After some minutes the hairless old man with the pale skin and the thin but dense chest had appeared in a towel in the sauna and struck up a conversation. I told him I was a minister, and he told me, laughing, he was a retired super hero who had gotten impatient with the competition and gone into the drug trade. The rub was that this was the absolute truth. We’d gotten into a long conversation about Nietzsche and gnosticism, in the course of which the sauna dehydrated me, and I lost track of the time. He helped me out, staggering, leaned me against a tile wall for a shower and a cup of water, and laughed some more. Wesley Dodds had laughed all the time—just like Superman—even through the bad times. He’d sat me down on the bench in front of the women’s locker room, and when Ellen came out, startled, he told her just to pour lots of that Glacial Milk mineral soft drink down my gullet. Ellen and I had invited him over for a home-cooked meal that evening, and, from that day until fifteen years later when I buried him, we were friends.
“There were voices,” Wesley said, “and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake. And there followed hail and fire mingled with blood.”
He lay propped up on the bed at Saint Clare’s now. Doctors had removed him from the intensive care unit, saying it would do him no good at that point. The most intensive care he could get now consisted of attention and comforting, they told me. Wesley suffered three strokes and two heart attacks, and only the enormous investment he’d made through the years in individual health insurance kept his doctors from issuing a “do-not-resuscitate” order. Years into the Twenty-First Century, enormously heroic measures for extending the period of a person’s dying were available to anyone like Wesley who insisted on emerging kicking and screaming into the next world like a babe in birth trauma.
I was familiar by now with Wesley’s recurring visions. He kept talking about the eagle carrying the golden lance, contending in the sky with a giant sucking bat as doom approached from out of sight. There were torrents of green fire, flashes of red lightning. Wesley spoke of a legion of the mighty drowning in a great lake of heat waves and burning sand, and over and over again of the American flag in the shape of a man, tattered and torn, struggling to emerge through a wall of fire.
He described all this again, ignoring my pleas to rest. He said, “There fell a great star from heaven, burning as if it were a lamp. And I beheld, and heard an Angel saying with a loud voice, ‘Woe woe woe to the inhabiters of the Earth.’ ”
Wesley used to call himself the Sandman during his youth. No one to my knowledge ever gave him a genetic test, but he was probably a metahuman the same as Green Arrow the archer and Wonder Woman the Amazon Princess and—who knows?—Joe DiMaggio and Muhammad Ali. The current thinking in scientific circles, or the thinking that was current the last time I read the latest journal report, is that the capacity to rise to what we call super heroism is genetic. Estimates are that the metagene is in the cellular structure of 12 to 16 percent of the current human population. It appears to be a highly dominant trait.
Back before I was old enough to be conscious of such goings-on, the Sandman had been all over the tabloids, one of the first—or maybe the very first—of the modern wave of masked adventurers with a solid sense of public relations. His “costume” had been rudimentary: a trench coat and, to hide his face, a World War One mustard gas mask that he’d found in a trunk in his grandfather’s attic upon the old man’s death. He’d skulked through the night solving mysteries, righting wrongs, sandbagging bad guys. It had been a lot of fun, he insisted, until he found he was developing arthritis in his joints as a result of all the rooftop-leaping, window-crashing, and thug-tackling that came to be expected of a super hero on a day-to-day basis.
“It was all my fault I had to quit,” Wesley had mused over a glass of Bordeaux he’d brought to share with Ellen and me one evening back in Wilmette. “I demanded too much of my body. Much too much. Who knew what super heroes were supposed to act like before I decided how I would act?”
“What do you mean?” Ellen asked him.
“Well, my pop was a major-league pitcher for a few years, you know.”
“Really?” My ears perked up; I’d been an enormous Cubbies fan all my life, up until the day Darkstar and the Manotaur rumbled out the last World Series back in ’02. “What club was he with?”
“The Tribe mostly,” Wesley said, “and I spent most of my childhood in Cleveland. He was the guy on the mound when the Babe pointed up in the bleachers and sent a home run where he’d pointed.”
