Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen

by Claude Lalumiere

  We passed by a used bookstore and I pointed out the window desperately. The yellow sign that displayed the name Dixon’s Comics and Cards made us both yield as we turned a corner. The store was part genre fiction and part comic books. Next to the yellow sign was a smaller red one that informed us that the store also offered trading. One comic book for any issue of The Amazing Spider-Man; one old cracked-spine of a Stephen King novel or copy of The Lord of the Rings, and you could take your pick from the trade bin. We stepped inside and a bell rang.. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman peaked out from one of the bins.

  “How much do we have?” I asked Apollo.

  “Enough money, G—”

  “But how much other stuff?”

  I wanted the allure of paying for comics with comics. Of trading in the only form of currency that seemed to matter to us and getting something in return. But like our proverbial parents, the ones who had made us orphans, we were broke. The man behind the counter would not want to hear me wax poetic about my old life. I could not trade our stories for stories, not yet.

  Apollo pulled out a five, a ten, and then raised his eyes.

  “Are you sure you want this, G? There are so many others.”

  “I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” I explained. I held Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes to my chest. “I need something to read.”

  VII

  From the back of the bike, I watched Apollo smoke. I got off and joined him. He offered me a cigarette; I declined, and we went into our already established script.

  “No, thank you. Haven’t you heard? Smoking is bad for you.”

  “And so is sun, and fighting crime, and yet, here we are.”

  “Fighting crime and breaking the law are very similar.”

  “And our lungs are only ours for breathing, like our bodies only for eating. Nothing else. Never for pleasure.” Then he smiled and touched his stomach. I could almost hear the ripple of hunger tear through him, like a frost quake after an ice storm. “You hungry, Greta?”

  I smiled. “Always.”

  He smiled again as he tossed away the cigarette. Once he had mounted the bike, he extended his hand to mine and helped me on. I wrapped my arms around his waist, holding a fist in the middle of his stomach. We drove, and I felt the weight of the wind, and Apollo’s smell against me like a kiss. We found a diner, went in, and ate until they kicked us out.

  When we were kids in foster homes, Apollo would always get up in the middle of the night, pace the room, go to the kitchen, and then back again. His midnight snacks became feasts at four a.m., and he’d find me. Even in the houses that separated us, put him with the boys and me by myself, he’d find me. He’d crack the locks on the fridge door, if they had one, and he’d bring me loaves of bread. Candy, milk, ice cream, and meat. He would always find me.

  That night in bed, the rare warm Alberta night made me feel as if I were sweating out everything that had happened to us. It was as if I were in an interrogation room, my skin oily and unrecognizable. My freckles stared up at me and I looked to Apollo, his dark hair matted to his forehead and his body stirring against the sheets. I waited for him to wake up that night, but he was still stuck in a dream.

  VIII

  I had always liked the DC Universe. It allowed for so much to happen at once. There were too many possibilities for a single Earth to hold, so they just created another one. Earth II. Added another Krypton, and even more inane planets if they wanted. When you read DC, you checked your reason at the door. And I liked that, in a way that we get used to certain tastes and proclivities. I also liked Marvel. They had stolen Asgard from the Vikings. It took real balls to get away with something like that.

  I sat up all night and into the morning when Apollo didn’t wake up. I thumbed the collected works and comic books we had just bought and categorized my new collection. I reread the stories of Thor and Loki and invested myself in their troubles. They were brothers who had grown up together, with constant strife pulling them apart.

  I showered and thought I heard the whir of a time machine opening above me, like the Rainbow Bridge to Asgard, but it was just Apollo. He moved back the glass shower doors, and slipped under the water with me, naked. With his hands steady on my shoulders, he whispered in my ear, like Loki must have said to Thor: “I’m adopted.”

  Our foster homes always matched us up, always said we were twins, despite the contrast of my ginger hair and freckled skin next to his dark looks. I didn’t care which reality was a lie.

  Everything eventually changes. Maybe after the shower, I would be the one to drive the motorcycle. Maybe we would rob a bank or mug someone, instead of remaining invisible during our thefts. Maybe we would fall against the road and crack into a thousand pieces and become a thousand stories for someone else to pick up and understand.

  As our secret identities washed down the drain, our lips met again and again. Even when it was all over, I knew our superpowers would remain forever.

  * * *

  Ontario writer Evelyn Deshane received an MA from Trent University and is pursuing a PhD at Waterloo.

  In the Kirby Krackle

  John Bell

  You wanted something

  I couldn’t, wouldn’t

  give:

  A murderous rampage

  against your

  enemies

  Your very own genocidal

  god raging in the Kirby

  Krackle!

  When all I wanted

  was to retreat like

  Thoreau

  Into the last wild

  places beyond your

  reach

  Your comic-book

  fantasies, video-game

  mythologies

  New scriptures of

  unbridled death &

  destruction

  I am leaving but

  don’t pretend I’m

  dead

  I am starbound, relishing

  my escape from

  you

  This is my power & it truly

  crackles, pulses with

  fire

  A beacon of loss in

  a dark, forbidding

  sea

  But this won’t kill you—

  only break your

  hearts.

