Fresh Ink: An Anthology

by Fresh Ink An Anthology (v5. 0) (azw3)

  Catch, pull, drive. Five.

  Catch, pull…but the confidence is quickly draining as I realize I have mere seconds until the race is over. My lungs are demanding air and I feel fatigue seep through me.

  There’s no point, the darkness says.

  NO! something deep inside screams. NO!

  Looking ahead, I recalculate. I must take an extra stroke if I’m going to have any chance.

  But GIVE UP pulses in my chest. NO, my mind refuses again. Not for Roman, not for Coach, not for anyone. This is for me.

  Drive. Six.

  Catch, pull—

  Parker’s hands are outstretched, about to touch the wall. I gather all the remaining strength I have to give the hardest kick. Drive.

  When my head breaks the surface, there is no cheering. I hear only the sounds of us gasping for air. We both turn to look up at Coach, standing in between the blocks with the stopwatch.

  Even Roman is silent.

  “Tommy, 1:05.8, Parker, 1:05.9—” And I feel everything inside me explode. I can’t hold back my grin. Parker sticks out his hand and says, “Good job, Tommy,” with a small smile. I take his hand and grin back.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the locker room, Roman and his friends are already ragging on Parker. “You really are a pussy, letting her beat you.” The disrespect stings, but I’m madder that this is hurting Parker. He cowers, trying to wash off the soap they keep throwing at him.

  I watch as he eventually gives up and starts to put his clothes on.

  “Are you a fag, too?” they taunt.

  “Shut up, Roman,” I hear Parker say through the shirt he’s pulling over his head. I have to close my own jaw-dropped mouth this time. In the year that I’ve been on this team, I’ve never heard Parker respond to any of Roman’s jeers. What is he doing?!

  “SHUT. UP.” His head has popped through his shirt and his voice doesn’t waver. “Shut up, shut up, SHUT. UP,” he says again.

  Roman is clearly caught off guard. He’s speechless, sporting an astonished look that I’ve only seen in movies. One of Roman’s minions gasps audibly and they all peer at him, then back at Parker. Frantic fury replaces Roman’s surprise and he finds his voice: “What—what did you say to me?”

  “Tommy won. I raced him the best I could. Shut up. Leave me the fuck alone.” Parker’s found courage. I find myself standing up, too.

  Roman stutters and strings together nonsensical insults, ending with a final “Faggot.”

  “You’ve used that word so many times today,” I hear myself say. “Do you know any others?”

  What am I doing? Am I out of my mind? Roman whips around, his in-need-of-a-haircut hair falling into his eyes and his “I lift really heavy weights, bro” shoulders hulked forward as if bracing for a fight.

  “You don’t have much of a vocabulary,” I tell him. His eyes flicker with uncertainty.

  “You don’t have much of a penis,” he finally says.

  “I don’t need one to be me. I’m doing just fine without one, thanks.”

  Parker’s finished getting dressed and I catch him motioning from behind Roman. It’s time to go.

  “Yeah? Well, next time we’ll see how you race against me—”

  Parker cuts off Roman’s comeback. “Sure, Roman. See ya tomorrow.”

  Together, we walk out the door.

  It’s when X, the world’s one and only superhero, starts to pull off his mask that Syrita realizes that they are all going to die anyway.

  It’s kind of a relief, really.

  Her task to save humanity from destruction is impossible. Everyone knows that. But if X has already made up his mind, then it doesn’t matter what she says.

  Syrita watches as his gloved fingers hook into the seam of his mask, readying to pull it over his head. The skin of his neck, and then his Adam’s apple, comes into view.

  “Stop!” she screams, before she can think better of it. Before she can think better of ordering a superhero intent on annihilation to stop doing just exactly as he pleases.

  To her surprise, he does stop. His fingers uncurl from beneath the flap of his mask. He tilts his chin up and smooths his hand down his neck. It’s a gentle gesture. A pensive one. In that moment, Syrita knows that it’s a gesture he repeats often. A part of his ritual for becoming X.

  Maybe he puts on black and gray camouflage pants. Next, black athletic socks and black Converse high-top sneakers. After that, a close-fitting, long-sleeved black T-shirt with a big white X painted in the center. Black motorcycle gloves are next, until, finally, he gets to the mask.

  For this part, he stands in front of a mirror. He gathers both sides of the mask into an accordion fold, raises it to his shaved head, and pulls it down over his face. He does it a little roughly and all in one breath. Afterward, he stands there in front of the mirror, taking a few seconds to adjust. To become. The last thing he does is smooth his hand down his neck.

  Watching him now, Syrita wonders if he’s making that gesture for the last time. Her fear is evident on her face.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he says. Which is ridiculous, because that is the whole point of her being here.

  He is going to hurt everyone.

  * * *

  • • •

  Three days ago, X had broadcast his message on all media simultaneously. No one knew how he accomplished that. No one knew how he did anything. In part, the message was as follows:

  I no longer believe in humanity. I would see it destroyed. Send someone to convince me otherwise.

