No wonder she wanted to paint him the colour blue.
“But I didn’t ask for this. I never wanted this. I just want to disappear.”
“You’d be surprised how many people say that in my office.” Amelia managed a weak smile that did nothing to lift her client’s spirits.
They tied up a few more legal odds and ends, and then Kyle left the lawyer’s office for his next appointment. As he descended the flight of stairs to the ground floor, he could hear her typing away on her computer, feverishly writing up notes on their meeting, no doubt to be featured in her upcoming book.
Twenty-eight minutes later.
“Right on time, as usual. How are you feeling today, Kyle?”
Last on the list: Dr. Gary Sparco, general practitioner and doctor to all the superheroes in the county. This, of course, meant just Kyle. The portly and mostly bald man seemed genuinely happy to see the man literally hovering in his examination room.
“Same as always,” he said, punctuating his declaration with a shrug.
His words were almost lost in the hissing sound of the doctor taking his blood pressure, which was usually a futile endeavour. The results frequently didn’t make much sense or contradicted the previous visit’s recorded reading, but it was habit for the good doctor. Once, Kyle had somehow broken the doctor’s automated blood pressure machine, so now Dr. Sparco took it manually. The portable ones were easier to replace.
Today, it seemed Kyle’s blood pressure was 80 over 120, which was the opposite of most people and generally considered impossible.
“Kyle, one day you’re going to send me to an early grave. You realize you don’t make sense—at least your body doesn’t. I’m telling you, you need a specialist.”
On the far side of town, Kyle could hear a car screeching to a stop and a dog barking at the car in annoyance.
“You’re tellin’ me there’s a specialist for my condition? That’s news to me. Yeah, everybody wants to prod and poke me, run tests, and try and keep me in a lab to study. Goddammit! My lawyer got rich off fighting that one. Naw, you’ve been my doctor since I can remember. There’s more to being a doctor than just how much medicine you know. There’s also trust. And I trust you.”
Sitting down in front of his patient, the doctor did a quick visual survey of Kyle. Eyes looked good. Skin tone customary. Hair not falling out. Regular respiration. To Sparco, Kyle looked maddeningly normal and healthy.
“Wish I had your faith in me, Kyle, but as usual, I’ll do my best. Any new symptoms or abilities to report?”
“Well, I think I’m beginning to attract animals. I’m not sure, but for the last week or so, there have been a whole lot of earthworms crawling up out of the ground around my house. Hundreds. Thousands. And as a result, lots and lots of robins have been swooping down on my lawn to eat them. Now, I’ve lived in that house forever, and I’m pretty sure that’s not normal.” He paused for a second. “Kinda annoying, actually.”
Dr. Sparco wrote something down on Kyle’s chart, shaking his head ever so slightly.
“Spontaneous abilities still manifesting themselves. I don’t even know how to categorize this one. Possibly pheromones of some sort, but I’ll add it to the list and do some research later. Okay, let me check the back of your throat.”
Kyle opened his mouth wide and discovered he could disconnect his jaw at will now.
“This is also new,” muttered the good doctor as he peered down the man’s throat. “That’s enough, Kyle. You can… close your mouth now.”
Kyle did as he was told, and his jaw slipped back into place. “Well?”
The doctor put his clipboard down and swivelled in his chair to face the patient. “Well, what? You know that even after all this time, this is as new and bizarre to me as it is to you. I don’t know what to tell you, Kyle. We’ve run what tests we can, which as you know is difficult in itself. We can’t draw blood because of that damn puncture-proof skin. So we’re reduced to doing what we can with saliva, urine and stool samples. Your urine eats through our plastic and glass containers, so that makes things extra tricky.”
The lights in the room momentarily flickered. Kyle hoped it wasn’t him.
“Can you at least tell me whether I’m getting better or worse?”
On the wall behind Dr. Sparco was a line of cartoonish body charts illustrating various organ and circulatory systems. Kyle had glanced at them on his first visit to the doctor’s office and had long since memorized them. Another side effect of his condition.
“I don’t know. You keep manifesting new abilities all the time. So far, none of them are overly injurious to other people or yourself, but that may be only for now. And then you lose other ones. You no longer glow in the dark, as far as I can tell, so that’s something. Other… I don’t know what you would call them… powers… don’t change. It’s hard to tell.” The man looked frustrated. “This is new territory. I wish I could tell you more.”
The room went silent, as silent as any room could be with Kyle’s superhearing. Somebody not far away, just a block or two, was shouting out answers to a Family Feud episode.
“Kyle…?”
Kyle looked up.
“I’m sorry. You had such high hopes. You wanted to make a difference.”
Kyle nodded, touched by the older man’s empathy. “I talked to this elder on my reserve a few days ago. You know, looking for help trying to figure things out. Didn’t know what he could offer me, him not being a particularly scientific kind of guy. But I’m getting pretty desperate…”
“What did he say?”
Outside the window, clouds had overtaken the sun and the world had become a little gloomier. On the doctor’s desk was a four-inch-long quartz crystal. Kyle picked it up, savouring the cold, glassy feeling in his hand.
