The Midlife Crisis of Commander Invincible: A Novel (Yellow Shoe Fiction)

by Neil Connelly

  I make the choice not to engage this argument till later and take Nate’s hand. The winds up here are biting and still strong. We walk to the door, and I punch the code into the keypad. But when I grab the knob and twist, it doesn’t budge. I try it a second time, then a third, before looking around in exasperation and seeing a similar building just two blocks to our east. I may have landed on the wrong roof, or my scrambled brain has lost the correct combination. Either way, I’ve screwed up. Thomas is three feet behind me. With one hand I grip the knob, and with the other I point into the clouds at the perfect O shape of the HALO floating above. “See how far we came,” I say. When my sons glance up, I gently tug the door, popping the lock. I’m impressed that I kept the damn thing on its hinges, but Thomas clearly heard. As he and Nate step through, his fingers brush across the fractured housing. “Nice,” he says. “We gonna have to fight our way through security guards now?”

  I concentrate and indeed hear a subsonic alarm in the distance, perhaps several floors below. But when no one comes bursting into the hallway to prevent us from boarding the elevator, I decide it’s just ringing in my ears.

  Thankfully, the building’s front door isn’t locked, and we step out onto the sidewalk like normal people. “Stay close,” I tell Nate, though he’s holding Thomas’s hand and the streets are far from crowded. Sunday morning. Folks are hung over or at church. I step off the curb and lift an arm at an approaching taxi.

  “What are you doing?” Thomas asks. “It’s like three blocks.”

  “Change in plans,” I say.

  “We’re not going to the museum?” Nate says.

  “Maybe later,” I say. “First, Daddy has a surprise. It’s a better place.”

  “Better than a museum?” Nate asks Thomas. “Does it have dinosaur bones?”

  The cab pulls up, and I open the back door. “Way better,” I say. “Bones are dead. Climb in.”

  I could fit in the back, but instead I ride shotgun. The cabbie is a heavyset woman with olive skin and unruly eyebrows. She gives me a look, asking why I invaded her space instead of sitting with my kids. “Metro zoo,” I tell her.

  “The zoo?” Thomas says. “I think Nate would really rather go to the museum.”

  Nate looks out the window, but he’s smiling, I’m sure of it. He’s absolutely smiling.

  “After lunch maybe,” I say. “This is my birthday present. You loved the zoo when you were a kid. On a chilly day like today, we’ll have it to ourselves. Plus, there’s a new butterfly exhibit I read about it. It sounds great. Nate, don’t you like butterflies?”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, and his enthusiasm is not entirely manufactured. He says to Thomas, “Butterflies come from caterpillars. They go through a metamorphosis.”

  “That’s right,” Thomas says. He points out his window. “Look at that guy’s beard. Birds could be living in there.”

  My sons quickly fall into an easy chatter, and I relax. All morning they’ve been inseparable, laughing at dumb jokes, wrestling like puppies, working as a team to annoy me or Debbie or Sheila. Thomas showed Nate a crawlspace behind the levitation generator where he used to make forts. It did me good to see them playing, and though I’m not a part of the laughter they share in the taxi’s backseat, it lifts my spirit. I only feel a little dirty for not telling Thomas the whole truth, that I’ve got a separate agenda for this trip to the zoo.

  So far today, not much has gone according to plan. Thanks to a sleepless evening—Nate came upstairs with Debbie and spent the night tumbling between us on that narrow mattress—we had a late start from the Sullivans’. But I drove the hovercar on the way home, and I floored it a bit, as much as Deb would allow. Even so, by the time we landed, Ecklar had already returned with Sheila and Thomas. We found them down in Ecklar’s quarters, picking at a brunch he’d set up: fresh strawberries, melons, cheese, and mimosas. The boys disappeared into Ecklar’s lab, and Debbie and Sheila, as always, acted like long-lost sisters. They hugged and laughed, and Debbie started in trying to convince Sheila to give up her day of research and go shopping in town. I feel nervous when they are alone together, like somehow they’ll compare notes about me and realize that, hey, they both agree I’m kind of lacking certain essential qualities.

