“Senator’s Sun?”
The waiter brings the coffee and smiles at Carol, who gives a professional smile in response and tells him, “No, thank you, this will be all.” And then, to Nancy, “Yes, Senator’s Sun. I was so jealous,” she laughs, “and Bernie knew it. He spent a few weeks teasing me about it, and then one day he tells me about a big story that he needs help with. ‘I’m going to distract this Congressman and I need you to break into his apartment and steal a file that he keeps in a safe,’ he said.” Carol sips at her black coffee. “Well, he gives me the safe combination and I wait until he calls my desk, then I head over to this Congressman’s apartment. Except it’s not the Congressman’s apartment. It’s Bernie’s. He’s standing there wearing Sun’s golden pants and black boots and that yellow and gold mask he used to wear. The one that was patterned on the American flag? But yellow and black? God, the first costume was so ugly.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen it.”
Carol continues on, as if Nancy isn’t even sitting across from her. “He tells me that he realizes he can’t be his own reporter. Maybe if he’d decided to be a photographer, he could pull it off, but he was a reporter and if he kept getting the Sun’s exclusive stories, people would eventually put it all together. He needed someone else to be his reporter.” Carol shrugs, smiles, sips coffee. “It was a successful partnership.”
Nancy plays with her cup. “But … do you ever feel like he was using you?”
“Of course he was using me,” she laughs, “just like I was using him.” For the first time since she sat down, Carol gives Nancy a good look, and realizes the young woman is conflicted. “Listen, this whole game — the reporting game, not the superhero game — is all about leverage, same as it is for reporters covering politicians. You’ve got to figure out what parts of what you know make it out to the world, balancing the public’s right to know with the public being better off not knowing. And if you blow all your information every time you file a story, you’ll never get ahead.”
“Jas— Kid says—”
“Oh, God, you’re fucking him,” Carol laughs, pushing back on the table to press against her seat. When Nancy’s face turns read, Carol does her part to erase the shame. She leans forward and asks, “Is he big? It looks like he's got a big cock.”
Nancy is momentarily horrified because she is barely old enough to legally drink alcohol and Carol is almost ready to retire, but the friendly smile on the older woman’s face soon has Nancy smiling, too.
“It’s not as big as I thought it was going to be,” she confesses.
“They never are.”
“He does know what to do with it, though.”
“That’s what counts.”
“I think … I dunno … he’s something of a sex addict.”
“There are worse things to be addicted to.”
“Did you and Senator’s Sun …?”
“God, no. No, no, no,” Carol laughs. “That’s where I drew the line.” She sips more coffee and accepts the check from the waiter. “Always remember that you’re a reporter first,” she says, “and not a PR firm. Make sure you get as much as you give. Make him give you leads about stories he has nothing to do with. A bribery case. Corporate malfeasance. A chemical spill. You have to be careful about the public thinking you’re only good for getting Kid Rapscallion stories, because you’re a player in their game, too, and it can consume you. If it does, you’ll be out of the business before you know it and selling insurance. So … any other questions?”
“How?” Nancy asks, feeling like she’s drowning. “How do I stay me through this? The stories I’ve been writing about what happened between Kid and Fake Out? Most of that was a lie. He was,” she pauses to lower her voice, “he knew her before she went all super villain. She was his partner.”
“Ah,” Carol nods, finishing her coffee. “Those are tough ones. If you out that, bye bye his career and bye bye your career.” She drums her fingers on the table, thinking through her options. “Do you know,” she asks, “that Shining Light dated a reporter?”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Carol says, rolling her eyes. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? The first superhero in the world, the only one that predates World War II, the one people loved, dated a reporter.”
“Professor Sil didn’t mention that.”
“Sil?” Carol asks, her momentary surprise giving way to a shake of her head. “Michael Sil, as the Lord is my witness. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.” Carol laughs. “Him? Him I slept with.”
“Ew.”
