From up here I can see down into the restaurant, beyond the yellow-lettered window, which reads CLARK’S PLACE though the owners are a Vietnamese couple by the name of Ngoc-Tran. “They probably needed something catchier, for business purposes,” Luc said, explaining why they used the name. “Koreans do it all the time.”
So do superheroes.
The last of the afternoon regulars finally leaves, and my mother takes a cigarette break at a corner booth. She stares out at the street, taking greedy drags of a Marlboro. She exhales smoke against the window, and it dances before her face like some sort of phantom lover. I often catch my mother in these moments, a sad woman in pink, looking into nothing, waiting. “That’s how I met your father,” she once confessed in a stupor. She was one of Manila Rosie’s Beauties, the best dancing girls the Navy boys could find in the city. “And I was your daddy’s favorite,” she said. After a two-week courtship he proposed to my mother, promising her citizenship in the USA. “United Stars of America” is what she called it. I have had longing dreams about this incarnation of my mother, seeing her asleep and afloat in outer space, the constellations re-forming themselves around her. I try to locate this part of her in myself, to isolate it from all the other stuff.
Then suddenly, from nowhere, a man in a uniform invades the picture. He sits down at her booth, lights my mother another cigarette, lights his own. They begin to talk. I don’t need to hear what they’re saying; I can read the words, frame by frame. My mother laughs, her hand over her breast, as if she is gasping for air. She is weakening.
Oh, stop! You’re too much, do you know that? she says.
He tosses his head back, his shoulders bouncing up and down, up and down, laughing at his own jokes with a villain’s arrogance. Then he grabs my mother’s hand and brings it close to his face. He is acquainting himself with my mother’s biology, remembering the texture of her skin, her scent. My little tropical gardenia, he says to her. But I can read the thought bubbles above his head. So easy. This bitch will be so easy.
I’m too far and high up above. There’s no way to warn her in time, no hope for a last-minute rescue.
In 1976 the Green Lantern returns to the stars. This is a difficult time for him. Realizing that he is unable to wipe out evil on Earth and the societal ills of the era, he falters in his ability to wield the power ring. He is summoned to Oa, where the Guardians put him on trial and consider finding a replacement. The following dialogue is an excerpt from that trial:
“Perhaps Abin Sur was mistaken in selecting you, Hal Jordan.”
“Please, Guardians. Allow me to prove myself worthy of the ring. Allow me to be your champion once more.”
The world jerks to a stop, and my pencil slips from my hands. I pick it up from the littered bus floor. “Brake more gently next time!” I shout to the bus driver. Baldie shoots me a look from his extended rearview mirror.
He does it again at the next stop. “Hey!” I rise from my seat. “I said brake more gently next time!” I walk toward the front. “Did you hear me?” Baldie ignores me and slams on the brakes at the light. I keep him in my eye as I fight gravity, but I lose my footing; I fall. But just as quickly I’m up again, and I almost manage to dig the point of my pencil into his arm, but two of his henchmen passengers force me off before I can make contact with his skin. I walk the rest of the way home against traffic so loud that it smothers the battle cries in my head.
When I call, Luc’s grandmother picks up the phone. I don’t bother identifying myself; she always drops the receiver at the sound of my voice, and I have to wait two or three minutes until Luc finds out it’s for him. To his grandmother, I’m The Filipino, the mutant friend who is too different for her to speak with, too weird to be allowed to come over.
Luc finally picks up, and I tell him what happened. “Just breathe for a sec,” he says, competing with loud kitchen noises in the background. “It’ll be fine.”
“He had to be stopped,” I explain. “He’s putting other lives at risk. Better the driver die than a busload of innocents.” If I have to be the one to do it, then I’ll do it.
Luc understands the good of my intentions and says so. “But it’s over now. You kept all those passengers safe.”
“Let’s hope.”
Then Luc says he’s sorry but he has to go, his mother needs to call his aunt about a Korean variety show on cable.
“No problemo,” I say, “and thanks again. Old chum.”