  Ecklar took orders for omelets from the ladies. I followed him into the kitchen because it seemed everyone was breaking into twosomes and I didn’t want to be the last man standing. Ecklar started beating eggs and said, “You had an interesting call from Arthur last night.”

  On the couch, Sheila and Debbie stopped talking and turned to listen.

  I said, “Let me guess. I’m banned for life from Titanland?”

  “No. He said to tell you he’s in.”

  Debbie stood up. “Wonderful.”

  Sheila stayed in her seat and cocked her reporter’s eyebrow. “What exactly is Arthur in on?”

  Debbie outlined All-Star’s plan about Bone Crusher, how Titan might come out of retirement to help me enter it. Sheila kept her eyes on me. She seemed skeptical, but in the end she still congratulated me. “You’ll tell Thomas about this?”

  I nodded, and there was a loud crash from the lab. “Anything back there they can break?”

  “Plenty,” Ecklar said. “But nothing I can’t repair.”

  “The end of the original Guardians,” Sheila said, and I realized Ecklar had told her about his impending departure on the ride out. “That’s a big story.”

  “Clyde is hoping for front page,” Ecklar said. “With any luck, Bone Crusher will put up a fight.”

  “We can hope,” Debbie said. “Though he doesn’t look real feisty.” So she knew where Crusher is hiding—a fact no one had yet shared with me. With this realization, my face snapped to my wife’s, but thankfully she didn’t notice. I dropped my gaze and felt another surge of guilt: If I’m going to make this work, I’ll need to exploit her knowledge, one way or another.

  Ecklar went back to work on the eggs, beating them with more ferocity than the task required. I wondered about that phone call my friend had with Arthur.

  “I’m not sure how Thomas will take this,” I said, to no one in particular.

  “I’ll tell him if you want,” Sheila said. “You don’t give him enough credit.”

  Ecklar stopped scrambling. “Indeed,” he said, and he turned those big black eyes up at me.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that the boy cares for you, and you should tell him everything now. The whole story, the entire truth. It’s wrong not to be honest with people who care for you, Vincent.”

  From the sarcastic tone, it was clear I’d guessed right. Arthur had filled Ecklar in on my plans for King Chaos. I’d wounded my alien comrade’s pride, only days before he leaves my world forever. I wanted to apologize, explain that I had every intention of telling him, that indeed I will need his help too. But with Sheila and Debbie watching, all I could say was, “No argument from me. You’re right.”

  He nodded, and I nodded back, and those big eyes blinked, and his lipless green mouth formed its tiny smile.

  When we take on King Chaos, raw power won’t be enough. Our last encounter in Hamburg proved that. The weapons array in Ecklar’s battle suit will no doubt come in handy. But I’m assuming Chaos has kept tabs on us, which means he’ll be anticipating Ecklar. So, from a strategic standpoint, I knew victory might depend on another element of surprise. It was this need, and a sense of obligation, that led me to bring my boys to the zoo for my birthday.

  After the taxi drops us off, my sons and I work our way through the turnstile opening, and I try to come up with a game plan. People mill around us—other families renting strollers, couples holding hands, and two dozen wheelchaired old folks, each pushed by a teenager with a red hat—but it’s far from crowded. Thomas gets upset when I unfold the map and begin plotting the most efficient route. He hoists his half-brother onto his shoulder and glances up. “Yo, Nate,” he says. “Which way?”

  Nate, who stud
ies the crisscrossing arrow signs, seems fixed on a simple image of a train, but finally points toward emus and ostriches.

  “Perfect,” Thomas declares and marches off without checking for my approval. And I feel a bit like a stalker, really, hands in my pockets, pursuing my two sons. I’d never leave them alone in a public place, knowing what I know about the world and human nature, but I stay ten feet behind, not wanting to spoil their bonding. As we’re plodding along, Thomas laughs loudly and looks back at me, shakes his head in disbelief. I wonder if his brother is telling him about the other night.

  In this loose group we move quickly from one exhibit to the next. The ostriches and emus strut slowly around the perimeter of their cyclonefenced pens. The rhino sits, unmoving, his horn aimed at the back wall of its faux-rocky enclosure. I clap my hands to get its attention, but it’s probably asleep. Plus, it’s the only animal in there, so it couldn’t be Huan. In the next pen, a lone camel curls in on itself beneath a tiny shed, chewing its tail. I make eye contact and wish I were telepathic. I realize I’m doing things in the wrong order. I should’ve tracked down Gypsy first and brought her along to help.