  * * *

  John Bell is the author or editor of nearly twenty books, including Invaders from the North, a history of Canadian comics.

  A Week in the Superlife

  Alex C. Renwick

  MONDAY

  Monday you wake up and all your bones ache, every single one.

  People probably don’t realize you ache like this, if they ever think about you. Sure, yes, you can fly and you do have superstrength, but you also take superpummelling, day in, day out. Anybody ever think of that?

  You’re like any other guy; you put your pants on in the morning one leg at a time— except they’re not really pants, but tights. And they’re not really tights, but some nanotech self-repairing microfiber developed in some government lab back when you had your regular gig and still punched the clock for the feds. But then you had to go and fall for the Commissioner’s only daughter, had to find out she wasn’t the type to be happy with a workaholic son-of-a-bitch like you. Had to find out she wanted kids — kids for chris’sakes, in a crazy messed-up world like this one! — and that, plain and simple, wasn’t something you could get on board with.

  So you started staying out later and later, calling it work, coming home drunk sometimes, it’s true, but never really meaning to, not really. Eventually she stopped crying, though she never stopped caring (she really is a saint and you never did deserve her), until one night she wasn’t there when you got home three sheets to the wind with your guts so full of bullet holes from those delusional teenage self-styled gangstas you’d tangled with earlier that evening, you looked like a goddamn slab of Swiss cheese.

  Bullets can’t kill you, though they sure as hell hurt. But unlike other times your woman wasn’t there that night to patch
you up, to cry over you or kiss or even yell at you because you scare her half to fucking death and she’s afraid one of these nights you won’t come home at all, and though this actually all happened what feels like a long time ago you’re still glad she finally got the juice that night to leave you for good.

  For her sake, you’re glad.

  TUESDAY

  You spend Tuesday doing the usual. It’s harder and way more boring than people might think to find crimes or accidents or even catastrophes actually in progress. Back when you worked for the government you had some military-developed superphone, tapped you into police channels, rang whenever the Commissioner needed your expertise. These days you look for breaking news on your regular smartphone (smarter than many, not as smart as others), or simply fly around the downtown core, waiting for someone in trouble to flag you down like a goddamn taxi, for chris’sakes. Some days, you figure you may as well start wearing a light on your head, turn it on when you’re flying around doing nothing so it announces to the world: Available.

  But today you’re in luck. You spot two guys messing with some poor junkie prostitute near the corner of High Street and 82nd. They chase her into a weed-choked gully out of sight from the roadway and one pulls a knife. All this you see from seventy feet up in the air, so you don’t get details or hear what they’re saying (it’s not like you have superhearing or supersight), but you recognize the unmistakable terror in the prostitute’s cower, the heart-wrenching inadequacy of her brittle-twig arms raised to shield her face from the bigger guy’s blade. The other guy, the littler one, is unbuttoning the fly of his jeans.

  You drop like a raptor, Bam!, and those guys go sprawling. The knifer squeals when you rip the stupid metalhead T-shirt off his back in one go and tie his wrists so tight to his ankles, he’d better hope the cops arrive before blood loss forces them to amputate later. The other guy’s fumbling with his buttonfly, trying to pull up his pants and run at the same time, gets all tangled and falls.

  Hoist with your own petard, motherfukkah! you shout as you tie him like his buddy, all yoga-pose on his stomach with wrists lashed to ankles. The woman — a girl really, you can see now she’s close up, though the years have not been kind — comes over and kicks him a few times with the scuffed toes of her red pointy flats while you look away, out of politeness. You’ve already texted Emergency Services, the single word like always, so they know it’s you, know you’ve got criminals waiting and the cops should hurry their asses up if they want to make a bust.

  POW! is what you texted. Global positioning and fancy Emergency Services equipment can figure out the rest.

  The girl thrusts her hands down the pants of first the big guy, then the little one, ignoring the one’s tears and the other’s threats. She comes over with two wads of cash, rubber-banded rolls of bills as good as any you’ve ever seen hidden down the pants of a petty street hoodlum playing it big. She hands you one roll and shoves the other up her skirt, and after a grim nod of thanks turns and marches off into the scraggly line of trees behind the fast food dumpster over the rise.

  Hearing the whine of sirens, you tuck that wad into the waistband of your microfibre supertights and shoot straight up into the air, a beacon so the cops know exactly where to look before you head home.

  Sticking around to fill out paperwork really isn’t your job anymore.

  WEDNESDAY

  One good thing about Wednesday is, it’s karaoke night down at the bar.

  You’d think hanging out in a basement dive with a bunch of washed-up single losers would be depressing, but it isn’t. Makes you feel maybe it’s not all your fault you’re looking at middle age like staring down the barrel of a gun, no family, no friends to speak of, no savings, and no prospects. Feels good to peer around the darkened room at other patrons, their skin washed in the same dim green glow as yours from the crappy lighting, and think maybe you don’t have it so bad after all.