“You mean that really happened?” I said, astonished. “I thought it was apocryphal.”
“Most stories are apocryphal and true at the same time, but that one’s real to boot,” Wesley told us, taking another sip. “I was there. Yankee Stadium. Independence Day weekend. Way back. Pop was none too happy with that pitch, and the skipper took him out of the lineup after that inning. I sat in the visitors’ dugout with my father’s teammates because he didn’t trust me to the New York crowds. Can you imagine that? A father feeling it was unsafe for a young boy alone in a crowd of baseball fans even back then? Ah, me.”
“What did Babe Ruth and Yankee Stadium have to do with the Sandman?”
“I’d grown up around super heroes,” he said, pouring Ellen and himself another half-glassful, “or around the closest thing we had to them. I used to resent sports figures being called heroes in the press. Then I realized the Sandman was taking all his signals from them. You couldn’t be effective as a costumed adventurer in the Nineteen-Thirties and Forties without owing a lot to Babe Ruth and guys like him.”
“Are you telling me Babe Ruth was a metahuman?”
“I don’t know about the science,” Wesley went on. “Genetics is voodoo to me. I just knew that the Babe was my idea of what a super hero was supposed to be like. Strong. Unrelenting. Incredibly generous of spirit.”
“And apparently unable to grow up,” Ellen observed, with Wesley nodding.
“Same as me.” He smiled. “Still.”
“So why’d you stop, really?” I asked him.
“The competition in the super hero biz got to be hell.” Wesley had laughed, Ellen and I laughing with him—not because it’d been funny, but because Wesley had seen fit to laugh.
Then he stared at his glass, rolling it back and forth over the fingers of his left hand so the good wine draped viscous liquid curtains over the inside of the crystal. “And one day,” he said, “I realized it was the life of a super hero that killed the Babe, and I didn’t want it to kill me too. I loved life so much back then that just those memories’ll keep a man going for a long time after.”
*
I looked out the window of the hospital room that housed my friend Wesley’s deathbed, and the night sky was peppered with dark, darting creatures. They perched on gargoyles and spires. They traced the lines of the roadways like low-flying planes. They hovered here and there, conferring and congregating high above the rooftops. They were mutations and accidents and biochemical experiments gone awry. They were the children and grandchildren of heroes and villains and retired victims of circumstance of a simpler age. They were heirs to a lost time of right and wrong in the Universe, when that distinction had not been difficult to make. They had a dimension beyond that which the rest of us possessed, and, more than the skyline itself, they dominated the spirit and identity of this city.
When Superman had dropped from sight, so had most of his generation of higher-minded warriors. He’d been the most powerful and, paradoxically, the most human of them. He’d also seemed unbound by the infirmities that age brings, those troublesome little stiffenings of the soul that we like to cover over with a cosmetic we ironically call “dignity.” I guess we supposed that guys like Batman and Green Lantern and the Flash and Hawkman simply had receded into the scenery the way stage and film stars did, in favor of younger players better able to take the same roles. Those of us who wondered some more, however, soon noticed that the roles had become different. Heroism was no longer about inspiri
ng human achievement. Suddenly it was about belittling it.
Wesley told me that. It was around the time he first interrupted my sermon.
It was not only Metropolis’ sky that was different. On and under the ground, things were going unfixed. Battles over the landscape left cars and buildings a shambles, and the asphalt and concrete of the byways themselves lumpy and misshapen like an ill-tended throw rug. For all the burst pipes and water mains, water pressure was so depressed that it usually took most of a day to fill a bathtub, and showers were a luxury available only at out-of-the-way spas. Commerce was next to impossible in the general vicinity of where these young super-folks contended or simply showed off, and Midtown alone—from the old Union Station up to the Park—averaged two rumbles a day. That was what the set-tos among these highly hormoned types were called: rumbles. I understand that Cal Tech has begun measuring rumbles seismically and giving them ratings on the Richter scale.
