Memoirs of a Crimefighter

by Seth Jacob

  I stood up from the log, I took a deep breath, and then purely on instinct, I jumped. I jumped so high that I was looking down on acres of forest like a giant striding across the countryside, and then the tops of the trees came racing at me as I fell back down to Earth. I landed on an ice covered branch, the force of my fall snapped it like a pencil. I tumbled down through the bare arms of the tree until I snagged the trunk with an unreasonably strong grip that cracked half century old wood. I hung there on the side of the tree, at least 40 feet off of the ground, just in uncontrollable awe at both the drug enhanced vision of the wintery forest and the amazing things I was doing.

  Then I pushed off of the bark with both feet like a swimmer pushing off of the starting block. Trees glided by me as I flew through the air, and newly enhanced superhuman reflexes made them all seem like they were moving past me in slow motion. It was all like a strange dream except that it felt more real than anything I had experienced in my entire life, like I had been playing a video game since the moment I was born but I had just put down the controller and stepped into reality. I felt hypercharged with energy like I had been injected with a thousand cups of coffee but there was no jitteriness, there was only an incredible clarity and focus unlike anything I had ever known.

  I reached out for a nearby branch and latched onto it. I spun around it like a trained gymnast once, twice, three times before letting go and catapulting high above the trees. For a split second, I hovered above the forest and I could see the school on the horizon. It was so small and far away. Then, I plummeted back down into the woods and I scraped the side of a fir to slow my descent like it was the most natural thing.

  I crouched in the snow and caught my breath. I should have been freezing cold, but I could barely feel the sting of the winter air on my cheeks. I felt intoxicated, not just with the high of the soup, but with power, power like a galaxy of fiery burning suns spinning around inside of my chest. I stood up and walked over to a nearby tree stump. It was a huge, ancient thing anchored deep into the ground. I clenched a fist, and steam ebbed off of my hand because of the unnatural amount of heat generated by muscles experiencing superhuman strength for the first time.

  I pulled back my fist, and I jabbed at the frigid tree trunk. The stump exploded into a cloud of icy splinters, and I’m lucky that I squinted enough to block the hail of shards rocketing in every direction. Still, a few splinters had lodged into my face and my knuckles. Stunned, I looked at my fist like it was the first time I had seen it. I opened my fist and flexed fingers strong enough to crunch steel like a beer can, and I looked at where the stump used to be. It was just a jagged mess of shattered wood, and I couldn’t believe that I had just done that.

  For a few more hours, I experimented with what I thought was temporary superhuman agility and strength. I ran and leapt through the forest, and all conscious thought dissipated. I was like a wild animal on the loose in its natural habitat, just letting the shapes and colors of the winter forest wash over me. There were no doubts or anxieties or concerns with my everyday life. There was only the exhilarating rush of incredible movement, of strength beyond description, of a physical potential unchained by a lifetime of an inarticulate restraint, of liberation.

  I lost track of time, and when the intoxicating effects of the drug wore off, I found myself sitting in the top of a tree. The sun was beginning to rise, and I realized that I had to get back to my dorm room before someone discovered that I was missing, if they hadn’t already. I jumped off of the branch and as I was falling I was hit with a sudden panic. Too late it occurred to me that the powers must have worn off by now, and as the ground rushed at me, I thought I would be seriously injured by the fall. I slammed into the snowy floor of the forest…and to my surprise, I felt fine. I just thought that I got lucky and there was still a bit of the soup working its way through my system. I started to walk back to campus, unaware that superhuman sections of my DNA had just been startled awake from a deep sleep.

  Chapter 3: Trophy Room

  “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction…!”