“He told me that he was taught that we were the land and the land was us. In a perfect world, we were to reflect each other. And if something is wrong with the Earth, then it makes sense that something will be wrong with us. It kind of makes sense, don’t you think?”
Living so close to a First Nations community, Sparco had always tried to keep an open mind about traditional Native beliefs. A good many modern medicines came from compounds originally developed by these so-called “primitive” people. So he nodded, wondering where the conversation was going.
Gently squeezing the crystal, Kyle continued talking, remembering the conversation he’d had the preceding Sunday. “He thought maybe I was the Earth fighting back. I’m the first casualty of a war to come.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I stopped trying to figure any of this out a long time ago.” Turning the cloudy semi-precious stone slowly in his hand, Kyle counted the six sides of smooth, angular coldness. “Why am I the way I am, Doctor?”
Dr. Sparco wasn’t sure he was comfortable with where the conversation was going. “Kyle, you know we aren’t sure…”
“But there are theories, aren’t there?”
“Of course there are. There are always theories, but—”
“But some make more sense than others, don’t they? Okay, Doctor, after all these tests and examinations, why do you think I am the way I am? You’ve read all the reports on the tests the government did, the tests you’ve done, all the resources of our fine society… Why am I the way I am? Why am I?”
The doctor bit his lower lip. He had nothing to hide. This wasn’t a massive government conspiracy. Still, like every doctor worth his salt, Sparco was not fond of delivering bad news. He’d become a doctor specifically with the hopes of delivering as much good news as possible. Today was not going to be such a day. “It’s complicated.” He wasn’t sure where to go from there.
Kyle held up the quartz and looked through it at the squat, malformed figure of the doctor on the other side. “The world is complicated. Why should this be any different? I jus
t want to hear you say it.”
Reluctantly, Sparco leaned across his desk and grabbed the Muncy file. His chair creaked loudly in protest. He remembered when Kyle was a little boy and had broken his wrist falling from a tree. Another time, Kyle’s head had required four stitches due to playing baseball. A third time, his thumb had gotten infected by an errant piece of glass. Knowing Kyle’s parents had passed on not long ago and that he was alienated from most of his community, Sparco felt for the simple man with godlike powers. And now his patient was holding firmly in his hand the piece of quartz Sparco’s grandson had given him. Despite everything, it seemed the Aboriginal man still possessed some of his childlike fascination with the world. Sparco hated to ruin that.
“Well, ahem, as far as we know, it is possible that your environment was largely responsible for your… metamorphosis.”
Kyle knocked the quartz three times on the table, creating an echoing effect. “That’s what I don’t get. Most of what all these doctors and scientists theorize I don’t really understand. I live in a small house on a reserve with a thousand other people. Why me? Why not them? Why not anybody else?” His voice rose and his fist clamped down on the crystal.
Although he wasn’t afraid of the young man, Sparco was… he would say… concerned about his emotional outburst. “As I said, it’s complicated. It’s been theorized that the water you drink—”
“The substandard water most of my community is forced to drink? That water?!”
This was a contentious issue. Like many other First Nations communities across the country, Muncy’s reserve was under a contaminated water alert. Had been for the past seven years, at least. That’s when the toxins had first been discovered in the groundwater. Who knows how long they’d been there? Local Native people were pissed off about this, and the doctor was well aware of the ill effects of unclean water. But as his patient had been asking ever since his metamorphosis had begun, why him?
“Yes, that water. With all the chemicals and impurities that have been digested by your body…”
Kyle remembered the farms he’d passed driving into the city with Karl. “The stuff from all that agriculture, right?”
The doctor nodded. “The fertilizers, antibiotics, growth hormones and steroids they give to the animals eventually make it into the water table. And then into you.”
Kyle was silent for a moment. “What else?”
Flipping over a sheet of paper, Dr. Sparco’s eyes scanned the test results. “Well, and this is just conjecture, you realize, there’s all the radon gas that was found saturating your house. As you know, that stuff is a natural by-product of the decay of radium and is radioactive.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard all this before, but nobody will tell me how my house could have become saturated with this radon gas. This doesn’t sound… normal.”
“It is normal, Kyle. It’s… it’s naturally occurring. I’ve told you this. Seeps up through the ground. I know it sounds weird, but it’s true. Because of that, a lot of places have radon gas detectors.”
Kyle took a deep breath. “But not on my reserve?”
“So it seems. And somehow, someway, the gas and the steroids and the fertilizers interacted with your biology, bonding and transforming your body on a cellular level, creating all sorts of unique… side effects. We’re not quite sure how… exactly.”
It’s a good thing Kyle wasn’t a gambling man, thought Sparco, or he’d be broke and in jail by now. The Gods of Chance didn’t seem to be too fond of his patient. Actually, on second thought, broke and in jail might be a little better than Kyle’s current situation.
“Anything else?”
When Kyle had first come into his office eighteen months ago, when he first began manifesting these unique abilities, the doctor had been amazed, possibly even a little envious. Over the decades, he’d seen a lot of damaged bodies and persistent illnesses, and now here in front of him was a man it seemed God and the universe had made indestructible, even superior. The good doctor was now quite sure he’d been overly generous in his assessment of Kyle Muncy and his condition. If you have all the money in the world but no place to spend it, is there a point?