“He might not be much now, but he was quite the hot shot reporter back in the ‘70s. I met him when Sun crossed paths with Gentleman Beaneater. God, Bernie hated that case, but not Michael. Heroes always get nervous when they have to start working the dirty side of the street. Oh, stop, listen to me. Reminiscing. There’s a mall opening I need to get to.”
“Just one more question,” Nancy says as Carol stands up and drops a five dollar bill on the table.
“Don't ask it,” Carol says.
“But —”
“You’re going to ask if it’s worth it,” Carol says, “and there’s no way to give you a definitive answer. For me, it was worth it. For Elaine Eastman, it wasn’t.”
“Who’s Elaine Eastman?”
“Exactly,” she nods, pulling on her coat. “Tell Michael I said hello, and file a story that’s critical of Kid. Not one that makes him look terrible, but one that lets him know you can bite.” Carol winks. “But maybe he already knows that? Take care, Nancy. See the sights when you’re in town. It’s the greatest city in the world.”
6
Nancy files a story that questions whether Kid Rapscallion is doing enough community outreach and waits in her apartment for Jason’s reaction.
It never comes.
He doesn’t watch her report because he is busy being Duplication Girl’s date at a wedding in something called the Shadow Nebula. He bought a tiger from someone who just stopped by his place at the Grand with one to sell, names him “Fred,” and gives him as a wedding gift.
Nancy gets angry and depressed and knows, though she will not admit it, that she will never really be anything more than Jason’s PR rep.
7
Jason discovers his interest in Duplication Girl goes beyond the sex, and they spend the summer of 2000 dating. Nancy knows, but doesn’t report on it. When July arrives and Jason tells her she can go public with their relationship, Nancy declines. She says it’s because she’s going on vacation, and that she’ll give the story to Kira Erdrich.
Jason is having sex with her when she makes the call to Kira ten minutes later.
8
Excerpt from More Than a Copy: The Autobiography of Duplication Girl’s Third Self
Published, 2009, Atomic Anxiety Press
The summer of 2001 was the best time I ever had. Duplication Girl moved out of the Revolutionaries’ Fort and down to Las Vegas to be with Jason. Eagle ’62 discovered that DG had brought back several cases full of Ikanium powder that she and Jason had bought from space pirates after Calling Bird’s wedding.
(I can’t believe he gave her a tiger for a wedding present!)
DG and Jason were going at it all the time and in all kinds of ways (the only rule Jason seemed to have was “no spitting,” which is like Julie Roberts’ character in Pretty Woman having a “no kissing” policy — you’re a fucking prostitute, you kiss if I say you kiss!), and yeah, us duplicates were aware of it. I don’t know how to explain it other than to say that when we were inside of DG, we experienced what the main body was experiencing as a kind of dream, and then when we were let out, it was like waking up.
People always want to know if I’m mad at Jason for what eventually happened to DG, but the truth is I owe him my life. He pushed DG like no one ever had, and sure, he was doing it because he was a horn dog, but if it wasn’t for him, I don’t think any of the duplicates would have ever come to their own distin
ct consciousness. Before DG started dating Jason, I didn’t see myself as, well, myself. I was just an extension of DG. If she wanted me to do the laundry, I did the laundry. If she wanted me to lick Jason’s balls, I licked Jason’s balls.
But the more Jason pushed her to make more and more versions of herself, the more we began to realize we were not just DG but our own individuals. We always came out in the same order, too, though I suspect if DG had reacted to 9/11 differently, we would eventually have come out based on what DG wanted. The 7th Self, for instance, loved to do chores because she was so anal about things. The 8th Self was anal-focused in a different kind of way. Ha. Love you, girl.
I was more analytical, which is why I still work with what’s left of the superhero community.
9
“I want to do something different tonight,” Jason says, kissing Duplication Girl’s forehead as he enters the kitchen they share. He’s just exited the shower and is in a towel, while she is wearing a pink Bubblegunner t-shirt and shorts.
