Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  They reached the back door. It led to a short staircase that descended to a large garden. “This is the part of the house I like least,” the old hero complained. “These steps, I mean. But I bet that with your help they’ll be easier to take.”

  Bruce helped him down the stairs. The old man’s stiff body came to a halt on the edge of each step, balancing, arms swept by more intense, almost electric bouts of shaking, that were transmitted to Bruce in a series of tiny and nearly painful impulses.

  As soon as they got to the foot of the stairs, Superman broke away from him and took a few steps on his own, without even the aid of his cane, taking advantage of a momentary absence of the shakes. He squared his shoulders and stood there in the welcoming afternoon light. How old could that man be? In his eighties, at the very least. Still, in the illusion of the golden light, with rose bushes and the branches of a wisteria swaying behind him, the body of the ex-hero seemed for an instant to be as majestic as ever, and Bruce stood before him, astonished, dazzled, feeling wonderfully small. Wonderfully pure. For that passing instant, he too became what he had once been. A boy filled with trust and with the desire to stand in the presence of a great, eternal superhero.

  “It’s very nice here. A very nice garden, Mr. Kent.”

  “Until a few years ago, I did the gardening myself. The rose bushes…” Superman sighed, glancing over at the flowers close at hand, “seem to feel a little slighted.” He was still standing without the support of his walking stick, though he was starting to sway. The flow of a breeze was tossing the branches. “Who’d ever think,” he mused after a moment, “that I once knew how to fly? It’s been twenty-two… yes, twenty-two years since the last time I lofted up into the air. In the end, just to fly a few yards… Just to fly a few yards was so exhausting that I had to throw up.” There was no sadness in his voice. Every word he spoke seemed to have the tone of a calm, unforced observation. The faint smile reappeared on his tight lips. “Do you know how to fly?”

  The question baffled Bruce. Instinctively, he crossed his arms. He realised he’d adopted a typical defensive stance and dropped his arms to his side, feeling naked and awkward, now, in this garden full of scents. “What do you mean? I don’t have any superpowers,” he chose to respond.

  “Oh you don’t? That’s too bad,” the other man said in a sly voice. His eyes were a nebula of bluish light. The rustling of leaves dominated everything else, serving as a background to their voices, thousands of leaves tossed in the breeze, louder and louder, a multitude of tiny whispering rattles. “De Villa. De Villa,” the elderly hero went on reciting, in the same rapt tone he had used at the beginning, when he first repeated Bruce’s surname at the front door.

  The sun extended a golden patina over the gravel on the path. A little further, on a garden table surrounded by wicker chairs, a few wrinkled newspapers, probably left from that morning’s reading, waved lazily in the breeze. When the old man staggered, Bruce hurried over, offering him his cane, but the man preferred to lock onto Bruce with both hands.

  They both stood there trembling, clinging tight, like inexperienced skaters poised in a fragile, surprising equilibrium. “As you must know… I never receive reporters,” Superman said. “Were you wondering why I agreed to meet you, Bruce De Villa?”

  Bruce dropped the walking stick. The old man’s weight made him tremble with effort.

  The scent of the rose bushes was overpowering. A large insect with brilliantly coloured wings glided between the flowers. Superman was saying something about having gathered information, about reading the newspapers closely, and even about unleashing a small bunch of informers. By now, he felt confident he knew a lot about the De Villa brothers. “If I understood this well, my young friend… There are two brothers. Something happens to the mother. One of the two brothers… gets it into his head that he’ll go and murder the old superheroes.” From somewhere in the garden, or perhaps from another garden, came the sound of an automatic sprinkler. “But I ask myself,” he said, “what about the other brother? What’s going through the mind of the other brother? What is that uneasy spark I glimpse… in his deep dark eyes?”

  Everything was becoming clear. This meeting had been a trap of sorts.