  I was watching Master Boson launch into his stale supervillain spiel on the video Joe Metal had uploaded onto The Millennials’ website, and if there’s one thing that’s not good for a downward spiral, it’s obsessing over what the internet thinks about you. My father died two weeks ago, and I proceeded to aggressively preoccupy myself with work. Every day, I would go after low level losers like Master Boson, sometimes with The Millennials, sometimes by myself, and I barely stopped to sleep or eat. There were often periods when no supercrime was going down in the city, and these were the times that I would torment myself with these videos. Meanwhile, the voice mails piled up.

  I sat up from my couch and paused the video, stopping Master Boson’s horrendously bad rant. Then, I made the worst mistake I could possibly make…I scrolled down to the comments section to see what people were saying about me. I cannot stress this enough to any up and coming superheroes reading this: do not read the comments. I’d bet good money that reading comments on the internet is what drives a lot of supervillains to do more than half the crazy shit that they do.

  I stood up from the couch and stretched my legs. My one bedroom apartment had deteriorated from a relatively nice place into a shithole of epic proportions. Although I never kept it in perfectly clean condition, there was at least an effort to keep it presentable. When I first got the place, I decorated it in a minimalist style with post modern art that ironically referenced superhero culture. What was an apartment that you could bring people to after a night out had become an inexcusable mess of clothes all over the floor, empty pizza boxes, discarded beer bottles, plates of half eaten food, and a stink of body odor spreading like fungus.

  I stepped over one of my dirty costumes that had laid on the floor next to my coffee table where I dropped it a week ago and walked into the kitchen, which reeked of unwashed dishes. I opened the fridge and took out a beer (one of the only known cures for the common internet comment). I popped the cap off of the bottle with a super strength flick of my thumb, and didn’t even bother to pay attention to where it landed. A third of the beer was gone by the time I sat back down on the couch to pore over the internet’s infinite wisdom.

  I pored over them, and predictably, they were varying shades of “I hate this” to “I love this” with very little middle ground in between the two extremes. The beer bottle was empty when I had reached my tolerance for internet comments, and I pushed the power button on my laptop to put it into sleep mode. The screen turned to a reflective black, and my unshaven face looked back at me from the dark surface. My black hair was matted and greasy, heavy bags were visible under my eyes even through the black mask stuck on my face. There was a mustard stain on the collar of my dark navy costume jacket, and the skin tight blue spandex underneath the jacket was covered in dried sweat marks. I slapped my laptop shut.

  I was about to microwave some ravioli before heading back out to take out my frustrations on the first unlucky supervillain that I could get my hands on when I heard someone knocking at my door. I paused for a moment. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and my place certainly wasn’t in any condition for visitors. I walked over to the door and looked through the eye hole to see Ultra Lady, a superheroine I had never even met. The eye hole warped my view of her like a fish eye lens, but still, she was strikingly beautiful in her iconic red and white costume despite the distortion.

  “Are you going to open the door? I know you’re standing there. Even if I couldn’t hear your heartbeat with my ultra-hearing, I can smell you through the door. Jesus Christ, when was the last time you showered, kid?”

  She must have heard my heart rate suddenly double. There was a lump in my throat, and I tried and failed to gain my composure before opening the door slightly with the chainlock still on.

  “Uhm…can I help you?”

  “Are you serious? Come on, let me in. I want to talk to you about something.”

  I hesitated. I w
asn’t exactly in the right state of mind to have company, and I couldn’t understand for the life of me why Ultra Lady, THE Ultra Lady would want to talk to me. Ultra Lady was about five years older than me, and if I was a C-list superhero, then she was A-list. Realistically, she wasn’t even on the same grading scale as me. Ultra Lady was on a meteoric rise to the upper echelon of the superhero community. She recently joined the Superb 6, replacing Doc Hyper, who had just retired, and she was gifted in every way. She was invulnerable, she could lift over a hundred tons and was easily one of the strongest crimefighters in the game, plus she could fly and move at super speeds rivaling the now retired Doc Hyper. She could hear electrons bounce off of each other and see lightyears away, and as if all of that wasn’t enough, she was also stunningly gorgeous. She was the Indestructible Woman, the Lady of the Future. What could she want from me?