With my mother at the restaurant, I have time to work in my lab. I can construct bombs and explosives, but these require the proper chemicals and materials, and I can use the bathroom for only so many hours in a day before my mother becomes suspicious. When she pounds on the door, asking what I am doing, I tell her nothing, to please give me five or ten minutes. She guesses that I am masturbating and tells me to stop. I tell her okay.
My favorite weapon is my slingshot. I stole it from a high-quality sporting goods store six months back: lightweight, aerodynamic, potential of elasticity twenty times as great as the average sling. How enraging, to think that a lesser comic like Dennis the Menace has reduced the slingshot to a mischief-making toy kept in a child’s back pocket! People forget that David killed Goliath with a slingshot. With the proper ammunition, I could kill too.
But I am at work on what I hope will be the greatest addition to my arsenal.
Centuries ago Filipino warriors created the yo-yo as a weapon, emitting from their hands stone-heavy objects at the ends of twenty-foot-long ropes. They learned to hunt with it, to kill. Eventually the yo-yo immigrated to America. The story goes that a traveling salesman named Duncan saw one and introduced it to the country as a new hobby, a toy to pass the time.
I intend to get it back.
I will fuse together my native ingenuity with modern technology to create a weapon of the deadliest force. My yo-yo will be of marble, attached to string at least fifty feet long, so that even from rooftops I can stun my enemies far, far below. My father too had weapons. In the framed photo my mother keeps on her bureau, he holds a rifle in one hand, my mother in the other.
Suddenly I hear movement in the apartment. “Come out here!” my mother shouts, pounding on the bathroom door. “Come out and meet my new friend!”
“You’re early! Hold on a sec!” I stash everything behind the toilet paper under the sink, hiding it next to the Windex and Lysol.
I open the door and find my mother standing before me, her head resting dreamily on a man’s arm. “Honey,” she says, smiling at me, “this is Alex. He’s our mailman. We met today at the restaurant.”
At least six feet tall, Lex towers over my mother and over me. He is well-postured, undoubtedly strong and agile. His uniform shows a badge of a bald eagle, and another badge tells me that he has proudly delivered U.S. mail for five years. “Hey, champ,” he says. He fixes his eyes, as blue and sharp as lasers, on me. Five milky-white fingers reach out.
Armed with addresses and ZIP codes, Lex can track down anyone, anywhere. If my mother and I were to escape, he could follow the trail of our forwarding address to find us. It’s the extra sense, the instinct, of a hunter.
Villain.
But I accept his challenge and take his hand. I tilt my head down just a bit, so that my glasses slide down the bridge of my nose. “Nice to meet you,” I say. Lex does a double take at my nonmatching eyes. Already I have the upper hand.
My mother and Lex want privacy, so tonight I’m a bedroom shut-in. But I can still hear them laughing, dancing clumsily around the front room to old Motown love songs. Luckily, I have the ability to phase out any and all distractions, to teleport my thoughts, even my senses, elsewhere. I believe this is another of my mutant abilities, the active residue of my father’s genetic imprint. It’s the power he used on Mom and me.
I use that power now. I have homework to do.
I’m at that difficult point in my research where Hal Jordan’s status as a hero comes into question. In Green Lantern #50, Volume 3, he stands befor
e a jury of Guardians, on trial for attempting to alter history in order to save his destroyed city and its murdered inhabitants. “Surrender the ring!” they say in unison. “We command you!”
And then: Hal Jordan’s face. His mask. His eyes. Then nothing. Only a frightening flash of green.
I turn the page slowly, knowing what comes next: an exploding sky, fallen emerald towers, the lifeless bodies of Guardians long thought to be immortal scattered among the debris. Hal Jordan takes their rings, all of them, and explodes into space, his eyes blank with madness and power. It’s the face of a villain, the kind I’ve seen a million times before.
But consider what Hal Jordan has seen! Consider the burden he bears! He got there too late. He arrived just in time to witness his city’s destruction by an enemy he couldn’t defeat. You don’t recover from that; you fix it. If I could rewrite the world, I’d do the same.