  Superman had never intended to grant an interview. What he wanted was to meet the other brother, the one who wasn’t a murderer, the complementary figure to the one who had killed several of his most famous former colleagues over the past few years. The smell of the wet lawn around the sprinkler wafted over to them. If anyone had been watching the two men in the garden from a distance, they might have concluded that they had fallen into a clumsy swaying bear hug. Their trembling shoulders. Their faces close together. The greying hair of the old man almost touching the greying hair of the younger. Now that he had met Bruce De Villa, the old hero was even more curious. From the moment he welcomed him in through the front door, every instinct told him that this man had certain special abilities. He had experience when it came to people with superpowers. “There’s something in you, my young friend.”

  Bruce had no time to feel disquieted by those words. He was too busy trying to stay on his feet. His shoulders were aching. He wished he had enough strength to hold up the old hero for all time; he wished he had a steady enough body to transmit his steadiness to him, his own absence of tremors. But he was starting to sweat. He wondered how long he would be able to hold out. Why was the old hero leaning all his weight on him? Why did Superman assume that Bruce wouldn’t drop him? Bruce decided that pretty soon they’d both fall to the ground. They gripped each other tighter. The leaves on the bushes went on rustling. In the end, neither of them fell.

  *

  Bruce had taken off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and was now wearing a pair of gardening gloves he’d found in a tool shed. He’d started to prune the rose bushes under the old man’s supervision. All the gardening experience he possessed dated back to his boyhood, in Clifton, when he’d sometimes helped his mother with the flowers in the front garden. But the work he was doing today didn’t seem too complicated. Pruning some of the bushes and cutting a dozen flowers to take inside. Superman was sitting in one of the wicker chairs, and from time to time he’d toss out courteous, meticulous instructions on the best way to use the clippers. The sprinklers had turned off and turned on again, at intervals, while the breeze pushed tiny particles of water spray in their direction.

  Every time his gaze met the eyes of the old hero, Bruce felt a sense of disorientation and, at the same time, of strange, immediate fullness. By now he had given up on the interview. As he continued to cut thorny stems from the bushes, encouraged by that gaze whose touch he could sense without looking over at it, Bruce did most of the talking.

  He told him about a series of memories. Scenes from his boyhood. He told about his earliest memory, the first of his life, when he burned his tongue eating a hot dog, on a grey afternoon on the beach at Coney Island. He smiled at that memory. He told about how he and Dennis used to talk about superheroes, lying on their beds in the Clifton nights. He told about his mother’s wet hair. About her small sad smile. Memories poured out of Bruce and seemed to hover in the air, and it almost came as a surprise not to see them glitter, along with the particles of water spray, in the late afternoon light.

  The legendary hero sat listening in his wicker chair. In his lap, his hands with their liver spots barely trembled.

  He told the story of his mother’s double body. The off-white flaccid flesh of the man that he’d glimpsed, one day, having sex with her second body. He’d never confessed these things to another living soul. How could this stream of sincerity suddenly pour out of him? He told about his mother’s death. The faces of the neighbours as they told him what they’d seen, what had been to their eyes a mysterious and fatal convulsion, a fit that had come over her during a quarrel with her husband on the strip of grass opposite their house. The coffin into which the two bodies had been secretly spirited, in a final embrace, so that they might be one
again, if not in life, at least in the hour of their decomposition. The desperate perseverance that surged into him in the wake of that death, and that drove him to get his college degree in short order. How his brother was able to go to college with a scholarship, only to enlist in the police force at an early age. Overwhelmed with remorse, their father pined away in solitude and died within a few years, hammered by a state of depression and a case of stomach cancer.

  “Go on,” Superman encouraged him.

  He told about his abilities. He had lied when he told him that he possessed no superpowers. Actually he did, however modest they might be… After learning that his mother possessed a superpower, he had discovered he possessed one of his own. A power of second sight. The first time, in fact, it was her death he had foreseen. Wasn’t that ironic? In him, everything happened almost at once: he had discovered who his mother was, discovered who he himself was, and sensed that she was about to depart this life.