By this time I’d lost track first of most of the costumed folks’ names, and then of who were the good guys and who were the bad guys altogether. Apparently I was not the only one. The popular culture as well twisted to the shape of this new self-image that humans were growing around themselves. Wesley called me early one morning about a year before his death, all excited over the new theme restaurant called Planet Krypton on the far side of Governor’s Plaza.
“Come on,” he barked through the phone line and my morning haze. I had not found my glasses or the coffee maker yet, and he was saying, “Get your holier-than-shit ass out of the kip, Padre, and I’ll meet you in your lobby at seven forty-five. That’s fifteen minutes by most of my clocks.”
I did not mind his swearing; it seemed to fit the context of his personality. But I hated it when he called me “Padre,” and I was not sure why. “Is there life at this hour?” I asked him.
“Only metahuman life,” he said. “This place has an under-twenty-buck breakfast special. My treat for a change,” and he hung up.
The subways in Metropolis were continually being repaired. The taxis were uniformly rusted-down, cannibalized, homemade jobs that as often as not leaked exhaust into the interiors and onto the passengers. Buses were a joke, and the phrase “bus schedule” was a contradiction in terms. No one kept a car in Metropolis unless it was up on blocks in some secured location, and no one drove into town in a car built since the turn of the century except to get an insurance settlement on it. The only reasonably reliable means of transportation around town were feet and hovercraft. Rich corporate executives used the prohibitively expensive vehicles. Hovercraft were good because if they got caught up in a rumble, they were not bound by roads, rails, or gravity. They could generally recover their stability through shock waves much like a sailboat, unless they took a direct hit from one of the “heroes.”
Congress was forever passing laws in an attempt to nullify the economic hardships that metahuman activity imposed on individuals and communities. Most insurance companies had a special high-priced category of rumble coverage. The award of benefits for rumble insurance was based on rules and assumptions similar to those governing “acts of God.”
Highly active metahumans learned early on that the best career path for them, despite or perhaps because of their enormous earning power, was to get whatever they needed through whatever means they could manage, and stay as broke and unlitigable as they could. Whatever got in their way—buildings, walls, asphalt, people, irresistible forces, immovable objects—would crumble, and they did not have to pay for anything no matter what laws Congress passed. All the President’s horses and all the President’s men still could not figure out how to squeeze water from a stone or reparations from a wild-eyed impoverished super hero.
So Wesley met me in the lobby of the old LexCorp Building, where I lived in a little apartment adjoining the upper floor of the church, and we walked the several blocks downtown. Wesley counted vehicles with handprints, footprints, or what he thought were dents from body slams somewhere in their hulls before we reached the Plaza. I was increasingly hesitant to walk with him through town, the scenery upset him so. At the Plaza the police stood waving their arms mechanically, moving pedestrians along. Behind them strips of yellow tape cordoned off what used to be the eastern exterior wall of the big old Metropolitan Radio Corporation building. Some sort of flying craft three stories high hung partly in and partly out of the sixth floor where, I knew, they were usually broadcasting the morning’s installment of The Daybreak Show. At least it looked like a flying craft, with its curved aerodynamic chassis twisted into itself along lines that traced where the building walls once were. Later, I realized it was actually the remains of the statue of Odysseus that had stood in the nearby square for decades, all twisted and stretched so it reminded me of some weird science-fiction artifact.
“Move along,” the middle-aged policeman said to people who were, by and large, already moving along. “Move along,” he repeated as his arms waved, and the people on the sidewalk ignored both him and the spectacle.
“Hey, son.” Wesley tried to get the cop’s attention.
“Move along,” the cop said, and didn’t notice Wesley was talking to him.
“Excuse me. Officer?” Wesley persisted.
“Yes, sir?” the man answered, a little bit surprised as he continued to wave his arm back and forth as though a little motor in his shoulder were forcing him to do so.
“Ever miss the concept of human achievement?” Wesley asked the cop.
I rolled my eyes and yanked Wesley by the jacket sleeve, but he locked eyes with the Metro cop long enough to see the man tilt his head like a pet dog who did not understand what you were trying to tell him. Then he gathered up his officiousness and said, “Move along,” some more. “Move along.”
