by C. T. Phipps
I hung up.
“Who was it?” Mandy asked.
“Wrong number,” I lied, shrugging.
“You really shouldn’t have done that. That sounded like spirit world static.”
“Is it a pressing issue?” I asked, mentally.
“Not now.”
“Then hold off on it,” I said. “I’m talking to my wife.”
I started dialing the Chinese restaurant.
Mandy walked a bit away from me. “Gary, is this your dream?”
“Excuse me?” I asked, looking up.
“Your dream, the thing you want most in the world.”
I was surprised at the direction the conversation was going but, I supposed, this is what I wanted, the chance to talk to Mandy about this seriously.
She walked over to the fireplace shelf. The fireplace, which we hadn’t used in our entire marriage and wasn’t even linked to a chimney, was purely a place to put pictures. Picking one up of her father, she looked at it. He was a slightly balding man wearing a blue military uniform with numerous patches indicating the various alien invasions, robot uprisings, and anti-terrorist operations he’d been involved in.
Colonel Summers hadn’t liked me.
“I had a dream too once.” Mandy said, surprising me.
I knew what my wife was referring to but I also knew she wanted to talk about this. “I take it you don’t mean your music career.”
Mandy looked down. “No.”
“You mean wanting to join the Foundation,” I said, sighing. “Like your dad.”
The Foundation for World Harmony was the institution which existed for the explicit purpose of cleaning up after the superhuman, supernatural, extraterrestrial, and ultraterrestial so a modicum of sanity might prevail in this world. Its agents were outmatched by even low-level supervillains but they did a bang-up job fighting P.H.A.N.T.O.M and the International Crime League.
Good guys.
Mandy got a little misty eyed. “Yeah.”
Her father had passed last year from congenital heart failure.
It had been rough on all of us.
“My father was never a liaison to the Society of Superheroes or even one of its members but he was always there fighting the good fight,” Mandy said. “I remember him pushing me from day one. Ballet, martial arts, gymnastics, linguistics, mathematics, criminology, gunplay, ethics, and computer programming. That was just my high school years.”
“I still think he pushed you a little too hard.”
Mandy put up the photo. “He did, and I was wound so tight, I snapped when I got to college. He’d wanted to make me into the perfect candidate for the Foundation for World Harmony or even a superhero myself.”
“Lots of parents do.”
“And lots of parents ruin their kids that way,” Mandy said, looking back. “I came to Falconcrest U wanting to be the perfect student, only to end up smoking dope and screwing everyone I liked within a week.”
“Oh, you monster,” I said, heavily sarcastic. “They should just throw the book at you.”
“You know where this leads, Gary.”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
“The Black Witch.”
Oh.
I bit my lip. “Then I guess I do know where it’s going.” We actually hadn’t discussed that part of her life in detail. I knew my wife had been involved with her and some of her gang in the past, but aside from statements about ‘bleak poetry speaking to her’ and distancing herself, I didn’t really know how close they were. “Sort of.”
Mandy looked down. “Do we really want to go here?”
I also knew it was perhaps better to leave some things buried in the past. “I think we’ve been together long enough to share everything without judgment.”
“Perhaps not without judgment.” Mandy said, looking down. “But with love? Yes. Gary, I loved Selena Darkchilde.”
“Loved?” I asked, wanting to make sure it was in the past tense. It was unfair of me since human emotions weren’t so easily shut off. If you loved someone in the past, it didn’t go away just because you wanted it to. God knows, my parents’ lives would have been simpler if they could have just disinherited Keith and me.
Mandy nodded. “Yes, loved. I was never her henchwench but I knew who she was, what she was doing, and what she planned to do. I was an accomplice because I never tried to stop her or even suggest she should.”
I blinked, staring. “Wow. So, uh, you didn’t just know about her crimes after she was finally captured by Ultragoddess.”
Mandy crossed her arms. “No. I knew her when she was just a mousy occultist before her experiments with Professor Thule made her Hecate’s champion. Which, in retrospect, yeah, with a name like that he was going to become a supervillain.”
I pointed at her. “I never liked that guy. Swastikas being harmless Asian good luck sigils, my ass.”
Mandy blinked. “I thought it was all good fun. Striking at the system, getting revenge on people who’d wronged us, and so on. I...perjured myself when I was brought to court as a witness. They found me guilty.”
I blinked. “I see.”
“I got my sentence reduced to community service because someone pulled strings. They even kept me in the program.” Mandy looked back at her father’s picture. “I had a criminal record, though, now. Worse, I’d been proven to be involved in a sexual relationship with a supervillainess. I might have gotten away with it if I was a man, but a woman? No. My father never said anything about it but I could tell I’d disappointed him in a way he never forgave.”
That was very much like the Colonel. He never stopped loving his daughter. He also never stopped judging her. I still hadn’t told Mandy about his ever so delightful conversation with me about how I should convert to Christianity so I could help her back to the righteous path.
“He sounds like a real ass,” Cloak said.
“Thanks,” I said back. “Now would you stop listening? This is private.”
“I wish I could.”
I decided I needed to convince Mandy she wasn’t the biggest fuck up in the room. “If it’s any consolation, this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to be a supervillain.”