  Over the years, he had foreseen the deaths of other superheroes. Superheroes, just the deaths of superheroes. It was something more than a sensation. It was a genuine, full-fledged knowledge. He knew in advance when a superhero was drawing close to the end, even a superhero he might never have met in person, as if that superhero were heading straight for the edge of a cliff and there was a sensor that alerted a guard and that guard was him, Bruce De Villa. Finding himself in the presence of a man who decades ago had been able to fly, lift a truck weighing tons, and bend a traffic light in half with his gaze, Bruce chose to stress that his own power was negligible at best.

  “What about the murderer brother? Does he have superpowers?” Superman inquired.

  “Oh no. Not as far as I know.” He’d put down the gloves and the clippers. The branches that remained to be discarded were stacked at a corner of the lawn. Someone had come from inside the house to pick up the cut flowers; in exchange they’d left a pitcher with iced herbal tea and a couple of glasses on the garden table. Bruce and the old hero were now sitting in the wicker chairs.

  “Thanks for the gardening.”

  “It’s been a pleasure,” Bruce replied, in perfect honesty.

  “What other powers do you possess?” Superman questioned him. Leaning with some effort towards the table, he took a sip through the straw extending from the glass. “I can’t believe this is your only power… foreseeing the death of some old superhero. That sort of ability is unquestionably… nothing but the tip of the iceberg.”

  Bruce stared at the pitcher on the table. The ice-cold glass he was holding in his hand. Pieces of orange peel bobbing in the herbal tea. He took a sip and recognised the flavour of lime blossom mixed with other unfamiliar plants. He closed his eyes to savour the aroma of the herbal tea and when he opened them again Superman was still waiting in front of him, with his courteous but insistent demeanour.

  He felt his head spin. He sank back into the chair and gave in to the liberating, and to some extent terrifying sensation of confessing the whole truth. “I admit that there are times when I can do more. Brief, intermittent episodes… For instance, mild capacities of teleportation. If I concentrate hard enough, I can teleport small objects. Sheets of paper. Scraps of fabric. Light objects.” He took another sip. The iced herbal tea gave relief to his constricted throat. “But I don’t see the purpose of talking about it. Like I said, they’re intermittent capacities, undeveloped and difficult to control.”

  Superman seemed to nod. “But you could train your powers. My young people…” he said, with an almost imperceptible tilt of the head towards the façade of the house, on which the sun, low in the western sky, was hurling its last dense rays, like a sniper shooting from concealment, “have powers that are not much different from your own. Unreliable, elusive, surprising powers…” For some reason, he raised his hands and fluttered them in the air, casting a long, movable, and somehow graceful shadow on the grass. “The superpowers of your generation are different from those of the old guard. And let me add that this… might be a good thing. An opportunity.”

  Bruce sighed. Whenever someone talked about generations it left him cold. The scent of the roses was still on his shirt. He drained his glass and set it down on the table.

  He wondered what time it was and guessed that it was time for him to go, but first he cleared his throat and told about the last piece of the picture. He told about the farewell notes. The ones he had sent to the superheroes. The ones he had sent to Robin, Batman, Mister Fantastic, and Mystique, the ones containing a simple farewell printed in capital letters, at the centre of desolate blank sheets of paper. The ones he had written in order to slip a farewell into their hearts, a loving and woeful goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye to those who had once filled his dreams to the brim, only to abandon those dreams and leave behind an unbearable void. He had brushed his lips over each of those notes before delivering the notes in various ways to his ex-heroes. “Even if I had warned them in a more explicit manner, I don’t think that this could have saved them. I’ve thought it over. In a certain sense, those people seemed to have reached the end of any possible path remaining to them. They were stumbling around on the edge of a cliff…”

  “And the murderer brother gave them the final push,” Superman noted.