  “Listen, I know we don’t know each other, and I don’t want to…I don’t want to offend you or anything, but I knew your father. And I just want to talk to you for five minutes. If you don’t like what you hear, I’ll leave.”

  I closed the door and slid the chain lock off, then I opened it for Ultra Lady. Her disgust with the state of my apartment was instantly apparent as she walked with me to the couch. The sight of her walking through my messy, garbage ridden apartment in a pristine white cape and her radiant red costume was a stark contrast, like seeing Athena stroll around a landfill.

  “So you knew my dad?”

  “Yeah. Yeah I did, briefly. He was a reserve member of the Superb 6 and we had a few…team ups.”

  “Oh, ‘team ups’? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

  “…it wasn’t like that. Your dad, he was kind of like a mentor to me.”

  “That’s nice for you,” I got up from the couch and got another beer from the fridge. I held one up, offering it to her, but she just looked at me with disapproval so strong that it could have been another superpower. “Ultra-disdain”.

  “Look. I get it. I know you must be going through some shit right now…your dad just died, and it’s pretty obvious that no one in the superhero community is even aware that you are his son. At least, no one at his funeral seemed to know that The Spectacle is Jack Titan’s son. The funeral I just came from, by the way.”

  I drank my beer, and said nothing.

  “Your father’s lawyer was there. I spoke to him, and he mentioned that Jack had a son. I didn’t even know he had kids…he was never the sharing type.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” I said. Ultra Lady looked at me with eyes that could watch bullets crawl like snails, and all my body language must have been making my emotions a flashing neon sign for her to read in slow motion.

  “Oh my god. You didn’t know, did you? You didn’t know that your dad was Jack Titan.”

  I briefly considered lying to her, but that ultra-hearing would have heard the lie in my heart beats. I nodded, and took a long drink of my beer.

  “God…no wonder you didn’t go to the funeral.” Ultra Lady shifted uncomfortably on the couch. There was an awkward silence, and I got the impression that she was wavering between leaving and giving in to the urge to say something that I might take the wrong way.

  “Okay. I came here to give my condolences, and okay, maybe I was also curious to see what Jack’s son was like and why he wouldn’t even show up to his father’s funeral…but I think you should have this.” Ultra Lady reached into a pocket in her cape and pulled out a piece of golden rope, about two feet long, joined in the center with a little oval scrap of leather.

  “He called this his ‘golden sling’. You should have seen him use it.” She handed it to me, and I turned the sling over in my hands. The leather patch in the center of the two gold painted ropes had the initials “J.T.” embroidered onto it in yellow thread.

  “Jack would put a little piece of debris in this thing and I swear, he could hit a comma on a page two hundred yards away. It was unreal how he would whip that sling with super strength and just rocket projectiles.”

  “How did you get it…?”

  “On one of our team ups, things went a little sour. We were fighting…The Punster and his henchmen, I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Jack lost his golden sling during the fighting, and when it was all over, I managed to get it back. He told me to keep it and put it ‘in my trophy room’…he said he had a million of them.”

  I rubbed my thumb over the yellow “J.T.” stitching. There was still a big part of me that refused to believe that my dad was a superhero, but holding his “golden sling” in my hands hammered home the reality of it. He was always stitching his name into his things. When I was young, I used to watch him stitch his initials into his shirts and his socks.

  “Thank you. I actually…I really appreciate this.”

  “Of course…I probably shouldn’t say this, but…you know, if you need someone to talk to, you can call me. I didn’t know him that well, but I could tell you a couple of stories about your dad.” Ultra Lady’s intense waves of ultra-disdain had faded and were replaced by a look of pity. She got up from the couch and floated a few inches off of the floor to avoid stepping on dirty clothes and garbage as she left.

  “And it’s not my place to say this, but get your shit together man. You can’t just not go to your father’s funeral.”

