Corrupts Absolutely?

by Peter Clines

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Which one was your favorite? When did you read the comic?”

  “They were my father’s. He went to Vietnam and came back in a box. All he left me were his dog tags,” which Marvel rattles as he explains, “and a tub of comic books from the late 1960s.”

  “As I thought. You like the space-born Marvel comics Captain Marvel, not the D.C version that is a weird reimagining of Egyptian mythology and possession.”

  Jimmy waves his hand with the cigarette. “Alright. Whatever? So there are three types of superheroes. So what?”

  Marvel turns toward me and nods. “Yeah. So what?”

  “So how many types of villains are there?”

  “Is this a test?” Jimmy asks. “I hate tests.”

  “It’s not a test. You don’t even have to know the answer. In fact, if you did, it wouldn’t change what’s about to happen.”

  Jimmy’s eyes narrow.

  “There are three types of villains,” Marvel says hopefully. “Just like heroes, right?”

  I shake my head. “I can see why you’d think so, but no. There’s only one kind of villain.” I stand up and walk over to where Marvel sits. His eyes go wide. “No matter the power, no matter the ability, no matter the technology, the single factor that decides if someone is a villain or not is their desire to do evil. The comic books are certain about that. They don’t fuck around with evil. You have to want to be evil to be evil.”

  “But what about when an evil character does something good? That happens. I see it all the time in comics and in the movies.”

  “The only reason an evil person would do something good is to achieve an unjust end.” I give Jimmy a momentary stare. “Trust me. I know.”

  I watch as a light dawns in Marvel’s eyes. “What about the Punisher? He’s evil, right?”

  “He just wants revenge. He’s an anti-hero. That’s where a hero does evil things to attain a just end.”

  “This is just weird,” Jimmy says, stabbing out his cigarette and standing.

  “Sit down a moment,” I say. “I got a story to tell you. A story about June 5th, 1968.

  I watch as Jimmy sits down slowly. Things he hasn’t thought about are beginning to surface in his mind.

  “Once upon a time, there was a Chinese kid who wanted to be a hero, but he learned real quickly that the universe had something else in mind for him. And you know what? He embraced the fuck out of it.”

  #

  Danny New was a cop on the beat for ten years before I met him. He thought I was just a kid, and I didn’t do anything to stop his belief. I knew he was scheduled to be on guard detail at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5th just like I knew that Sirhan Sirhan had been paid by anonymous courier to kill Bobby Kennedy at the same hotel on the same day. They didn’t know me. To them, I was just a paperboy. After all, there’s not much a person of my appearance and stature can do. Knowing both of their intentions helped me envision the future. In fact, I can honestly say that it was the first time that the future was laid out before me in such a way that there was no denying what was going to happen. And I didn’t like what I saw. But trying to do something about it was hard because Danny New was too good at his job. They said that he could spot a crime before it happened. When asked, he couldn’t explain it. He just knew. Danny New… knew.

  Well, there was something I knew.

  I knew he had a baby boy back home.

  I also knew he had a fine young wife.

  Before I stole the baby, I did the wife. She’d never been with a Chinese kid before. I could read her mind between the screams and the fear. She was mystified that my pecker was yellow.

  Of course, I had to kill her.

  But I didn’t kill the baby. I mean, one has to draw a line somewhere, right?

  I arranged it so the call to Danny New went out an hour before Sirhan Sirhan planned the assassination. The policeman ran to his car with the news that his wife had been murdered and his baby was missing. Then everything went as planned. Bobby was shot in the head once, the back twice, and he died 26 hours later.

  Hooray for the Piss Boy.

  Fucking hilarious.

  #

  “But what about the baby?” Marvel asks.

  I turn to Jimmy and ask him, “What about the baby?”

  Jimmy’s face is ashen. He looks like he’s about to have a coronary. He has trouble breathing.

  “Jimmy? What’s wrong?” Marvel runs to him.