The following pages are panels of green: he wipes out a building in the background, KRAZAAKK!, one in the foreground, BLAZAAAM! He destroys another, and another. Then—CRASH!—something made of glass falls to the floor in the living room. I hear my mother and Lex whirling around to the music, bumping into bookshelves and walls, causing fragile things to fall. They laugh through loud kisses.
“Could you please be quiet out there?” They don’t answer. “Would you be quiet, please?”
At 2:43 A.M. I wake from weird dreams. Dehydrated and dizzy, I get a glass of milk. On the way back to my room I peek through my mother’s half-closed door. She’s curled up in Lex’s arms. Tangled sheets bind them together.
I walk toward them, silent in bare feet, invisible in the blue glow of the digital clock. I stand at the foot of the bed, watching their bodies rise and fall with every breath. If I wanted to, I could crawl in between them, slip my head into the circle of my mother’s arms, and ram my knee into Lex’s balls.
My mother mumbles something in her sleep, and slowly she turns away from Lex. I go to her. I can feel her pupils shift side to side beneath the skin of her eyelids, and I press down on them just enough until the panic in her head subsides. I move a strand of black hair away from her face, looping it slowly around my finger.
I float to the other side of the bed, over to Lex. In the moonlight he is even paler, and the stubble on his chin is like metallic bristles against my knuckles. I kneel next to him and set my head down beside his. I can see my mother’s lipstick smeared along his neck, trailing down to the center of his chest. I imagine my mother kissing him, just inches above where the heart should be. I lay my palm there, just barely touching skin. I can feel the life beating inside him.
“What do you want from us?” I whisper to him. “Who sent you here?” But like my mother, he is drowned in sleep or just passed out.
So I test him. I tip my almost-empty glass, letting a tiny drop of milk fall onto his ear. The white dot slides from the outer edge and vanishes into the black hole of his ear canal. His neck and shoulders jerk, lightning-quick. Then he is still again.
“Assassin,” I say. I return to the kitchen to wash my glass.
We have not seen The Gas for almost two weeks since the battle. At lunch Luc and I split up, eavesdropping on conversations, trying to piece together the fate of our nemesis.
After school we regroup on the library roof. “I heard Suzy Cheerleader talking to one of the vice principals,” Luc says. “Brandon’s in the hospital.”
“The Gas will be fine,” I tell him, staring out onto the campus quad. We stay low, speaking in whispers.
“Did you hear me? He’s in the hospital. His arm needs some sort of operation. Skin grafts or something. What did you put in that thing anyway?”
Skin grafts. Then the body of my enemy is mutating as well. Fascinating. “Mercury fulminate, chloride of azode, some other chemicals. The usual.” I keep an eye out until I finally spot Tenzil, blanketing the school with his propaganda. I blame Tenzil, an ally of The Gas, for our corrupt student government. As vice president, he’s the person who rejected my proposal for a school trip to next year’s Comic Book Convention, and gave my money to varsity track instead.
I pull the yo-yo from my bag. “What the hell is that?” Luc asks.
“Quiet.” This moment requires silence and the utmost precision.
Tenzil comes closer as I loop the string round and round my finger until I’ve cut off circulation. I raise my hand over the edge. But suddenly Luc grabs my wrist. “Don’t,” he says, trying to bring me back.
I take a quick foot to his stomach, freeing myself from his clutches. “If we don’t get him, he’ll get us.”
“What are you talking about?” Luc asks, as if he doesn’t already know. He reaches for my wrist again, but he’s too slow: I snap my hand forward, letting go of the yo-yo for its spectacular debut.
The double disk drops straight to the ground, deadly with the force and weight of marble. But Tenzil is gone, and the yo-yo dangles at the string’s end, lifeless, refusing to wind its way back up to me. “Where is he?” I say. “Where the fuck did he go?” I crane my neck over the edge, scanning the quad, the locker bay, anywhere someone might hide from me. But Tenzil is nowhere to be found. “Traitor!” I accuse Luc. But when I turn, he too is gone.
I take a quick inventory of my surroundings.
No traces.
I keep no school ID, have no driver’s permit. I tossed my Social Security card once I had committed the number to memory. Anonymity keeps me safe.