  “I’m a superhero, I can do anything. I can leap tall buildings in a single bound, I can bend steel with my—”

  “Don’t be a smart ass, Spectacle.” Ultra Lady opened the door and softly landed on the ground. Her white boots squeaked as she touched down on the tile floor, and she lingered with a white gloved hand on the doorknob.

  “If you want to know more about your dad, the information is out there. There were people at the funeral who knew him way better than I did. But you’ve got to stop wallowing in self pity.” She walked through the door and closed it behind her without looking back.

  I sat there holding the golden sling in my trash cluttered apartment. I was angry, angry that Ultra Lady would talk to me like that. Who was she to come down from the space station headquarters of the Superb 6, like a pompous goddess descending from Olympus, to self righteously lecture me about my life? I was angry that my father never told me that he was a superhero. I was angry that the superheroes at my father’s funeral probably knew him better than I did. I couldn’t see it at the time, but most of all, I was angry at myself. I was furious for letting myself fall to pieces like this. I was raging at the idea that Ultra Lady was right.

  I put the golden sling in my costume jacket pocket, and I took out my phone. For the past two weeks, I had been avoiding calls from my dad’s lawyer and letting his texts and voice mails build up. The voice mails he was leaving painted an interesting picture. They began passive aggressively with the lawyer politely requesting that I meet with him again to deal with funeral issues and go over my father’s will. Then, as time passed, his messages gradually mutated from respectfully tolerant to flat out yelling at me for neglecting the logistics of my father’s death. I couldn’t help but giggle at his frustration, but I also felt a flood of guilt as it dawned on me that I couldn’t just be willfully oblivious to these things.

  After an extremely tense phone call with the lawyer, who was less than happy to hear from me after weeks of me ignoring his calls, I took a walk across town to my father’s apartment. He had warned me that unless I went there and collected his belongings, which my father had left to me, his possessions would mostly likely be thrown out by the owners of the building.

  “And you don’t want that. Trust me. Check in his sock drawer, go look in his little walk in closet, and you’ll see what I mean,” he explained with more than a hint of bitter amusement in his tone of voice.

  Although it wasn’t the home I grew up in, my father’s apartment was a place I had been many times. I lived there for a few months during the summer before I went to college. I even had a key, but I had never been there with the knowledge that my father was a superhero. I tur
ned the key in the lock, and the lawyer’s cryptic comments made me anticipate a scene of utility belts and Titan-computers and spare costumes in glass cases. When I opened the door, what I saw was the ordinary apartment that I had seen many times before.

  The place just looked like the upper middle class home of a sixty year old stock broker. I walked into the apartment, and just like the many times I had been here before, there were no signs whatsoever of a superhero career. There were barely any signs of a person living there. The place was immaculately clean; the cupboards were empty, the fridge was vacant except for a jar of pickles with an expiration date that had passed almost a year ago, the wood floors were so well kept that they gleamed like a mirror. The TV remote was perfectly perched on the arm of his white leather couch, magazines were flawlessly fanned out on his glass coffee table, even his flat screen was free of smudges and looked like it had just been brought home from the store. Nothing was out of place.

  I sat down on his pristine white couch. It didn’t seem like there was anything here that I would miss if it was thrown away. Sure, he had nice furniture and expensive things, but none of those things were worth it to me to keep if I had to constantly be reminded of my father’s death. The leather creaked as I got up from the couch and walked into my father’s bedroom, to investigate the walk in closet that the lawyer had mentioned.

  My father’s bedroom seemed just as unlived in as the rest of his place. I looked around for the walk in closet that the lawyer had mentioned, but I was surprised to find that he didn’t even have a closet. That seemed extremely strange to me. What kind of bedroom doesn’t have a closet? He did have an uncommonly large dresser that was almost as tall as me, and I opened the top drawer which was filled with socks. The black socks each had my father’s initials stitched into them on the ankle in blue thread, and I rifled around in the drawer but found nothing.