  “I had no idea Dennis was involved. I didn’t know exactly what would happen to any of them,” Bruce said defensively, before it dawned on him that the elderly hero had spoken in a melancholy tone of jest. He noticed that Superman looked tired. “I’m sorry,” he said, standing up in a burst of disappointment at himself. “I hadn’t considered that you might find it tiring to be out here all this time, listening to me.”

  The evening grew dense around them. Scattered over the lawn, small silvery spotlights lit up in succession. A small flock of birds flew low over the grass before skyrocketing up to disappear into the now-dark sky. A woman, the same one who had brought the iced herbal tea, was coming back with a small tray. “Time for my medicine,” Superman observed.

  ”Mr. Kent…” Bruce began. His voice cracked and he realised, to his surprise, that he was choked with emotion.

  “I hope I never get… one of your farewell notes,” the old hero joked. A glint appeared in his gaze. “And I also hope that you’ll be willing to… consider this place. This training centre. Wouldn’t that be interesting, Bruce De Villa… if you were willing to join us?”

  *

  He remembered seeing them after the gallery opening in Chelsea, on the banks of the Hudson River, while the sun set on the other side of the water. He remembered thinking that his brother must have been acting as a bodyguard, and noticing a certain tension between the two of them, a tension that he would have had no problem describing as erotic, but he also knew that he hadn’t had a hint of suspicion about what his brother was going to do two days from then. He remembered looking into his brother’s reddened eyes. He remembered wanting to give Dennis a hug, and to give Mystique one too, and he remembered not having done it. They had stood there, the three of them, each searching in the eyes of the others, two brothers incapable of talking to each other and a woman with bluish skin, continuing to exchange glances as if they were lobbing a volley of unspoken questions. He remembered Mystique staring at him as if she had suddenly understood that he was the one who had sent those notes. The one who had been saying goodbye. The sun set over the river, over the banks, over the three of them in all their awkwardness.

  He replayed that scene in his head as he was walking back to Grand Army Plaza. He stopped more than once to catch his breath. He didn’t feel ill. He just felt hollowed out and vulnerable in a way he hadn’t experienced in years. Outside of the bounds of Superman’s garden, life seemed to go on unchanged. There were streets to be crossed. Hurrying pedestrians. Some guy having an argument on his cell phone. In the big plaza, there were sculptures of soldiers aboard a chariot looking down from high atop the immense arch. The bronze warriors peered into the distance, beyond the phantasmagorical skyline of the city by night.

  Bruce slipped
into the subway station and waited for the train.

  He clutched himself and went on wondering where his brother could be. He wondered where Alyson was. He hadn’t seen her since the end of the Batman murder trial. He wondered what the young people from Superman’s school were doing now that their day was over, after having meditated, after training themselves to perceive themselves, after taking lessons on how to develop their superpowers. He wondered whether Superman was still in his garden, after taking his dopamine pills, surrounded by the scent of the roses, by the glow of the silvery spotlights.

  Bruce had promised the elderly hero that he’d think his offer over. Consider whether to start superhero training. At age thirty-five? In the twenty-first century? On the subway train, he slumped back in his seat and let himself be rocked by the train’s motion. He reflected on the fact that the world… The world was reading Dr. Joseph Szepanski’s bestseller. The world was teeming with lap dance clubs populated with girls dressed as famous superheroines of the last decades. Hordes of superheroes could find nothing better to do than read the weather report on Fox News or play themselves in pretentious docudramas. It was all so cheap and perverse.

  The empire of the ridiculous was at its zenith, ruling unopposed over every corner of the planet. How could he, Bruce, subscribe to the faith held by Superman and his students?

  The train doors opened and shut various times. The passengers’ bodies rocked in unison. Bruce closed his eyes and sank into a tepid niche that was neither sleep nor wakefulness. Was he thinking or dreaming? Did it make any difference? He found himself back on the riverbank with his brother and Mystique, he found himself back in Superman’s flowering garden, and swung back and forth between those two scenes, uncertainly, following the train’s pitch and roll.