  We find ourselves on an elevated viewing platform, scanning an empty enclosure below us in search of something called an “okapi.”

  “Maybe okapis can turn invisible,” I say.

  Neither boy laughs. Thomas studies a drawing on the sign. “Maybe it escaped, tried to get back to Africa where it belongs.”

  Holding his brother’s head, Nate asks, “Are the animals happy?”

  “They have it made,” I say. “Out in the wild, they’d have to hunt for food, and they’d be in constant danger from predators. This is like a vacation for them.”

  “Not all animals have predators,” Thomas says. “What hunts a camel? I’ll bet every one of these suckers would rather be back where it came from.”

  “Something must hunt a camel,” I offer. “Otherwise, they’d overrun the desert. That’s how evolution works.”

  Thomas shrugs. “Maybe when you learned it.”

  Nate wiggles, and Thomas lowers him to the ground, where he bends to pick up a coin. He walks down the ramp, against the flow of a small parade of old folks. I want to tell them the okapi’s a no-show.

  We follow Nate to a fountain, where he contemplates tossing the coin. Thomas crosses his arms, and I say, “Can we please just have fun today? I’ll send a check to PETA when we’re through.”

  Now Thomas rolls his eyes, a move he inherited from his mother. Nate points his hand at a sign and says, “Hey! Big Cats!”

  I ask Nate if he wants to ride on my shoulders, but instead he just grabs my hand and starts walking. Up that ramp on the observation platform, the rest homers and their teenage escorts point and smile. We must have missed something in that pen.

  We cross a small wooden bridge spanning stagnant water and pass beneath an arched sign that reads cat town. Just inside, the panther paces behind bars, glaring. On the other side of a twenty-foot concrete pit, a sleeping tiger grips a white plastic bucket between its massive paws. It reminds me of the way Thomas clung to his stuffed panda bear, a nostalgic connection I know better than to share with him. For the lions they’ve built a savannah the size of two basketball courts. Rocks surround a wading pool, and a real tree spreads its branches, providing cover. But instead of playing in their water, which has got to be close to freezing, or hiding in the tree, or even taking their royal position atop the rock mountain, both animals lie placidly by the see-through wall. The lioness is collapsed on her side, a few gnats congregating in the crusty corners of her closed eye. The male sits nearby, looking away from her as if he can’t bear another minute of seeing his wife like this. His mane is flat and tangled. A brown growth the size of a lime sprouts from one of his paws.

  I wonder where he came from and pray it was a circus, or that he was saved from a barbaric roadside attraction in Nevada, something. I don’t want to acknowledge the truth, that deep in his memory are images of open plains, the blackness of night, the sweet comfort of tall grass, the whiff of a gazelle lifting on the breeze. I have no doubt that the beast before me is grateful for the food he receives every day, that he eats greedily to sustain his body. But I also don’t doubt what Thomas said earlier, that even if it meant his life, he would return to Africa for one more hunt.

  “Why’s the tiger so sleepy?” a little girl asks. I turn to find her between my two sons. She has a ponytail and glasses. A man says, “Gwen, that’s not a tiger.”

  He and I share a look, both of us clearly understanding the other’s predicament. We are dads without custody, trying to be good fathers by doing a fatherly act.

  On Earth 1.5, I had no children. I lived alone in a studio apartment on the lower south side of Kingdom Town. My mediocre career as a superhero had been replaced with a mediocre career as a pitchman. My image was plastered on billboards in Center Circle, hawking shaving cream, light beer. I followed myself into Big Shanghai, where I paid an anonymous hooker to put on a cape and invite me into her bed.

  Nate tells Gwen, “It’s a lion.”

  The king of the jungle yawns and struggles to his feet. As he moves away, he favors that bad paw, limping just a bit. Thomas slides next to me and gets ready to unleash the wiseass remark I know he’s working on. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s check out those butterflies.”

