thinking of something. “Apparently we got an email from a viewer. Apparently I was seen standing in line at a Barnes & Noble store yesterday, waiting to get my copy of Szepanski’s book autographed. Isn’t that incredible? Very odd, since I spent the whole afternoon here at the studio.”

  “Very odd, indeed,” she agreed without losing her composure.

  “Mystique,” Chad sighed. “I’ve asked you a thousand times: please don’t go around town disguised as me.”

  “Don’t complain. It was for the good of the show,” she apologised. She brushed away a lock of hair again. She noticed that a faint burning sensation lingered in her limbs, something like lactic acid in an athlete’s muscles. Her body had a twinge, a blend of excitement and horror, at the thought that in a few minutes she would have to resume her effort to transform herself into Szepanski.

  Chad must have sensed her state of mind. “Okay. I’m going to forgive you because I possess a magnanimous soul. Plus, I can see that we’re not really looking our best today. You’re not a very pretty picture, did you know that? A bluish mutant in a bathrobe, with scraggly hair, plastered across the couch in her dressing room.”

  “My dear,” she said. “Nobody knows how to pay a lady a compliment quite like you do.”

  “Hey!” he said, on his way out of the door, as a goodbye and to get her to laugh. “Watch this,” he said, improvising a barefoot tap routine across the floor, making a series of flaccid and ridiculous sounds.

  Mystique laughed.

  Chad finished his routine, took a deep bow, adjusted his green tailcoat, and finally turned and left, heading back to his costume fittings.

  She sat there, alone. In the sudden silence she heard the sound of her own respiration. The dressing room surrounded her, motionless, almost alive, pervaded by that silence, by the sound of her breathing. It was time to start again. The mirror was there, brightly lit, eager to see what she could do. She got up from the sofa and pulled off her bathrobe. Come on, she said to herself.

  *

  Later on, at the end of the day, she left the studio and headed as usual for the car that would be taking her home. The sky was an impassive vault over the city, criss-crossed by grey-red clouds that seemed to be steeped, like cotton balls, in the blood-coloured light of sunset. Far in the distance, along the horizon line, blinking aircraft were rising from the strips of LaGuardia Airport, crossing their routes in the darkening sky. Mystique felt her stomach tighten. She could hardly remember the last time she’d taken a plane or the last time she’d left the city. I’m sick of only reading the travel section of the New York Times. When we’re done with this season I’ll have to take a vacation. I really think I will.

  She climbed into the car and said hello to Santiago. The driver seemed to be in a bubble of distant thoughts. He shot an opaque glance into the rear-view mirror before shaking himself out of his reverie, mumbling an apology, and starting the car.

  Mystique was tempted to close her eyes and rest briefly. She was not sure how she felt: sleepy, or perhaps in a state of turmoil, or just dissatisfied. Her experiments with the Szepanski character weren’t going so well. The following day she’d have to work hard on it. Only when she looked out of the window and noticed how crowded the restaurants along the boulevard were, did she realise that the weekend had begun. She wouldn’t be coming in to the studio tomorrow. Friday, she told herself. It’s Friday night, she thought, with a chilly amazement, as she observed the people behind the restaurant windows, and the crowds strolling down the sidewalk, feeling like an anthropologist intently observing the habits of an exotic, incomprehensible populace.

  She lowered her window an inch or two. The air from the street blew into her face. “The weekend always sneaks up on you,” she mused aloud. “Like a rift in time. I never remember that it’s about to happen.” She leaned back against the seat and tried to imagine what the next two days might hold in store for her. There must be an invitation to lunch somewhere, as best she could remember, and maybe an invitation to a theatre premiere. That kind of thing. She doubted she would go.

  Santiago tucked his head down, and kept steering along the boulevard. He honked at a pedestrian who was trying to jaywalk, then he speeded up, and asked Mystique, in his Hispanic accent, if she was married.

  She curled up on the seat, aware of the countless implications of that question. People had expectations. People expected a woman her age to be married, to devote her weekend to her family, or at least to her husband, or at least to a lover. At the same time, people didn’t know what to expect from a woman like her. A mutant with bluish skin. A television star. People would be amazed to learn that a woman like her slept alone, and to the same extent, amazed to learn that she slept with someone. “No,” she replied. “I’m not married.”

  Silence filled the interior of the car. Nothing but the sound of the engine and the whirr of the tyres on the hot asphalt. They’d left Astoria behind them. The car was gliding towards the comforting embrace of Manhattan. Mystique let her eyelids drop, and her consciousness was beginning to blur when she realised that Santiago had started talking again.

