When he was sure that Ben was shielded behind him, Dev instantiated a wormhole and tunnelled it into one of the rooms in the basement. The floor beneath the Phantasm distorted, and colors prismed in glittering constellations as the Phantasm was sucked into the temporary warp.
“You’ll keep in there till I can decide what to do with you,” Dev said.
“That was unreal,” Ben said, from behind him.
* * *
“I can assure you it was very real,” Dev said. He picked up pieces of furniture broken in the fight and stacked them on the bar.
“You’re one of them.”
“Go Home, Ben,” he said, with a Command. “You Won’t Remember In The Morning.”
“Wait,” said Ben. “Hear me out. I can help you with whatever you’re doing here. I can be your sidekick. Your Renfield. I can help you with anything you need. I swear your secret’s safe with me.”
“There’s a reason I haven’t told anyone,” Dev said, unable to keep the anger from his voice. “I’m not like the others. You want to know why you’re not reading about me on the news? The moment the world finds out you’re different, they paint a target on your back. The media wants a piece of you, the government wants to regulate you, and people like him,” he pointed to where the wormhole had been, “want to kill you. I decided a long time ago I didn’t want that kind of attention. All I want is to run my bar and be left alone.”
Ben backed away slightly. “I mean no disrespect, about what I said before. That’s your… choice. I just didn’t expect that you would be right here in my backyard. I mean, all that time with the Alliance, did they know?”
Dev pulled out a first-aid kit from under the bar and handed disinfectant and gauze to Ben. “You got a gash across your forehead, better clean that up.”
“I didn’t ask for this,” Dev told him. “The fight between the Alliance and Dr. Moriarty happened right here. Moriarty built a device to steal the Alliance’s powers and transfer them to himself. He was so confident that it would work that he walked straight in here and set the thing off. And guess what?”
“What?”
“It blew up in his face. All of them, the Alliance and him, died instantly from the backlash. Except me. All their powers transferred to me.” Dev flicked his hand and swept the broken furniture aside. He would deal with it in the morning.
“But something that big would have been on the news,” Ben said.
“Would have,” said Dev. “There are ways of ensuring that things like that never happen. People can Forget a lot.”
* * *
“Kingsley, are you awake?”
The track lights lit up the length of the basement, a room far too big for the physical space the bar occupied. When the Alliance was still active, the bar had been more than a convenient space for the five of them to meet. It had been the Architect’s idea to hide in plain sight. He built the basement with Tesla’s help, outfitting it with sophisticated cloaking devices, one-of-a-kind surveillance technology, and enough protection to withstand an army.
“At you service,” Kingsley replied. His avatar appeared on a screen to Dev’s left.
“The Phantasm found me tonight. We need to know how it found the place.” Kingsley, the AI, was the brainchild of the Probabilist and Shade. He snooped vast swaths of network traffic and surveillance footage, finding the signal hidden in the noise, any threats the Alliance should identify and neutralize. Except now there was only Dev left to do that.
“He’s in one of the holding rooms for monitoring,” Dev added.
“Already on it, boss,” Kingsley said.
“What’s on the schedule tonight?” Kingsley updated him on a series of international developments, the foremost being the location and activities of Moriarty’s remaining associates. Dev geared up. He pulled on his cowl and said, “Let’s save the world.”
* * *
A graduate of the 2012 Viable Paradise SFF Workshop, Arun Jiwa lives in Edmonton.
Apollo and Greta
Evelyn Deshane
I
We used to go to all-night diners at four o’clock in the morning to see if the world was different then. He told me it was a lot lonelier, but I never agreed. I didn’t see how it could be if there was a place that was always open, always willing, and waiting for us to come. The big neon sign, red and yellow, told us its name. The restaurant was a person and his name was Denny. He engulfed us as we ordered our eggs and pancakes with extra maple syrup. How could this warmth, this circulatory system of fluorescent lights, ever be lonely? We were inside of Denny; we were a part of him.
I ate my meal of champions in the middle of the night and told my brother that he was wrong. The world wasn’t lonelier now. It had exactly the same amount of gut-wrenching sorrow that always existed. Only now it was far more obvious when it was black outside and we sat right next to the throb and buzz of a diner sign.
He was quiet after I explained and made no attempt to counter the argument. We were staying, lonely or not, in this hum. We were orphans and, having aged out of the foster care system, this was the only place where we belonged. This small type of consistency was the only thing we craved more than pancakes.
II
Our origins were always unclear. He was named after a Greek God and I was named after an actress, a silent film star. Apollo didn’t like it when I dwelled on his power, so we romanticized our unknown ancestors. We tried to figure out our parents’ lives from the small facts they left behind. Our blood, our names, and the powers we had to keep secret before they could be taken away.
“They probably went to a classic Garbo movie on their first date,” he explained away Greta within seconds.
“And Apollo?”
“Maybe they majored in Greek.”
All the stories we spun, the lies we lived off of, were always so idealistic. It took me too many revisions of the same tale to realize that in their minds men were supposed to be treated like gods and could crush anything with their thumbprint but women were supposed to be silent. To shut up and learn to live with loneliness in diners, swallowed by men, in the middle of the night.