  Jimmy waves Marvel off as he regains his composure. Finally, he blows out a heap of air and gives me the look of hate I knew he had in him. “Why are you fucking with me like this?”

  “I’m not fucking with you. I was there. I did what I said. I fucked your mother.”

  Marvel gives me a classic W-T-F look. “You did that?”

  I nod happily.

  Jimmy launches himself across the room. Knowing his intentions, it’s pathetically easy to move out of his way. Finally, I leap over the couch and pull the pistol from my backpack. I snap my arm into place just as he’s about to follow me over the couch. The barrel catches him dead center of his forehead. He stops, stares fire, and breathes heavily.

  “But your name is Raglin,” Marvel says. “If your daddy’s name was New, then why isn’t yours?”

  “I’m adopted, shithead. My father killed himself when I was five. Picked up his service revolver, shoved it in his mouth, and blew his brains out all over the refrigerator while I was eating Count Chocula. I moved in with a family in Sacramento. June and Spencer Raglin.”

  “How’d you like that?” I ask, watching as he replays the molestations of the migrant boys in his mind.

  “I fucking loved it.” His gaze goes from my trigger finger to the barrel. “You gonna shoot me?”

  “Not if you do something for me.”

  “What makes you think I’d help you? I wouldn’t even spit into your mouth if you were drowning.”

  “Because I know something you don’t. I know that you’re going to die in three days unless you do something.”

  I watch as an image of his mother appears only to be replaced by his father then himself as a child. Then the purity of it all is destroyed by a hundred thousand naked men and women doing things that are as devoid of love and concern as a lizard has for a fly. He’s become numb from the constant assault on his mind. Although he wants revenge, it doesn’t matter to him as much as it should. A small sliver of him knows this, but he can’t do anything about it.

  He licks his lips as his thoughts spin from what he knows he should do to self-preservation. “How am I going to die?”

  “Marvel is going to get all cracked up in an hour, get picked up by the police, and trade information about your child porn pictures for a free pass.”

  His gaze flicks to Marvel. “I don’t have child porn.”

  “Does it really matter?” I point out. “I mean, once you invoke the words child porn, it’s guilty until proven innocent, right? It’s a fucking game changer.”

  Marvel’s eyes widen impossibly. “I will not.”

  “Will too,” I say.

  “Will not.”

  Jimmy looks at me.

  “Who are you going to believe? A John Wayne-wanna-be-RuPaul-homo-crack-addict or a Hollywood super villain who fucked your mom, killed your dad, and screwed the country?”

  Jimmy looks at Marvel.

  Marvel opens his mouth to say something, thinks better of it, then hauls ass to the door. He jerks it open and runs down the walk.

  “Well? Are you going to go after him? You have less than an hour.”

  The images of his mother and father are washed aside in a tide of naked bodies and his imagination of how it would be in prison if he were ever caught, other prisoners doing things to him he’d only watched on the computer screen. He steps back from the couch.

  “Do you want this?” I ask, holding out the pistol.

  A person
al YouTube video of my destruction blasts through his brain.

  “There’s only one bullet, so you need to make a choice.”

  He grabs the gun and runs down the walk. By the time he hits the street, his self-respect is entirely gone.

  #

  They finally notice the body.

  A white woman from Ohio screams first. She bore seven children, has twenty-one grandchildren, collects ceramic squirrels, is addicted to sitcoms, and wants to have animal sex with Eddie Murphy.

  A man from Lake of the Woods, Minnesota, wearing a fishing vest and a Cabela hat, grabs his chest as his heart fibrillates erratically. The single thought that goes through his mind is that he’s going to die before he catches a Lake Trout.

  Then they all scream.