  “When we first moved to New York,” the driver was saying in the tone of someone recounting an old memory, “my wife and I used to go to the zoo. On weekends, of course. There are lots of zoos in this city. You can spend whole weekends just visiting the zoos of New York. There’s even one with a memorial to animals that have gone extinct, but I can’t remember which one.” His voice darkened, and his accent seemed to take on a dramatic cadence: “Unbelievable,” he said. “You look at that memorial and you think of all those species that are gone now. All that ending.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mystique murmured, her head woolly, not particularly happy to have been torn out of her state of sluggishness. She had the impression that the driver was in the mood for some serious talk. “It’s Friday night and I’d say you’re about twenty years younger than me. You shouldn’t be brooding about such gloomy topics.”

  “Ma’am, you shouldn’t pretend,” was his reply.

  “Huh?” she asked in confusion.

  The driver tucked his head down further between his shoulders and gripped the steering wheel tightly. “I know that’s not the way you are,” he said in a hoarse voice, almost emotional. “I mean, you don’t think that everything comes down to having fun on Friday night. You don’t think that certain things have to be forgotten. You don’t have such a fun-loving personality. You’re not so carefree, not at all, you’re not the way you act on TV.”

  “I get it,” said Mystique. She let out a nervous little laugh. “I’ll take that as a compliment. I guess it is a compliment. I think I’m going to get some rest now.”

  But the man wasn’t about to give up. He seemed in the throes of feverish ideas. “What do you say about destiny?” he went on, gripping the wheel even tighter. “That’s the real cage. Destiny. We don’t choose our own life stories, any more than some animal in the zoo. You think you’re free? You’re in a cage, same as them.”

  Mystique stared at him from the back seat. She stared at the nape of the man’s neck, his haircut done with a clipper, she stared at his temple where she could just detect a vein throbbing. “I imagine that’s so,” she replied with a consciously cool tone. She lowered her window a little more, letting in exterior noise. The hum of traffic. The spirited sound of a car horn.

  A few minutes later the car pulled up in front of her building. Mystique had never been so eager to slide out of the car and in through her front door. Her restful home. Her silent apartment, free of drivers raving bizarrely. She was about to exit the vehicle when the man turned around and looked straight at her. “Caged animals can do terrible things,” he announced, grim-faced. “Destiny can force us to do things we don’t want to. Destiny can force someone to die. It can even force someone el
se to kill.”

  Something happened. An icy jolt inside her. A lightning-fast movement in her head. It was as if the tails of several different thoughts had just been tugged, now revealing that they all formed one single thread: the notes she was receiving, the possibility that she really was in danger, the idea that the group of fanatics had actually recruited someone to harm her. Perhaps someone she knew. She stared at the driver. She stared at his face, immersed in the half-light, she stared at the gleam of those dark, deranged, heartbroken eyes.

  She got out of the car. She walked stiffly to her front door.

  Inside, she wandered from room to darkened room, and went to the window to make sure the car had driven away. She didn’t know what to make of this. She took off her shoes and considered making a herbal tea. She checked to see if the street door was properly locked. She laughed at herself. She switched on the air conditioning and a chilly breath enveloped her skin. She had no doubt that the driver had behaved suspiciously, and that he had spoken in an almost threatening way. Mystique rummaged through her bag until she found a certain business card, and grabbed her phone to dial the number. She couldn’t believe it. She was doing it. She really was calling, and stupid as she felt, she still sat listening to the ringing at the other end of the line, motionless, as if hypnotised, until she recognised Detective De Villa’s voice.

  *

  The weather held up for the whole weekend. A warm breeze blew steadily day and night, bringing an atmosphere of summery languor. Thousands of people poured into Central Park, turning the Sheep Meadow into a dense meat market, climbing the paths of North Woods, or surrounding the banks of the little lakes. Central Park. The city’s verdant heart. An oasis of artificial nature that an American landscape designer and an English architect had designed a century and a half earlier, carefully placing each tree and each boulder, providing city dwellers with a rectangular patch of bucolic, democratic peace. Crowds had poured into the city’s other parks as well. They had invaded the park along the East River and the long narrow strip on Riverside. People had taken possession of every green space, driven by a ravenous hunger for light and oxygen, lolling in the meadows and sinking their fingers into the grass. People had freed themselves of clothes, pushing to the very edge of the permissible, while the onset of summer impregnated their bodies with a damp, electric, restless heat. People had filled Morningside Park as well, though in this case they were a more chaste, more modestly dressed crowd of multicoloured families with large numbers of children, enjoying sumptuous picnics on the lawn.