I stop by Ollie’s Market on the way home. Ollie stands behind the counter, a sixty-something grump in a sweat-stained undershirt, venting his frustrations to anyone who’ll listen. At his side is Sasha the Amputee, Ollie’s half retriever, half something else. Sasha’s right hind leg was the only casualty of the last holdup, which Ollie swears, despite the ski masks, was done by Filipino gangsters. “Filipinos!” he curses to the air. “Stealing this and stealing that!”
He makes this so easy.
My mutant biology hides that part of me he would fear. Ollie continues complaining and accusing, unaware that a shape-shifter stands before him. I tell him I know exactly how he feels, that they really can’t be trusted, that they’re a dangerous and deadly breed, as my hand fingers its way to the mini-rack of candy bars at my side.
But Sasha sees. The mutt snarls, her snout pointed at me, accusing me. Go ahead, I dare her. Hobble after me and you’ll lose another, you damaged bitch. Mission accomplished, I tell Ollie goodbye, and press my heel onto Sasha’s front paw as I walk out the door. She lets out a pathetic yelp. “Sorry.” I smile at Ollie, petting the dog’s head.
I exit the store and make a sharp right into an alleyway. I cross a four-way intersection diagonally, dodging cars and buses. I make a left, a right, and another right. I round corner after corner until the geometry of the city swallows me whole and it’s safe for me to eat.
The shades are drawn when I enter our apartment. I hear movement from the bedroom. “Mom?”
I open her door. “Mom.” She’s on the floor, lying on her side. Laid out beside her is my father’s uniform, still wrapped in plastic on a wire hanger. She reaches out to it, moving her thumb back and forth over a shiny gold button.
I give her a shot of Johnnie Walker. I pour her another and then another, and she goes on about how Lex doesn’t love her, that the evil in men will always kill her, more and more slowly each time. “All the time. All the time this happens. Tell your father to stop it, please.” She weeps into my chest, clinging to my shirt. Streaks of blood stain her hands. She’s been cutting herself again.
An orphaned boy sees a bat flying through a window. The last son of Krypton dreams of the afterglow of his dead home world. All heroes have their omens; this blood will be mine.
“I will,” I tell her. “I swear it.” But she cannot hear my oath.
In conclusion, he is no longer the Green Lantern. With a final surge of power, Hal Jordan transforms himself into Parallax, a master of space and dimension. His only agenda: to destroy time, to inte
rrupt for good the linearity of history. With one hand he will knock past, present, and future out of order; he will be the judge of who may live, who will die, and who will never have existed at all. Time will move forward, time will move back, until it collides with itself, until what is left is the Zero Hour, and all that has gone wrong can finally be set right.
Villains and heroes don’t ask for the power they’re given: Destiny, Fate, and Luck drop it on us like a star, and we have no choice but to use it.
Tonight I must enter the fray.
I paint black around my eyes, like a domino mask, erasing the traces of who I am.
Mother’s future slips into Mother’s past as I don my father’s uniform jacket. It fits perfectly; I never knew our bodies were the same. Gold buttons sparkle on my chest, badges adorn my arms. To the collar I attach a cape, a long piece of cloth light enough that it does not impede my speed, dark enough that it keeps me wrapped in night shadows. All superassassins rely on the darkness.
I place my ammunition—segments of aluminum pipe filled with impact-sensitive explosives—in a leather pouch attached to my belt. I secure the slingshot in my front belt loop; the yo-yo I keep in an oversized pocket on my pant leg.
Midnight strikes. I climb out the window, descend the fire escape, and run through the city, staying in back alleys and on unlit streets. I keep an eye out for any and all enemies who dare to venture into the night. Though they are many and I am one, I will fight this battle alone. I have no need for Luc anymore. Sidekicks are extraneous; they give up the fight too easily. Robin was killed off for a reason after all.
I make my way to the abandoned projects. I enter through the back, and blast open the door to the stairwell. I fly up seven, eight, nine flights. I need to go higher.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen flights. I must go higher.
I reach the roof. I walk along its perimeter. Night wind howls all around, blowing my cape behind me like a black ghost in tow.
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