“What?” Mandy asked, eyes widening. “You did this before without telling me?”
I went to the fridge to get a beer. “No, this was before we started dating.”
Mandy blinked. “When?”
“It was a phase in college,” I said, using words which caused Mandy’s eyes to narrow. “Not that kind of phase.”
“I dislike bisexual erasure,” Mandy said, shrugging. “What can I say? It’s a pet peeve.”
I unscrewed the beer bottle top and took a swig. “I was pretty idealistic during my Junior year. I was away from my parents and I thought I could honor Keith’s memory by taking up his mantle.”
“You became Stingray?” Mandy said, stunned. “Why didn’t I hear about this?”
I took another drink of my beer. “Because I was awful at it.”
“When has that ever stopped you before?” Mandy said, smirking.
“Ha-ha,” I said, still smiling. “I decided I would take up the environmental cause of the oceans versus, you know, robbing banks and stuff.”
“The oceans?” Mandy said.
I gestured with my half-empty beer bottle in hand. “Words cannot express what terrible horrors mankind has unleashed on the sentient porpoises, Atlanteans, Lemurians, Merrow, and transmigrated Space Whales.”
“I had sex with a Merrow once,” Mandy said. “It turns out the whole fish tail thing is a myth. Not that we needed that part. She was great in a hot tub.”
I stared at her.
A minute passed.
“Gary,” Mandy snapped her fingers.
“Hmm?” I said, finishing off my beer. “Sorry.”
“Must you make that joke every time I mention my sex life?”
“Do you have any people not ridiculously hot you’ve dated other than me?”
Mandy paused. “...no?”
“Then joke I will continue to make,” I said. “Anyway, I defaced corporate property. I got help from the computer department and whistleblowers to hack corporate records and expose the truth. I also sabotaged some Omega Corp dolphin nets during trips with my girlfriend at the time and her father.”
“That sounds less like supervillainy and more like social activism,” Mandy said.
“Yeah,” I said, throwing away the bottle in the trash bin. “So I decided to blow up Omega Chemicals.”
Mandy stared at me. “Goddess.”
I stared at her. “That may be a bit dramatic. I was going to set a bomb to blow up their pumping station on the weekend after hours and expose they’d been leaking stuff into our groundwater for decades, causing gross mental illness and homicidal rages.”
They’d settled the lawsuit last week.
Still in business.
Mandy said, “That’s still terrorism.”
“Maybe,” I said, sighing. “In the end, I couldn’t go through with it. A bomb wasn’t my style. I might have been willing to go up to the CEO’s office, put a bunch of pictures of dead children on his desk, and shoot him in the face but I wasn’t going to risk bystanders. What if my Anarchist’s Cookbook Revised-made bomb was found and someone died? No. After it happened, Gabrielle talked to me, and I agreed to hang up my wetsuit for good.” I stared down at my outfit. “Until opportunity knocked. I owed her a lot for persuading me—but this feels different. It feels right.”
Or maybe I was just a helluva lot angrier than I was back then.
And more sick of the system.
“Gabrielle Anders? She was your other girlfriend, right? The one aside from Cindy, I mean.” Mandy always hesitated to bring her up, for much the same reason I didn’t like bringing up Selena.
I tried to play it off. “I’ve had tons of girlfriends, Mandy. I mean aside from you three I can name off like thirty I’ve slep...” I noticed her stare. “Sle...Sl...okay I can’t think of a good word I can substitute. Yeah, Gabby was my only other serious girlfriend.”
Despite the fact I was an enormous nerd, I’d had a significant advantage over my socially challenged kin in both high school and college. A secret I had exploited to its fullest extent in dating: I treated women as human beings who probably wanted fun dates or satisfying sex as much as I did. It had worked staggeringly well until I’d met Gabrielle. As much fun as Cindy and I had on a regular basis, the two of us had always been more partners in crime than anything else. Well, literally so, now. Gabrielle had been different. My usual charms had worked like a spoon on a steak, leading me to become entirely focused on winning her over.
She’d worked as a reporter for the college newspaper and was more focused on her studies than anything else. I would have written her off as uninterested in dating and moved on if not for the fact we’d bonded over our shared love of superhuman battles as well as criminology. She’d always gotten the best shots of Ultragoddess pounding the Black Witch and her monsters. Which was amazing because she always seemed to disappear when those battles were happening on campus.
Probably getting the best shots she could.
“Oh for Chrissakes,” Cloak muttered.
“What?” I asked.
“Nevermind,” Cloak grumbled.
In the end, Gabrielle and I had fallen in love. It was the one secret I kept from my wife, as I did my best to pass off my relationship with her as over and done with. Which it was, but not emotionally. We’d gotten into all manner of wacky hijinks together, checked out all manner of strange leads, and even talked about moving to Atlas City together after graduation. Then she’d started disappearing for longer and longer periods, coming home with injuries she wouldn’t explain, and flat out lying to me. Even living together for six months didn’t bring us closer together. After the Cackler had kidnapped me out of some perverse belief I was related to Ultragoddess, she’d broken it off with me. I still had a fuzzy memory of her telling me something but every time I tried to recall it, it slipped away. I also felt like something was keeping me from reaching some sort of obvious conclusion.