“Ugh, not tonight,” she says, pushing him away. “I’m sore and strung out. We’re doing too much coke.”
“You’re doing too much coke, maybe,” Jason says, slapping her ass lightly. “My body still metabolizes it —”
“Double ugh,” she says, opening the refrigerator. “I’m glad you have your little speech prepared to feed Nancy in case you ever get caught doing the powder, but — oh, fuck. Are we out of milk? God shit piss, Jason. I told you to buy milk when you went to the store!”
“When I go to the store, I will,” he says, nudging her out of the way to pull out the box of leftover pizza.
“I’m not going to wait four days for milk!”
“Anyway,” he says, ignoring her doldrums as he slaps the pizza box down on the island counter and flipped the cover open, “I wasn’t talking about that.” He grabs a slice of cold, limp sausage pizza and takes a large bit. As he chews, he says, “I want to know your name.”
10
“My name is Duplication Girl,” she says.
“That’s your codename,” he says, taking another bite of cold pizza. He’s now at the part of the pizza that isn’t so limp.
“No,” she insists, “it isn’t. You know this. The scientists at EGG built me in a lab and they never called me anything but ‘Duplication Girl’ or ‘the Experiment.’ That’s it.”
“So … your real name is The Experiment.”
“Don’t be a jerk.”
“Ha, you love it, Miss Experiment,” he says, and then pulls a vial of Ikanium powder out of his pocket and shows it to her.
“Damn,” she says, feeling an urge rise up hard and fast, “I thought we were out.”
“We’re not.”
“Then why have we been doing coke all week?”
“Shut up and snort it,” he orders playfully.
DG wants to get mad because, while playful, she doesn’t like it when he gives her orders, but the allure of where the Irkanium powder will take her once she puts it in her nose overrides any sense of self-respect she can muster in this moment.
11
Kira Erdrich doesn’t know why Nancy is giving her the news of Kid Rapscallion and Duplication Girl dating. The former classmates have not had anything to do with one another since Nancy left for her TV job, leading Kira to wonder if Nancy is going soft?
“Shouldn’t you give this to someone at the station?” Kira asks her over the phone. It sounds like Nancy is watching porn, which doesn’t particularly surprise Kira since she has thought Nancy was a Grade-A Slut since the first day she met the blonde.
“I hate all of them,” Nancy says. “You take it.”
Kira decides Nancy is drubbing her superiority in her face, but takes the information and writes the story and takes another step on the ladder.
12
Nancy tells everyone she is going on vacation and prints out the itinerary for a cruise to South America, but instead of collecting her mother at the airport and driving to Los Angeles to board the Queen Adventure, she checks herself into the Grand Vegas under an assumed name.
She is in her room by 3:30 and crying by 3:31. Nancy can no longer deny that she’s in love with Jason and that she wants to be more to him than just her media mouthpiece. It hurts her that he’s dating Duplication Girl, and that he tells her about some of the things they do together. She does not hate this because she is a prude, but because she knows “Deege” is giving him something she cannot. Whatever Nancy does to Jason, whatever she does for Jason, whatever she allows Jason to do to her, it will never compare to what Duplication Girl can do.
13
Hours go by without any attempt to engage the day. Nancy realizes a truth that she thinks is profound: if you want to cry, you should stop, but if you need to cry, you should not.
She keeps the window closed, the phone disconnected, and the TV off. As the dark descends, Nancy thinks she has fallen in love with a good hero and a terrible person. For all of Jason’s faults, Kid Rapscallion is out there, every single night, saving people.
The truth about Las Vegas is that it doesn’t attract lots of super villains. Plenty of low level costumes, of course, but this city is so dependent on tourism that the big villains stay away.