“Or maybe they just liked comics,” I suggested.
III
When we turned eighteen, minutes after one another, we left the house where we had been placed for the last six months. Without a goodbye note or explanation, I climbed out the window first and unlocked the door for him. He stole the car after I convinced him to. When we drove down the highway entering the Albertan badlands, I saw his spine finally relax.
“What did you realize?” I asked him. “That we’re not getting caught or that it wouldn’t matter if we did?”
“No,” he told me, voice transparent. He clutched the wheel. “I realize that anyone could have done this.”
“But we did.”
“But we did,” he nodded. After a while, he smiled.
I rose in the back through the sunroof, grabbed a blanket from the seat, and tied it around myself like a cape.
We should have done this a long time ago. Anytime our foster parents had threatened to split us up, anytime they tried to separate us in different rooms, we should have just crawled out our small windows and left it all behind. The badlands of Alberta, where we had always dreamed of going, passed us by too quickly. In the rear-view mirror, the reflection was like a movie on fast-forward, the film blurred and tight against the screen, the way that VHS tapes used to be. We were too nostalgic that first night of driving; we were still seeing our past in the movies we grew up with. Soon, we worked past Betamax and Tim Burton’s Batman franchise to DVDs, Blu-rays, and Christopher Nolan’s mouth-breathing Batman. We slowly figured out how to become better than Rogue and sound out our names without the worry of others hearing.
By morning, we were blinded by sunlight and I slumped down into the front seat. As I watched Apollo drive, I realized we could not have escaped when we were younger, because we had no idea how powerful we were yet.
“What should
our superpower be?” he asked, tugging on my blanket, my cape. I smiled and continued to play Superwoman, Wonder Woman, and the Birds of Prey in one go.
“Mind reading?” I suggested first. This power would have helped us a lot in foster care, wondering what house we would wake up in next and how we could stay together. We would have been able to figure out whom to trust and who meant what they said.
Apollo shook his head. “Don’t live in past anymore. We are out of that house, now.”
But, I thought but did not say, the world is still populated with liars.
“Strength would have helped,” Apollo said next. “Something like Thor’s hammer.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “But the strength would be located in the object, not you or me.”
He sighed, but understood. We needed something better than that, so we went through all our options.
“Fire power?”
“Too hard to control. And too much smoke would give us away.”
“Flying?”
“We would be too easy to spot.”
And then he said, “Invisibility?”
We nodded. It was utterly perfect for the two of us. We both gazed at our side mirrors, and watched as the morning turned to grey skies. The upcoming storm chased us down the highway through our back window. The looming skies reminded me of the story Apollo told me about the Tryon Rat Experiment in psychology. The highways and roads twisted and turned as the storm chased us until the end of a maze. Lightning struck and for a brief moment, I saw the reward enticing us further.
From the way Apollo shifted in his seat, I knew he was thinking the same thing.
“Do you think they ever figured anything out about us?” he asked.
“Only that we already knew what the end of the maze looked like.”
IV
As we drove, I thought of Grant Morrison. When he wrote The Invisibles, he used to method act. He shaved his head and turned himself into King Mob as he travelled the world, smoking hash and fucking women. But when King Mob was attacked in The Invisibles, suddenly Grant got sick. His appendix almost burst, just as his character doppelganger was being sliced open and shot above his appendix. A new type of sympathetic pain emerged then, like a new and foreign place for a heart. Grant wrote the scene and survived, had the surgery so he didn’t die. But he was careful afterward about what he wrote and how he used his own image.
After The Invisibles ended, Grant took up chaos magic next and wound up in that My Chemical Romance music video. As Apollo and I drove by the red earth, toward the sun, we cranked MCR’s The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys all the way up. In the first video for “Na Na Na” Grant plays the villain Korse, among the Draculoids who live in Battery City during the year 2019.
I imagined Grant Morrison’s evolution from King Mob to Korse, shaved head and white suit. This was how all the new series went, at least, from what Apollo and I saw. You restarted and rebooted, got new writers and artists, and attempted to change everything in an attempt to find a new audience. The Fabulous Killjoys were nothing new, nothing special, in the same way Korse was really just another version of King Mob. But that was why we liked the album and listened to it until we could recite the words to one another as our forms of I love you and hello. It made us feel as if we knew something and like we weren’t alone.
When Apollo and I got completely lost in the Alberta roads, we turned on the album again, and headed down a different way. It was so easy stepping off the pathway, especially if there was no map to guide your way.
V
Iron Man, as much as he was a billionaire playboy, was also a mechanic. I always forgot that. Batman and Robin were really just detectives, too. I always forgot the side lives of the ordinary characters of comics: the reporter Clark Kent and even the foolish, whiny student Peter Parker. It was more appealing to focus on the mutations of the Fantastic Four, the experiment of Bruce Banner, and the casual accident of Doctor Manhattan. We all wanted an excuse to gawk and stare at someone now that freak shows were relics of the past Apollo and I realized a long time ago that there was nothing separating most people from Batman but thin tights and confidence.
