Memoirs of a Crimefighter

by Seth Jacob

  “Yeah, that’s my dad. So we’ve actually got a little bit in common. Except my dad wants me to continue on the Dr. Delusion name, yours apparently didn’t want you running around as little Jacky Titan Junior. Am I right?”

  I didn’t say anything because I was restraining an almost uncontrollable urge to throttle this annoying, snot nosed incarnation of Dr. Delusion.

  “Fuck, I did it again, my bad. You gotta understand, every time I deal with you cape types it’s a negative experience.” Dr. Delusion’s smile twisted at the corners of his lips and teetered on the edge of a snarl.

  “So yeah, I did actually know your dad a little. Can I ask, just out of curiosity, what you thought a guy like me was doing talking to an old timer like him?”

  “You know, I don’t even know what I’m doing talking to a guy like you.”

  “Fair enough, I deserve that I guess. All this villain, hero bullshit aside though, I get it man, I want to help you find out whatever you want to know. Can we just play nice in the spirit of that, know what’m sayin’?”

  “Alright. So why were you meeting him at the Flasked Crusader?”

  “Drugs,” Dr. Delusion answered, and he pulled a plastic baggie out of his hoodie front pocket. It was filled with SUHP crystals. Crystal SUHP, called “bouillon cubes” on the streets, is the solid form of the substance that only the most hardcore of soupheads prefer. Because you smoke crystal SUHP, it’s absorbed into the bloodstream almost instantly, and it gets you ten times higher. It also has ten times the overdose rate.

  “Oh,” I replied, and suddenly this kid’s opulent apartment made a little more sense.

  “Yeah, your dad had a hell of a soup habit. He must have been running through a gallon a week, and I guess his old supplier went out of business. Actually, that’s a lie, I know his old supplier went out of business. I put him out of business.” Dr. Delusion laughed and jiggled the bag of crystalline SUHP. He watched the clear crystals bounce around in the bag, and he had a giddy look of greed like he was playing with a bag of diamonds.

  “Well, that’s great for you, Dr. Delusion,” I was ready to leave. I was convinced that I had rushed into another dead end, and I was wishing that I had finished tearing up that matchbook.

  “Yeah, I’m always looking to expand my clientele. I was put in touch with your dad and I was gonna sell him some bouillon cubes, but he never showed. How did he die, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Soup overdose.” I stared right at Dr. Delusion’s aviators to try to psyche him out with eye contact even through the mirrored lenses. Usually, I try to avoid getting personal with supervillains, but this kid was making it hard to not hate him.

  “Oh man, that sucks.” Dr. Delusion dropped the bag of crystal soup, the “bouillon cubes”, into his lap like he was so depressed to hear this news that he couldn’t hold it in his hands anymore. It was a good performance, but I wasn’t buying it.

  “Yeah. It does. You don’t happen to know anything else that would be helpful, like anyone else he was seeing or places he was hanging out, do you?”

  “…Nah, nah man. I wish I could help, I really do.”

  “Well, I appreciate your help, Doctor. I’m sure you have a lot of patients to see today, so I’ll get out of your hair.” I got up from the gold couch, but Dr. Delusion jumped up from the bean bag chair to stop me from leaving.

  “Hey, don’t be like that. Hang out for a while,” Dr. Delusion grabbed a remote off of the glass coffee table, and pointed it at the ceiling. I looked up and saw that he had a projector attached to his high ceiling, and the blank wall in front of his couch lit up. The screen of a computer was projected onto the wall.

  “You seem like a cool guy, despite the hero thing. No reason we can’t be bros, right? Come on man, let’s watch some Netflix on this new projector I got.” I turned my back to him and starting walking towards the front door of Dr. Delusion’s apartment, completely ignoring this plea for friendship from this loathsome kid.

  “Sorry man, I don’t really hang out with drug dealers. It’s kind of an unwritten rule for me,” I reached for the doorknob, but when my hand touched it, I recoiled in horror at what I saw. My father’s head was attached to the door where the doorknob should have been. His eyes were bulging out of his head.

  “Spectacle, I’ve gotta insist you stick around,” Dr. Delusion sneered, and I whirled around to see that he had strapped a small gas mask over his nose and mouth. I suddenly felt weak in my legs, like my knee joints had transformed into sponges, and I hugged the Superb 6 crime computer to keep from falling to the floor. Dr. Delusion walked towards me as I struggled to stay upright.

  “Did you know that if you change around a few molecules in the SUHP formula, the new compound will cause debilitating vertigo, erratic fluctuations in superhuman ability, and severe visual hallucinations?” Dr. Delusion nudged me on the shoulder, and I dropped hard onto the wood floors.