  The kid goes unnoticed. After all, why should they notice a gangly Chinese kid on an old bicycle? What could he possibly have to do with the body? The man wearing a Ramone’s T-shirt is curled up in a fetal position on a nearby bus stop bench, his shoulders shuddering from hard-won tears. He also goes unnoticed. After all, he’s probably just a wino or some homeless man without two dimes to scrape together. What could he possibly have to do with the body? Instead, all eyes turn from the body back to the paraplegic pimp and the one-legged midget hooker. The hooker reaches down and picks up the pistol. Balancing on one leg, she holds the pistol in self-defense. But the crowd sees something different, and they make up their minds.

  I turn and pedal away. I’m a shadow in the noonday sun as they gather around the shiny object once known as Marvel, who, had he lived, would have saved a little girl crossing the street in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater from being hit by a Compton teacher late for a conference at the Kodak Theater.

  “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”

  I laugh dramatically as I pedal faster and faster.

  Who better to know evil than a villain? And I, Piss Boy, am the greatest villain of them all.

  Mental Man

  William Todd Rose

  My therapist uses metaphors tailored for my unique situation. He speaks of the Fortress of Solitude with which I surround my true feelings. The Bat Cave tunneling into my psyche, so deep and dark that the secrets I hide there never know the warmth of enlightenment. In my subconscious, he says, there’s a decrepit Gotham teeming with super villains; their sole purpose in life is to tear me down, to find my emotional Kryptonite and destroy me. They have names like Chronic Depression, Acute Anxiety, and Persistent Avoidance. With their henchmen, they’ve banded together to form an axis of evil known as the PTSD, and the fate of my inner Metropolis hinges upon their defeat.

  He prescribes me pills and sits cross-legged in his chair, scribbling occasionally on his steno pad while I levitate the frog figurines lining the bookshelves in his office. This is a nervous tic that causes Dr. Thompson to peer over the top of his glasses as he peppers me with open-ended questions. Never something I can answer with a simple yes or no, these queries are specifically designed to draw me out.

  “Why do you feel, Rob, that you’re not living up to your full potential?”

  Why, indeed.

  In comic books and movies, people like me always have their counterpart, their polar opposite. Madmen hell-bent on world domination, misguided scientists who use their creations to fulfill their own twisted desires. An archenemy, if you will. And the existence of these rivals defines the hero just as much as his powers or costume. If not more so. In the real world, however, things are quite different. Junkies sweating through withdrawal rob liquor stores, jealous wives kill their husbands in fits of passion, and drunk drivers screech away from the bent and twisted frames of bicycles. There’s no ultimate nemesis whose apprehension will make the world safe for decent, law-abiding citizens. Just an endless string of beautiful losers with their own sob stories and justifications. And without someone sitting on the other side of the teeter-totter of good and evil, you end up busting your hump against the unforgiving earth time and time again. So how’s that for a metaphor, Doc?

  See, I never really wanted this shit to begin with. I was just this kid doing his best to grow up in a neighborhood where shards of shattered beer bottles littered the sidewalks like so many broken dreams. You grew up tough in this type of hood or you didn’t grow up at all. Since there really is safety in numbers, I fell in with a bad crowd and used my powers for the good of the gang. Door locks fractured as easily as ice with only minimal concentration, and security cameras played back static once my electromagnetic field wiped the tapes clean. I struck as quietly and efficiently as sudden death, knocking out security guards before they even realized that they’d just heard something rustle behind them. But my biggest contribution was sensing when the time was right to split. Before sirens could be heard wailing in the distance, I knew five-oh was on the way; I could see the black and white cars zipping through traffic, their lights strobing blue and red against the graffiti covered walls as radios crackled with chatter. Almost as if I’d left my body and was in a different time and place.

  The problem is, I developed a taste for downers, see. I popped Seconal like they were Jujubes and rode the waves of relaxation right into my downfall. With my senses dulled and reaction times so slow that I could have passed for just another member of the gang, it wasn’t long before I was picked up. Extortion, strong arm robbery, larceny, breaking and entering, conspiracy, and racketeering: the boys in blue had me by the balls. Tried as an adult, I would be looking at fifteen to twenty years in a state correctional facility with no chance of parole. But all that would just go away if I took the deal they had on the table. Come work for us, they said, and we’ll make sure you keep getting pussy instead of being somebody’s bitch.