  After conferring with his counterparts around the world, the president of the United States had called. Syrita was the one they’d chosen. She didn’t know what went into the decision-making process—just that the decision had been made. The president had spoken to her for a long time. X had given them three days to pick someone, but they’d come to a decision early so she’d have time to formulate a plan. Save for her mother, no one else was to know that she was the chosen one.

  “Why me?” she’d asked him. “Why choose a seventeen-year-old girl? Why not choose a philosopher or a scientist or a religious leader?”

  “Because you were the first,” the president answered, before the line disconnected.

  He meant that Syrita was the first person X had saved the day he introduced himself to the world.

  It was two years ago, during one of those car chases that Los Angeles is famous for, and most of what she remembers about X saving her is actually from news footage, in the way that video solidified one’s own memories. She was crossing Wilshire Boulevard right in front of the county museum. Through her headphones, she heard helicopters overhead, but that was normal for LA.

  Like everyone always said, the accident seemed to happen in slow motion. There was a sound—wheels slipping too fast across asphalt. A smell that reminded her of being a kid and lighting balloons on fire in her backyard. Who could be burning balloons in the middle of the day in the middle of a street? The black Chevy pickup was half a block from her when the police sirens penetrated her music. Finally, she understood what was happening: she was going to die.

  But then something lifted her straight up into the air. Not just a few feet, but thirty or forty. She was so high that the truck that was going to kill her seemed small and harmless. She didn’t have time to scream or panic. Was she dead? Was this how people actually got to heaven? They shot straight up as if they were on some sort of express elevator? But then she realized she was in someone’s arms. He was wearing a mask and his eyes were black and kind and surprised. She remembers thinking how weird it was that he was surprised, because he was the one doing the flying.

  After a while he stopped their ascent and they’d hovered in the air for a while. “You okay?” he asked.

  How did you even answer a question like that when you’re def
ying physics a few hundred feet in the air?

  Still, she wasn’t dead. “Yes, thank you,” she said.

  He flew them down to the ground, but not horizontally like Superman did with Lois Lane in the comics. Instead, they went down vertically as he held her in kind of a hug. After they landed, he flew off to stop the truck by melting the engine and the door handles with his laser eyes. And then he flew away.

  After that, the entire world went wild.

  At first, people thought it was a meticulous and elaborate hoax, but the sheer volume of cell phone video and pictures persuaded the world otherwise. There was footage of him saving her everywhere.

  The Los Angeles Times headline the day after he saved her read: BLACK SUPERMAN SAVES GIRL. The American news outlets kept focusing on the section of skin around his eyes that you could see through the mask. He was definitely black, they said. One pundit on CNN called him African American, until another pundit pointed out that he was a superhero like Superman and was probably from another planet and therefore not human, never mind African or American. Some pundits called him post-racial. Others talked about race as a social construct, and how interesting it was that it would take a superhero with brown skin to bring that point home to white Americans. Other countries ignored the race discussion entirely, calling them inane. WHY ARE AMERICANS SO OBSESSED WITH RACE? asked a Guardian headline.

  Syrita remembers thinking: Isn’t everyone?

  In the aftermath, Syrita did interviews for weeks with every media outlet, until her mother put a stop to it. She spent hour after hour being interviewed by military types. The frenzy about him never abated: Who was he? What was he? Where did he come from? Was he a he? Should we be afraid?

  A few months after he saved Syrita, X sent a note to the Los Angeles Times telling them that his name was not Superman. It was X. He said nothing about his race.

  In the two years since, he became the superhero everyone expected. He saved people and property across the globe. He never failed. He was like Superman in every way: noble, with superstrength, superspeed, and the power of flight.

  But then, just recently, everything changed.

  At first it was nothing: X didn’t show up to a particularly devastating apartment building fire downtown. Maybe he was on vacation. Did superheroes take vacation? Maybe he had business on his home planet. Maybe he just missed this one. A week later, he didn’t rescue passengers on an Amtrak train derailment. After that he wasn’t there to stop a mass shooting on a college campus.

  Then came the broadcast.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Why can’t I take my mask off?” X asks her now.

  She’s sitting across from him at his small dining table in his small apartment.

  “You can do anything you want,” she says, as if he needed reminding. Despite her best effort, her voice trembles. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t let him see her fear.

  Beneath his mask, his mouth twists. Do superheroes smirk?

  Of course he knows she’s afraid. He has super senses. Probably he can hear the too-fast rush of her blood pushed along by her too-loud beating heart. Probably he can smell her adrenaline and all the subtle changes in her body that say she’s afraid. Probably he knows all the signs of human fear.

  “You supposed to convince me,” he prompts, leaning back in his chair, arms folded across his chest.

  She pulls her shaking hands off the table and clasps them in her lap. Did he really want to be convinced that humanity was worth saving or was this just a game? And if it was a game, then why? Was he bored with being all-powerful?

  “You live here?” she asks.

  “Expecting something different?”