  Your turn comes at the mike and you get up, sing a Billie Holiday song — “Gloomy Sunday” — sing it like her, breathy and lonely and lost. Except you don’t sing the final stanza. The music keeps spooling out the “It was all a dream” cop-out verse, words scrolling across that big green screen over the bar, but you only schlump back to your stool, start sucking on your drink, not caring if anybody gives a damn whether you finished the song or not.

  Order another drink. And another after that. And then another.

  THURSDAY

  It’s unfortunate, but Thursday is a total washout. The day started as one big blinding hangover and got worse from there. You thought a little hair of the dog that bit you might help, so you scrounged around for Bloody Mary fixings. You remember your ex called — the voice of an angel! — and invited you to a barbecue at her place Sunday. Says she has some big news, wants you to be a part of her happiness. She doesn’t say what the news is (you know she’s been seeing that Random Asshole for about a year now), but she probably didn’t really expect you to say you’d come.

  But you did, you remember that much. You insisted you wanted more than anything in this world to come to her party on Sunday and congratulate her in person, a goodbye and no-hard-feelings sort of deal. And then you remember stumbling to the corner liquor store and buying another bottle of vodka.

  You don’t remember anything after that.

  FRIDAY

  Weekends, there’s always plenty to do. Large gatherings, too much alcohol, people out swimming and driving and motocrossing and bungee jumping— every hour there’s a dozen fires for you to put out, both figurative and literal. You know you could try to move up in the world, seek out the glory jobs, go where all the action takes place: New York, London, Tokyo; bombings, government coups, giant monsters from space… but this is your home town, man. You grew up here, had your first kiss in that park you can see from the corner of your eye and a hundred feet up. Had your first beer in that same park a year later, your first joint the year after that. Lost your virginity not long after about six blocks away, the backseat of her brother’s car, which hadn’t run since 1962 though he worked on it every day since he’d dropped out of school and told you not to date his little sister or he’d kick your ass.

  You smile, thinking about your childhood, your life before the accident down at the power plant where your dad worked before you and his dad before that. Coal, electricity, nukes: it’s all the same to the guys with the blue shirts and the hard hats, whose job is only to shovel, to dig, to press buttons without asking why or how or what.

  And then came the accident, you the only survivor, nobody expecting you to live after the levels of exposure you got. What made you the lucky son-of-a-bitch with the weird, mutative DNA? All your buddies died on the line that day, biggest tragedy this town had seen since the Great Mine Collapse of 1897. Some died quick, blown to pieces from the explosion, and some died slow, rotting away from the inside over the next few weeks or months or even year.

  Except you. It was like you got the strength of the ten men who died, like it all flowed into you as it drained from them, leaving two bereft girlfriends and one grieving fiancée and seven widows and fifteen half-orphans, all of whom still look at you with accusation written on their faces, if and when they look at you at all. It’s not that big a city though, so some of them go to quite a bit of trouble not to see you, ever.

  Yessir: you are one lucky son-of-a-bitch.

  SATURDAY

  Saturday barely deserves separation from Friday. You don’t sleep much on weekends; it all rolls together into one long two-day hell of rescuing drowning children at the lake and trussing up would-be muggers in back alleys near the bar district (Emergency Services text P-O-W-!) and saving pomeranians and their old ladies from fifth-storey condos on fire. You nap when you can between one emergency and the next, wondering when you’ll stop trying to make up for ten deaths you can never undo, that weren’t even your fault in the first place.

  SUNDAY

  Let yourself sleep in, you poor bastard. That’s right. And when y
ou do get up at last, sun slanting harsh and high through the blinds, don’t worry about all those empty pizza boxes stacked by the back door, or the unpaid bills stacked on that rickety hall table near the front. Don’t worry too much that your savings from the old government gig have truly run out, or that your fancy-fibre suit is starting to go at the seams and you have no way to replace it. Even if you had time for a regular job, which you certainly do not, a thing like that suit would be way beyond the finances of an ordinary citizen.

  That’s you: an ordinary citizen. Dropped out of high school because who were you kidding? You were going to go work at the plant like your dad and your granddad, both heavy chain-smokers and dead from not dissimilar cancers long before your accident. Mom lasted a few years longer, but she was a smoker too. You have a mortgage on a house you don’t even like anymore, your back hurts when you wake up each day, and you really should schedule a dental appointment one of these years. You’re afraid you’re developing one of those prostate problems you’ve read about, but are too scared to actually see a doctor because what if something really is wrong down there? No amount of flying around in the sky or bending steel bars or stopping bullets can make something like that go away.

  Then it hits you: you promised to go to your ex’s barbecue, promised to be happy for her happiness and not punch her new man in the face.

  Reaching for your supertights, you realize this might be an occasion better suited to civvies. You fling those things aside (ignore the sparking zap when they hit the far wall— that’s probably not the nanocircuitry giving up for good, shorting out, leaving a black smoky smudge on the sheetrock) and reach for jeans. One leg at a time, just like everybody else.