Then there’s Stan Lee, who Apollo always considered a later version of Alfred Hitchcock. Both men weaved stories together from discarded newspapers and strange events seen from out an office window. They created their characters as strangers with easy faces and gave them horrible fates. That was why big cities were important to their work; the small towns were too terrifying because there was just nothing there. Everyone lived in their house, alone, and let no one inside. With the big city, there were simply too many stories for these men to tell, but not enough people to find them believable. Stan Lee and Alfred Hitchcock were the authors of modern-day myths, attempting to rewrite what we thought we knew about who we were and what we could expect in our lives.
Lee and Hitchcock both made cameo appearances in their films. They walked on stage to judge a beauty competition, to buy a newspaper, and to get a cup of coffee. Stephen King also tried this, but he was too animated. He gave himself too many lines and drew attention to himself. He did not understand: the director and writer are ghosts. They are invisible and do not matter. They are the secret identity that pulls all the strings. When Lee and Hitchcock walk on, they give a silent nod to the audience. They make sure people are paying attention.
I looked wearily at Apollo. He was driving too fast, but not faster than anyone around us. We were driving a stolen car, but he sat in it like he owned it. When we zoomed past the black unmarked police car with the radar gun on the side, we didn’t flinch. We were not caught as we headed into another city.
“We’ll switch into a new car when we get there,” he told me. He moved his dark brown hair out of his eyes. “You know, just in case.”
“Just in case,” I said, slightly mocking him. He didn’t notice, as if mockery was something that could never touch him. “I think,” I added aloud. “I want something new.”
“Oh yeah?” he asked me. “Like what?”
A cop, his car blue and white, whirred past us both on the road. We held our breaths, as if not breathing really could make us invisible. The cop was on the other side of traffic, heading back toward where we had come from, back toward the speed traps, toward a crime much larger than ourselves. I wanted more attention. I wanted someone to see us, for real this time around.
“That was close,” he said. “What did you want again?”
The world. Everything, I thought. A secret plan.
“A motorcycle,” I said. “I want someone to see us. For real this time.”
He gave me a weary gaze. “That’s not smart, and you know it.”
“But it fits,” I argued. “You know, how Penguin used to ride in one, his sidekick in the sidecar.”
Apollo grinned. “I think you’d look good on a bike.”
“Really?” My eyes were bright.
“Yes. Behind me, with your Greta Garbo eyes, I think you’d steal the show.”
Those silent eyes that he admired fell. “But not on the front of the bike?”
“No. Too dangerous, like I said. I’ll take that.”
He thought he was being admirable. He thought he was being a hero. I swallowed hard, folding my arms over my chest. I didn’t want to tell him that villains road motorcycles and danger was still danger even if you were being noble. We had no leather jackets, no way to protect ourselves from the asphalt. A nurse who used to take care of one of the other foster kids told us once that motorcycles were really organ donations on wheels. Skin could burn off, completely deglove itself from the muscle, as soon as a crash happened. Boots were needed. Helmets were good. Protection was always imperative if you wanted to stay alive.
Apollo acted like he was the sun and he could keep the road warm. His name was a God’s name, and he thought himself truly immortal. For a second, I imagined a crash on the bike and both of us spilling into the road. I imagined sunlight radiating out of his wounds— and nothin
g but black and white picture shows coming out of mine.
Another cop car zoomed by. It didn’t even bother to slow down.
“We know what direction the police are taking,” I said, gaining strength. “So we know where to avoid. I want a bike. Let’s go get one.”
He smiled again. Sunlight shone in his hair. “Okay. You have a deal.”
VI
During our years in foster homes, apartments, and motel rooms, I collected stories. Like bugs and mites, the stories I found dangled like modifiers of city life. They were writer’s prompts, vague and incomplete, that lined the walls and stained the carpets. I could speculate far too much about the movements in the next room, the water dripping from the pipes, and the photos on the frontman’s desk as we slipped him our credit card. But while every thought and ending was true to me, hotel clerks always eyed our credit cards skeptically. Our real names had always required a special type of longing to believe.
When we stayed in motel rooms, I stole the soap and toiletries to help myself remember. I counted and added the different pastel shades to my collection in the bottom of a thrift-store suitcase. The soaps always left a white line at the bottom of the bag. Each time we took a trip, I found a different commodity to steal. The first time, it was crackers. Then the peanut-butter packets that were part of the free motel breakfasts (which we spawned out to lunch and dinner). I was daring for a while and started to take the towels. Then I realized they were charging our credit cards for them. The soap was my favorite, though it made my hands feel coarse, like they didn’t belong to me. I dropped the bars in the shower, and the soap wore away into half-moon chips, which I held up to the light at night but always failed to conjure up anyone.
One night, we stopped at a store and Apollo left the motorcycle on the kick stand while I went inside through the window. I left my suitcase and took the cash, thinking it to be a fair trade. But the money we stole was always so transient, so ephemeral. For a collector like myself, there always had to be something else around the corner. Money, which the Joker set on fire in The Dark Knight, was never important. I wanted things that I could attach my name to and say were really mine. Even the bike only offered a temporary fantasy and illusion. We hadn’t crashed yet, though we had come close. I still didn’t know what we were really made of.
Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen Page 28