Wesley counted body-slammed cars numbers seven, eight, and nine in the remaining block before we made it to the restaurant and slipped inside.
*
It was the Twentieth Century again at the Planet Krypton restaurant, sort of. For most of the latter years of the last century the building on this site had been called The Hippodrome. Years ago it had been a multiple-level parking garage and apparently had done a good business holding cars for commuters during workdays and for revelers at night and on weekends. People used to come into Metropolis to revel a lot. There was no longer much use for multilevel parking garages in this city of biologically propelled ground and sky traffic. The restaurant developers had hollowed out the big garage, and on its roof was a rotating model of Krypton—a wobbly green planet caught in the act of exploding. Continents hung by thick rods off the meridians of the doomed world. A proportionally planet-sized spacecraft of an oddly art deco style revolved around it in permanent escape mode. The battlements of the building were decked out with cartoony baby pictures of some of the most familiar masked faces of a bygone time: the Flash from Central City; Wonder Woman with big hair; the crisp young dawn-of-the-space-age fellow who used to wear the Green Lantern uniform extending a hand, his ring glowing and spewing fumes as if of dry ice; and more. They all looked so wholesome and quaint up there, even the villains. I guess that was the idea.
The interior of Planet Krypton had all the charm of a barn. Sound bounced off the walls and fixtures in an unsettling din. At the end of the century, I remembered, there had been a trend toward gutting old industrial spaces in Midtown and turning them into sandwich-and-martini houses with themes. It was a throwback in form as well as content.
Wesley covered his face with a wary mask when a maitre d’ in an ill-fitting Green Lantern suit stepped briskly up to the two of us. The kid did that officious heel-off-the-ground “ahem” and said, “Good morning, citizens. How may I serve you?”
“What the hell—” Wesley said.
“Two for breakfast,” I interrupted my friend.
It was important to Wesley that the costumed champions of whom he was the first—and of whom Superman was perhaps the last—be remembered for the values they had brought to their chosen fights. I
t was important to him that the world remained aware of the generations of metahumans who had advanced human achievement rather than stomped on it. Thus, his excitement upon hearing about this silly little restaurant. He should not have been surprised that the anticipation outshone the reality.
As Green Lantern showed us to our seats, Wesley snarled at a strawberry blonde waitress in a Wonder Woman outfit, and then commented with a sniff at our emerald warrior, “Well, at least they got a guy with the right color hair.”
“Did they? Yeah, I guess so.” The boy in green grinned effusively. “So what do you think? Not a bad job on the tights, huh? They tell me I make a pretty good Green—what do you call him?—Arrow,” he noted mistakenly, and then he scurried off to greet some more “citizens.”
Booster Gold’s original costume—that is what the plaque read, at any rate—hung over a mannequin in a clear cylindrical case on the restaurant floor. I heard later that the former Justice Leaguer was a partner in this enterprise, and that there were franchises going up in Keystone, Midway, Gotham City, and South Coast within the year. A little red-haired girl in green sunglasses and a Robin costume waited on us. The Martian Manhunter, with buck teeth and freckles showing through the green facial makeup, carried a tray of glasses. Catwoman and Lobo, both bulging a bit in the midriff, bused tables. All sorts of ticky-tack reproductions peppered the big room. Aquaman’s trident sat on a shelf propped on a green power battery. A golden Amazon tiara hung from a hat rack next to Captain Marvel’s cape and the original Flash’s winged helmet. A plaster fist wearing a tight blue cuffless sleeve protruded from a hole in a wall. A scale model of something that looked like the first Bat-Plane anyone had ever seen hung in a power-diving position from long wires in the ceiling. Episodes of an old cartoon series called Super-Tots, about super-powered babies in costumes of the original Justice League members, played on a multiple-screen complex at an angle connecting the ceiling to one wall. A golden eagle-beaked head mask straddled a Twelfth-Century European mace and a Sixteenth-Century pair of Asian nunchuks. Wesley even noticed a mustard gas mask, circa World War One, peeking out from behind a holographic display of famous front pages from the defunct Daily Planet, but he did not seem flattered or even impressed.
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