“Yes, one other thing. It seems all that black mould in your house also contributed to your… condition.”
By now, Kyle was getting weary. He wanted to know the details, but each statement of fact made him feel like a tree with a persistent lumberjack, each scientific declaration a swing from a sharp and heavy axe.
“The black mould?”
Sparco put the chart down on his desk and removed his glasses. He slid his chair a little closer to his patient. “Seems like the spores of the black mould acted as some sort of organic catalyst within your system. Somehow they helped metabolize all the other elements into… into… into what you are.”
In the park nearby, Kyle could hear children laughing. He could smell chili, today’s special, at the restaurant across the road. In the building next door, somebody was playing their stereo, and Dr. Sparco’s unusual patient could feel the thump thump of the bass. Sounded like something by The Doors.
“I suppose that makes sense.”
Suddenly his own office seemed very small to the doctor. “Actually, it doesn’t. That’s why we need to do more tests and—”
“Thanks, Doctor, I’ll think about it.” It had been a long day for the reluctant superhero. And it would be a long hitchhike back in the growing darkness. Kyle made his departure quick.
“I know this all sounds…”
There was no ending to the sentence, as the patient had exited the office, leaving behind a conflicted man of medicine. Stepping out of the building onto the street out front was the most amazing person humanity and nature had managed to create together. Everybody should have been doing cartwheels. Instead, there were no cartwheels in Kyle’s life. Sparco closed the file on his most interesting patient and replaced it in his desk drawer. Nothing frustrates a doctor more than a sense of medical impotency. Actually, Sparco could cure most types of impotency… but not this kind.
Late that night, Kyle Muncy crawled into bed. The day was over. The only thing he had looked forward to all day was closing his eyes again, finding blissful nothingness until they opened once more. There was always the hope that tomorrow might be better. Otherwise, this was just another day in the life of a superhero.
Kyle Muncy, the first Aboriginal superhero, closed his eyes and slept, peaceful for the first time that day.
Meanwhile, across the Earth, terrible people were doing terrible things, to themselves and to the planet. These terrible events were happening non-stop, with nobody to help prevent them. And in another part of the damaged world, someone else struggling to survive was discovering they had new, unexpected yet formidable powers, created from an unholy alliance of man-made environmental corruption and toxic natural elements.
And Kyle slept on.
Take Us to Your Chief
The men sitting on the couches in the middle of Old Man’s Point didn’t need the screeching of the cicadas to tell them how hot it was. The sweat on their foreheads and on the beer bottles gave them ample evidence. The sweat was cyclical: the more sweat on their foreheads, the more need for cold beer, which in turn became sweat in the humidity of the summer woods.
Old Man’s Point was located near the eastern shore of Otter Lake, named for an old man who used to stand on the bank and point at all the boats going by. A deserted stretch of shoreline running parallel to a rarely used dirt road, it housed a group of cedar trees that grew skyward in a sort of amphitheatre configuration. Over the years, several worn and tattered couches had found their way to the cedars, which circled an ancient firepit. Weathered by many years of rain, snow, sun and sweaty Aboriginal behinds, the sofas looked as beaten down, as lived in and as much a part of the landscape as the men. The constant breeze from the lake kept the more persistent mosquitos and other bugs of Ju
ly away, and all in all, it was a comfortable and picturesque place to pass the summer months.
Today, like most lazy days, there sat three Ojibway men. Tarzan, Cheemo and Teddy had been there since ten that morning, enjoying a cooler stocked with beer that was chilling in the shallow waters near the shore. They had no place to go and nothing much to do, a happy coincidence for all. Most of their relations agreed the trio were men of few words and fewer ambitions. And the three saw little need to argue. They did what they did, and they were very good at it.
Although they spent long hours in each other’s company—they had been best buddies since their early school days—they said remarkably little. Several seasons back, a cousin had joined them for the day and had come away utterly bewildered.
“They didn’t say anything. Not one word!” the cousin had exclaimed. “I tried to talk with them about something, anything, but I got nothing back. They would just sit there, look around occasionally, smile and drink beer. That’s all.” He never went back.
The men had spent so much time together over the years, they practically knew each other’s thoughts; thus, nothing needed to be said. Besides, nothing much happened to them that needed to be discussed anyway.
Until the spaceship landed.
It was a Tuesday. Tarzan, so called because as a kid he loved running around the village and climbing trees in his underwear, was pulling three more beers out of the cooler when he heard it. Years sitting at Old Man’s Point with his cousins had made him far more aural than oral. The buzzing of insects, the calls of birds, the lapping of water on the shore, the distant drone of motorboats constituted pretty much the only auditory landscape in the area. So when the insects and birds suddenly went quiet and the relative silence was filled by a growing humming sound—no, humming wasn’t quite the right word, but it would have to do—Tarzan’s curiosity was piqued. He looked to his right and then left. Not seeing anything out of the ordinary, he finally looked up, over the lake, and almost dropped his beer. Almost.
Take Us to Your Chief Page 17