  What had she been expecting from a superhero’s lair? Something more like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Something filled with clear glass crystals and alien technology so impossibly advanced she had no hope of deciphering it. She wasn’t expecting this dark, cramped space, overflowing with books and comics. She wasn’t expecting the clutter, every surface covered in knickknacks—action figures, Matchbox cars, and Lego pieces. It vaguely reminded her of her younger brother’s room.

  When she first Googled the address he sent, she’d been surprised at the neighborhood. It was the Crenshaw section of Los Angeles—the kind of neighborhood that white people and rich black people like her mother thought of as dangerous but wasn’t.

  Through her tears, her mother had asked: “What kind of place is he making you go to?” She hadn’t called it a ghetto, but she wanted to. People had strange ways of coping with stress, Syrita reminded herself.

  If humanity survived and historians ever got a chance to write about this period in time, they would divide the era into Before X and After X. That’s how Syrita felt about herself too. There was the Syrita she’d been before she was almost killed—rich, frivolous, untouchable. And the Syrita she’d become after, was still becoming, really. Still rich, but a little less frivolous. The new Syrita volunteered at a soup kitchen near skid row every month over her mother’s objections. The new Syrita said: “It’s not a crime to be poor, Mom.”

  Her mother hadn’t responded, just went back to crying.

  As per X’s instructions, she shared his address with no one else and drove herself over. The drive from her Beverly Hills address to his was like going to another country. The houses got smaller and smaller until they were replaced by cheaply built apartments. Boutique storefronts with designer everything became check-cashing and water-supply places. Cars changed from model-year Mercedes and BMWs to ancient-looking Toyotas and Fords. More people were on the streets—walking or else waiting for buses. Most everyone was black or Mexican. It was the kind of neighborhood that Syrita often drove through on her way to someplace else.

  Now, X makes a show of checking out her clothes. “You rich?” he asks.

  Syrita frowns. No one has ever asked her that before. Why would they? Almost everyone she knows is rich too.

  She shrugs.

  Beneath the mask his mouth twists again, but she doesn’t think it’s a smirk this time.

  “Can you tell me why?”

  “Why what? Why I want to kill all you people?”

  Sometimes, from watching his hero-ing on TV, it was possible to convince yourself that he was human. He looked the part. A human being with some extra bells and whistles. Sometimes, though, his voice would do this thing—double in on itself like it was its own echo—and you remembered. It was too other to be human.

  That’s what his voice was doing now and Syrita couldn’t find her own, so she just nodded.

  “You really need me to tell you all the ways human beings are shit?”

  “You liked us once. You saved us. What changed?”

  He has no answer for that, or if he does, he doesn’t want to give it. “Why they choose you to talk to me?” he asks.

  “I’m the first person you ever saved.”

  “That was you?” He narrows his eyes at her and searches her face. “Yeah, yeah,” he says after a moment, recognition in his eyes. “In front of the museum, right?” Syrita nods and he continues,“I thought it was ’cause you’re black too.” He puts air quotes around the black. All at once, he seems defiant and tired.

  “But you’re not black,” she says, remembering the articles from the days after he’d rescued her.

  He waves her off as if she’d said something, if not stupid, then definitely naive.

  This is not how she thought this would go. Why are they talking about race instead of him ending the world?

  She shakes her head and insists, “I’m the first person you saved. I think I’m supposed to remind you of your humanity.”

  “But I have no humanity. I’m an alien. Like Superman. You didn’t hear?” He makes a noise like a laugh, but it is devoid of joy.

  And now Syrita knows th
at X’s desire to destroy the world isn’t rooted in some existential crisis. Something happened. Something specific.

  She pulls her hands from her lap, places them on the table and leans in. “What happened?”

  He shrugs. “I got shot,” he says.

  It’s an answer, but not an explanation. X gets shot all the time. There’s endless hours of coverage of it. He’s in the middle of every fight. Gang shootings. Robberies. Terrorist attacks. The bad guys always shoot at him even though they know he is impervious to bullets. Bullets penetrate his costume but never make it past his skin.

  “I don’t understand,” she says.

  “By a cop.”

  “But why would a cop shoot you?” He is an honorary member of every police force in the country.

  He leans forward. His gloved hands are close to hers. Syrita resists the urge to pull away despite her fear.

  “I wasn’t X when it happened. I was just me.”

  It takes her a second to figure out what he’s saying. He wasn’t in his costume. He got shot by the cops for being black on a street.

  Syrita doesn’t know what to say to that. Television images of protestors marching through the streets of one city or another rise in her mind. They’re holding signs that say HANDS UP. DON’T SHOOT. Cops are holding riot shields and batons. It’s almost always night. She hears the chatter of news anchors and lawyers and police procedure experts and community advocates all talking at once.

  It’s not that she ignores these incidents when they happen. It’s just that she finds them hard to watch. She doesn’t want to know the names of the dead. It’s better for her if the details are left vague and the facts are left fuzzy. Because if cops are just killing black men without cause, then how can we all be okay with that? How can she live in a world like that without hating everything and everyone, including herself, for their inaction?

  She looks down at her clasped hands. Should she open them? Should she take his hands in hers as a way of offering comfort?