No one, the thinking goes, will want to travel to a city for vacation if Big Evil or VeroniCannon is in charge. Take over, say, Milwaukee, and you’ve got an entire urban system living under your rule, but if you take over Vegas you’re left with lots of empty casinos. The thing that makes it special only happens if people feel safe coming here, so the A-list villains who want more out of their activities than money and destruction think elsewhere.
Jason has even joked that villains come here on vacation just to have a vacation.
That doesn’t mean it’s a safe city, of course, and Kid Rapscallion has stopped all sorts of bad guys and girls: Domina Tricks, Hyena Girl, Boom Fist, Jack Russell Terrorize, Cat Wild, Rainbow Delight, Mallard Mayhem (not to be confused with any of the Duck Squadron), War Mongrel, Bitterheart, Chemical Chef … and on and on.
It’s exhausting trying to keep all of them straight.
“How do you do it?” Nancy asked Jason one night after he spent an hour punching and kicking the Iguna Twins around out in the desert.
Jason shrugged. “You just do. It’s the job. Rapscallion always stressed that.”
Rapscallion.
Jason refuses to tell Nancy anything significant about the hero that raised and trained him. All she knows is that he started training Jason when he was young (maybe 14 or 15) and that they had some sort of falling out. He refuses to tell Nancy Rapscallion’s name, though she realizes she could probably figure it out if she wanted to. Lots of people in the media know/“know” the identities of heroes but there is an unwritten rule not to out that information unless necessary.
“It’s like being gay,” the station’s entertainment report had said to her one night. “I could list so many Hollywood actors who pretend to be straight that you'd fall asleep before I stopped.”
“Why don’t you say anything?”
“If we say anything, we get burned by everyone else.”
Nancy thinks of Carol, and realizes most sections of the news operate under the same set of rules and behaviors. Politics, business, entertainment, sports … they all have their version of the secret identity story.
From the bed, her eyes linger over to the remote on the desk next to the TV and she contemplates turning on the news to see who Kid Rapscallion beat up tonight, or whether Kira’s story was picked up by any of the local news agencies. Her boss has already left a message on her voicemail about it, but Nancy ignores it.
She’s on her way to Brazil, after all, and cell reception is notoriously bad at sea.
There’s shouting down the hall, the sounds of a good time being had by drunk vacationers and Nancy contemplates going downstairs to do some gambling. Or to people watch. Or to eat a meal. No one comes to the Grand Vegas just to sit in their room in the dark.<
br />
So she decides that’s what she’ll do.
14
Nancy Cathall awakens at 7:07 Pacific Coast Time, takes ten minutes to rub the sleep out of her eyes, goes to the bathroom, finds the remote, slumps back on the bed, and turns on the TV.
“—gain, our top story, the South Tower of the World Trade Center has collapsed. Repeat, the South Tower of the World Trade Center has collapsed after a commercial airliner crashed into the building at 9:03 Eastern Standard Time. The North Tower continues to burn. We go live, now, to Carol Porg for the view from the ground.”
PART
SIX
9/11
1
TRANSCRIPT FROM TARNISHED LEGACY: THE SECRET LIVES OF CAPES
Season 1, Episode 5 (S01E05): “Kid Rapscallion”
JASON KITMORE / KR
(old interview from 2005 book-signing appearance)
I’ve said it. I’ve said it and I’ll stand by it. I know people don’t like to hear it, but I’ll say it again. 9/11 was not the fault of the superhero community. Heroes are responsible for villains. Cops for street thugs. And international terrorists are the purview of the intelligence community: the NSA and the CIA.
NANCY CATHALL
(shakes head, speak quietly)
I wish Jason would just shut up about 9/11. I’m not saying he’s wrong, necessarily, but it’s not something people will ever want to hear.
JASON KITMORE / KR
(old interview from 2005 book-signing appearance)
Of course it’s a tragedy. Of course it is. And if a hero knew about it, he should do everything in his power to stop it. But we didn’t hear about it and no one at CIA or NSA or FBI or DOD ever said anything to a cape about it, as far as I know.
Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story Page 9