  Sometimes I think I would have been better off just serving my time and eventually trying to find my place in a world that had moved on without me. Maybe then, I wouldn’t find my cheeks wet with tears when I watch young couples run hand in hand through the rain. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like the walls of my silent apartment are closing in and that an invisible hand grips my throat when the panic attacks set in. Maybe I could actually appreciate life.

  As it is, I sleep about thirteen to fourteen hours a day. I insist that powers like mine burn a lot of energy—that I need time to recharge my batteries, so to speak. Dr. Thompson, however, says it’s escapism. Wrapped in dreams, I am safe from the quiet voice in my head that whispers I’m not good enough, that I’m just a freak and will never fit in, will never know what it means to be truly loved instead of having just another booze-soaked romp with a horny groupie.

  “What’s wrong with horny groupies?” I want to know. He says they’re a poor substitute for true affection and are only feeding my need for validation. I say I just want to get my jollies and get out. That I want at least one thing in my life simple. We’ll never agree. Not on the bimbos and not on the sleep.

  Regardless of why I sleep as much as I do, I always awake to the same thing: my phone ringing in the darkness as insistent as a needy lover. The muffled voice on the other end breaks up as reception fades in and out. I rub my eyes and scrawl an address on a scrap of paper. Too-strong coffee that tastes bitter and burnt at the convenience store around the corner, a couple of No-Doz washed down with the scalding liquid, my cigarette ember winking in the rearview mirror as I stifle a yawn: This is my wake up routine, what people like me have instead of a hot shower and healthy breakfast.

  Here lately, the scenes are always the same as well. A suburban home with a carefully manicured lawn surrounded by the stereotypical picket fence. The mailbox by the street will look like a wide-mouth bass or a caboose or a miniature replica of the house at the other end of the sidewalk. The street will be roped off with yellow tape while neighbors dressed in bathrobes and boxers cluster on the sidewalks, whispering to one another as their faces change color in the lights of a dozen police cars. Cruisers, unmarked sedans with flashers shining through windshields, the obligatory ambula
nce and van stenciled with the letters CSU. Just another day at the office.

  Last night, I walked into a living room where the walls were covered with the arc of arterial spray. Blood had pooled on the white shag carpet in glistening puddles, and books were strewn across the floor from a toppled shelf. Sprawled half-way across the couch was a pretty blonde with one boob hanging out of her ripped nightgown. Her wrists were bound with the all-too-familiar silk rope, and silver duct tape had sealed her screams. He’d slit her throat, just like the others, and paraded her around the living room, coating the walls with her ever-diminishing blood supply before tossing her onto the sofa like a toy that had lost its sparkle.

  Lying face-down between the kitchen and living room was a balding man, and the back of his head looked like a dented car door that had been splattered with red paint balls. His tighty-whities were stained brown from voided bowels, and his right hand stretched across the carpet as if, even in death, he were grasping for the Louisville Slugger that was just out of reach. The baseball bat itself was pristine. No spatter or clumps of hair stuck to the polished wood. No cracks. It wasn’t one of the murder weapons but a line of defense that ultimately proved useless.

  I knew without being told that the children were upstairs. Each in their own bedroom, their hands staged over their eyes as if trying to block the horrors they’d witnessed and their throats mottled and bruised. Every mirror in the house would be shattered; if there were any family pets, they would be dead as well. In the second house, we’d found an empty bottle of bleach beside a tank of tropical fish floating upside down. In the fourth, a Scottish terrier had been strangled with its own leash, and the boy’s hamster lay by the baseboard, just beneath a sunburst splatter of blood on the blue bedroom wall.

  There was something different about this scene however, something that told me our unsub was becoming even more brazen, more confident in his ability to kill with impunity. For scrawled across the wall like crimson finger paint was a message: You will never catch me.