  In the darkened chambers of the insectarium, Nate and Thomas scurry from dung beetle to dragonfly to water strider. Since we’re in a building, I let them wander together out of my eyesight. I begin to doubt that I’ll have any success today. I’m not even sure Huan’s still here, and if she is, she probably doesn’t want to be found. She could be a Brazilian Leaping Spider, in the case right before me, or one of the dozen monkeys we passed, or a squirrel harassing passersby in the food court. Of all the original Guardians, Huan was probably the most powerful, though she never played it that way. Here was a woman who could turn into a mosquito, buzz up to an enemy, and—poof—transform into a Tyrannosaurus rex. She wasn’t gung ho like the rest of us, not flashy or showy. She always had an air of restraint about her, even of embarrassment about her powers. Not that she wasn’t friendly, but she rarely laughed at Sparkplug’s corny jokes, and after a successful mission, while we held press conferences and celebrations, she’d disappear to her room. Gypsy was erratic—would party like crazy, then have bouts of crushing depression. But Huan, she just idled at a different speed. Her belief that we were doing good was an article of faith for her, a matter of serious conviction.

  Huan’s metamorphoses, she told me, were always painful. At first I took this to mean physically agonizing—capes are wired to think this way, to translate the spiritual into the bodily so that we can do something about it—but over the years I came to realize that her pain was twofold. In part this was because Huan’s powers derived from a kind of superempathy. She literally felt her way into the skin of whatever she became. And after a while in any form, her humanity receded, and she became tortured by the instinctual urges that took hold. She was awed by their intensity. One time we were tracking Mr. Squid and Aquarius in the northern Pacific, off the coast of Washington. Huan transformed into a right whale, just to send out some sonar. When she finally returned—six days later—she couldn’t stop talking about the irresistible pull of migration. “I nearly forgot who I was,” she told me, and I could see it clearly, the gleam of regret in her green eyes.

  Over time she began to spend more and more of her days as something other than human. “It’s like being in a dream,” she told me once toward the end. “Do you have any idea how fast a hummingbird thinks?”

  Huan didn’t so much retire as retreat. She’d had it with the human race and chosen the animal kingdom. After Titan bailed out and before the cops forced us to butt out of their affairs, there were a couple years when mostly what we did was track down ordinary criminals. With our supercomputers, superstrength, and superspeed—and without the restrictions placed on traditional law enforcement—w
e tracked murderers, exposed corrupt politicians, burned meth labs in the fields of Kansas, broke up a kiddie porn ring outside Detroit. As glorified heroes, we’d spent years seeing mankind as mostly grateful fans, and distance from them allowed us to believe in our own mythology. Dealing with everyday crimes helped us realize how little good we really did. Huan, the only daughter of Chinese dissidents who defected during the Cold War, had always been a devout believer in our cause. She fell hardest. Responding to a domestic disturbance one night in Jersey, she and I found an eight-year-old girl in a basement apartment. The child hadn’t been beaten, just left alone while her father went out drinking. Supposedly for her own protection, he’d handcuffed her to the couch, abandoned her with the remote and a box of Cocoa Puffs. Soon after that, Huan left a note explaining her decision to take a retreat from the human race but saying that, if we were in dire need, we could seek her out at her new home, this zoo she loved so dearly. The remaining Guardians took a pact to keep her location secret and leave her in peace. For nearly eight years, we’d all honored that. Now, I wondered if she was still here, just how far gone she might be, and if I was justified in defining my harebrained scheme as “dire need.”

  A sign on the double glass doors tells us the butterfly exhibit is closed, though when Nate shoves his face against the fogged glass, he says, “I can see them!” Briefly I contemplate breaking in, but decide instead on another course of action. I lead the boys outside and ask if they’re ready for some lunch. “There’s the train ride!” Nate says, one chubby finger aimed at a sign overhead.

  Thomas smiles, but I say, “Nate, that thing is lame, really lame. It rattles, and it’s smoky, and all it really does is huff around the zoo. I’ll take you on a real train later.”

  “This one’s right here,” Nate says.

  “We should eat now.”

  “I could take him,” Thomas says. “If you’re, like, hungry and all.”

  “No,” I say. “We stick together. We’ll go on the ride and then find some chow, OK? It’s family fun day.”