  “Right now, my proprietary blend of SUHP is pumping through the air conditioning of this room, suspended in water vapor. It’s not quite a design classic like my pop’s daydream darts, but still…pretty cool, right? You would not believe what it costs to get a contractor to set this up. It’s goddamn highway robbery.” Dr. Delusion crouched in front of me as I clawed at the floor and tried to push myself up off of the ground.

  “Why?” I stammered. Dr. Delusion’s reflective aviators now looked like bright spotlights shining into my face and blinding me.

  “Why does anyone do anything ever? Money, Spectacle. You think I’m just gonna let you walk out of here? You really think I buy this whole soul searching, finding your father crap? Especially with the way he died, and all the shit you’ve been talking about my business? I’m not going to let you ruin my insanely profitable business because your daddy can’t handle his soup and you need a little revenge on an innocent drug dealer.” Dr. Delusion grabbed me by the collar of my costume jacket, hoisted me to my feet, and then shoved me across the room. I tripped on one of his bean bag chairs and fell on the foam filled blob. I tried to get up off of the bean bag chair, but the squishy thing seemed to be pouring through my fingers like it was made out of thick, tennis ball colored gravy. Dr. Delusion plopped down onto a nearby bean bag chair, and he started fiddling with his phone.

  “Check this out. You’re gonna love this, Spectacle. I’ve got this place set up so I can control everything with my phone.” Dr. Delusion was talking to me like a proud child showing off his toys to a friend on a sleepover. It was like the most normal thing in the world to him, yet I was doing everything I could to power through the effects of a crippling drug surging through my central nervous system.

  I succeeded in getting off of the bean bag chair which felt like a blob of viscous yellow liquid sucking me in and dripping off of my body, but I could just barely stand. The huge apartment was rotating around me and tilting and it was taking everything I had to keep myself on my feet. I made the mistake of looking towards the window, I thought maybe I could try to break through the glass and escape, but the park looked like an alien jungle with mutant purple pterodactyls soaring over the trees which were vibrating and pulsating. The buildings of the city skyline, which I routinely jumped across like playing hopscotch, now seemed to be piercing the stratosphere and thousands of times taller than I knew they were. Looking at the spires with their morphing textures and rearranging architecture made me nauseous, and I vomited all over Dr. Delusion’s copies of Spandex Magazine. A cover story about Queen Quantum’s possible baby bump was covered in my vomit which glowed and steamed like radioactive waste.

  “Oh come on! Keep it together Spectacle. For fuck’s sake, we’re just getting started,” Dr. Delusion fumed as he did something on his phone, as if my reaction to his drug was the height of rudeness. I had fallen to the ground again, and I was bracing myself on his glass coffee table which rippled underneath my gloved fingers like the surface of a pond.

  “Alright, what do you make of this, Spectacle?” Dr. Delusion gestured at
the projected screen, and I looked up from the quivering glass of the coffee table.

  An old photo of my father was plastered on the wall in light and looming over me. I recognized the photo from my father’s wall of clippings. Dr. Delusion probably found it in a simple Google search. The photo, however, was substantially different under the influence of Dr. Delusion’s SUHP compound. The features of my father’s face were decaying, the flesh was rotting off of his cheek bones, maggots pushed through his putrid skin and fell off of the wall and onto the floor. He was beckoning me with a pale, dead hand. His eyes were brimming with fire and rage and disappointment, and I was filled with a terror so indescribably powerful that the word “terror” doesn’t even feel adequate. I couldn’t look away from the horrible vision.

  “Oh man, you should see your face right now,” Dr. Delusion giggled.

  “If you’re gonna kill me, just kill me you sick fuck,” I spit this out, but I still couldn’t face Dr. Delusion. My eyes were locked in place by my father’s haunting gaze.

  “Naw, that’s not the way this works. I’m a supervillain, and I’ve got you right where I want you. It’s kind of a villain tradition for me to fuck with you as much as possible before I kill you.” Dr. Delusion stood up and backhanded me in the face. I spun around and slammed my head on the wood floors…but still, as soon as my skull pounded against the floor, my eyes locked right back onto my father’s searing glare.

  “And I’m all…about…tradition!” Dr. Delusion screamed this and his voice cracked as he swiftly kicked me in the stomach.

  Blackness was sneaking in around the edges, but I fought to stay conscious and to suck some of the air he had kicked out of me back into my lungs. Dr. Delusion strutted around me and I tried to crawl away. He paused, fiddled with his phone again, and the projected image of my father in his youth was replaced with a tight shot on his face as an older man. Jack Titan’s golden wreath didn’t look regal here, the SUHP distorted it into a crown of razor sharp, gilded leaves cutting into his forehead and temples and iridescent blood trickled down his face. Again, his eyes were blazing with flames and they oozed so much anguish that it physically hurt me, but even still, I couldn’t look away. His mouth was twisted in pain and agony. I pawed at the floor and tried to drag myself away, away from this phantom, away from this wispy mustached, second generation Dr. Delusion, but all my super strength had left me. Some small, drug choked part of my rational mind whispered that this nightmare wraith of my father wasn’t real, but it was a very quiet voice overpowered by a chorus of horror.