“Ultra-Mesmerism,” Cloak said.
“What?” I said asked, immediately forgetting what he said. “What was I asking about?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“We met at one of my concert’s after-parties a week after you broke up, as I recall,” Mandy said. “You were hitting on two of my exes and I’d heard you were a good lay. Strange how it managed to blossom into what it did.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking down. “Amazing how the brother of Stingray and girlfriend of the Black Witch ended up getting together at the same college.”
“Eh, not really. Falconcrest City University has the best unusual criminology department in the country and doesn’t discriminate on past associations or records. There were, like, seventy active superheroes and villains on campus while we were attending, according to my father.”
I stared at her. “Huh. That explains so much.” Like, why I was rejected for every college I applied to but Falconcrest U.
“Do you regret where your life ended up?” Mandy asked. “That you’re the brother of Stingray and not Merciless ten years earlier?”
I looked at her. “Are you asking me if I regret marrying you?”
Mandy looked away. “If the shoe fits.”
“Merciful Moses, no!” I said, staring at her. “God, no!”
“Then what are you saying?”
I looked at her. “Life has a way of going in directions we don’t expect. I didn’t like being kicked out of the Unusual Criminology program for getting kidnapped and missing finals. I didn’t like trying and failing to get a teaching position anywhere decent for five years. I didn’t like being forced to work at that damned bank while they cheated every single customer and hid money from the government. I may be a supervillain but that’s just wrong. But you? You, Mandy? I regret nothing about our relationship. I would have gone insane without you.”
Mandy looked at me.
I looked back.
“We’re going to pretend you’re not clearly insane, okay?” Mandy said.
I smiled. “For tonight at least.”
“I’ll support you in pursuing your dream,” Mandy said, sighing. “Maybe it’s time we both revisited the ways our life has gone off track—and how they’ve succeeded.”
“I never had any doubt.” I kissed my wife passionately and the two of us began taking each other’s clothes off.
It was a good night.
It would be the last for a while.
Chapter Seven
Bad Dreams and Memories
.
The next hour was beautiful.
Exhausted, my wife and I fell asleep afterward, only for dreams to take me. I was a frequent sufferer of nightmares due to past events of my life. For all the fact I didn’t have any sense of guilt for killing the Ice Cream Man or the Typewriter, I still saw their dead faces and other people’s in my dreams.
My brother Keith.
Shoot-Em-Up.
Gabrielle.
My parents.
Mandy.
The dream coalesced out of the random imagery into a memory. It was a memory I’d revisited several hundred times over the past two decades. A memory which had continually repeated itself and wormed its way into my mind. It was one which haunted me, shaped me, and controlled me. It was an inescapable memory which defined the way I chose to live my life to this day.
It was the day my brother died.
The weather was hot in New Angeles, a heat wave having hit the city not long after the recent Atlantean invasion. It was incredibly humid and the majority of the citizens were staying indoors until it passed. The Silver Lightning, Aquarius, and the rest of the city’s superheroes were cooperating with the Foundation’s Eco-Warriors in the clean-up but it wasn’t going fast enough for most of our tastes.
I was lying on the couch wearing jean shorts and a t-shirt show
ing the words ‘Superhumans Unite’ around a D.N.A helix held by a fist. Half my head was shaved; the other dyed purple. I had two gold piercings in my ear and was wearing a pair of shades indoors. I was fourteen and quite the little hell-raiser. I was presently flipping through a copy of Tights, which had a nude pictorial of the newest Larceny Lass. I’d found it an excellent palette cleanser after finishing Anarchism in a Post-Human World by Emanuelle Goldenstein (pseudonym) and The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu.
The room had seen better days, with my family having to move into a worse house after Papa Karkofsky got fired from his job for having a supervillain son. Joel Karkofsky was currently watching Foxhound News from his easy chair and complaining about every little thing he thought I might be listening to as well as plenty he didn’t.
He was an overweight man in his late-forties wearing a button-down shirt and dress pants. Joel was missing his right eye and wore an eye-patch over it at home since we couldn’t afford a decent cybernetic replacement since being dropped by our insurance provider. The wall had a framed picture of his medals from Vietnam II, showing how he’d lost it. I mentally vowed that when I became a supervillain, I wouldn’t ever do any work for P.H.A.N.T.O.M after what they did to my dad.
“This is all that damned abominable new President’s fault,” Joel muttered, pointing at the television. “We never should have elected one of them.”
“Dad, don’t be racist,” I didn’t bother looking from my magazine.
My dad pointed back at me. “It’s not racist if he’s a robot. We should have elected Clinton.”
“Android John was made in America, he can be President,” Keith said, talking from the kitchen. “Besides, the economy has never been better.”
“Not that we’re seeing it,” Joel said, over to the kitchen. “Also, you can’t tell me you approve of humans marrying robots.”
I looked up. “Ultramind II is pretty damned hot in her digital avatar.”
“And about as touchable as your pornography,” Joel said, shaking his head. “Don’t tell your mother I said that.”