  “Man, this was a real let down. Usually, I have to put in at least a little effort to figure out what’s gonna freak you capes out. This was really too easy.” Dr. Delusion knelt down next to me. I took a swing at his face, but my depth perception was all fucked up and my fist didn’t even graze his gas masked face. He put his fists together and thrust them in front of my face…I flinched and he laughed, and I saw that “D-E-L-U-S-I-O-N” was tattooed across the eight knuckles of his fists.

  “See this? This is the last thing you’re ever gonna see…the last thing that dozens of lower tier, spandex clowns just like you saw when they tried to fuck around with my multimillion dollar drug business.” The letters spelling out delusion on his knuckles radiated a sickly, red light that burned into my retinas like a brand.

  Then, Dr. Delusion walked out of the room, and even still, my father’s heartbreaking eyes locked me in place like a tractor beam. They were bursting with so much despair, like he was trying to communicate some profound truth to me but I couldn’t hear it. I just couldn’t understand what it was he was trying to tell me. Molten tears of lava flowed out of his eyes and down his decomposing face, and he started clamping his eyes shut and opening them again. It was so strange. He wasn’t blinking, he was closing his eyes tight for a few seconds and then opening them again.

  “Here we go. Did you ever think it would end this way, Spectacle? Not with an epic super brawl to the death with some kinda mutated monster, not surrounded on all sides by your worst enemies, not bravely sacrificing your life to save the world. Just a plastic baggie and little ol’ me,” Dr. Delusion came back into the room holding a large, plastic zip lock bag. Dr. Delusion sat down behind me, and he slipped the plastic bag over my head. He gripped the plastic around my throat and through the clear plastic, I saw the fifteen foot tall projection of my father closed and opened his eyes even faster than before.

  My lungs scorched as I gasped for oxygen. I thrashed around on the floor as Dr. Delusion choked the life out of me, but I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t summon the super strength that I needed to save myself. My mind was possessed by the projection of my father on the wall that had been amplified by the SUHP compound into a hallucination so ghastly, so frightening that I couldn’t look away, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but that look of desperation he was giving me from beyond the grave. I closed my eyes, partly out of an involuntary response to being starved of oxygen, and partly because I was accepting what seemed inevitable…and that’s when it hit me.

  The fog cleared from my mind as soon as I closed my eyes. The hallucinatory spirit of my father no longer paralyzed me. I don’t believe in ghosts, I don’t believe in gods and devils, I don’t believe anything is truly “supernatural.” I believe that everything, even some of the crazier shit I’ve seen in my line of work, can ultimately be explained by science…but I won’t lie to you. In that moment when my eyes were closed and a calm washed over me, my drug addled brain was convinced that my father had been trying to send me a message from the afterlife.

  I kept my eyes closed and I grabbed Dr. Delusion’s skinny wrists and squeezed as hard as I could. I felt his wrist bones crack and crunch like brittle twigs. He let out a high pitched whine and let go of my throat. In the darkness, I peeled off the plastic bag and gulped sweet, precious air. Dr. Delusion was howling somewhere behind me, and I spun around and fired a fist towards the sound of his shrill squealing. My fist bashed against his forehead and silenced his shrieks. I felt around, with my eyes still closed, and picked him up off of the ground by the folds of his hoodie.

  “Turn off the drugs. Now.”

  “I can’t, you idiot! You broke my fucking wrists! How am I supposed to use my phone to turn off the vapor flow?”

  “Figure out a way. Work through the pain, or I swear to god…” My voice must have been conveying just how insanely angry I was because I didn’t get a chance to finish the threat before I heard Dr. Delusion tapping on his phone.

  “There. It’s off. What now? Are you gonna kill me, hero?”

  I snagged his gas mask without opening my eyes. I started pulling it off of his face.

  “Okay, okay I’ll turn it off for real! If you want to get any information about your daddy out of me, you don’t want to expose me to this shit,” Dr. Delusion fumbled around with his phone again while I held onto his gas mask, ready to pull it off at the slightest sign of trouble.

  “Alright, it’s seriously off this time. Can you blame me for trying?” I began to slip off Dr. Delusion’s gas mask.

  “Woah woah woah, give it a few minutes, let the vapor dissipate a— “

  “Why should I?! Why shouldn’t I let you take a good whiff?”

  “Pay attention, dummy, I just told you: I know a little bit about dear old daddy, and I might not be as talkative if you dope me to the gills.”

  His voice sounded like he was telling the truth, but I would have liked to see his face to be sure. The last thing I wanted to do was trust the scrawny, drug peddling bastard who had just tried to murder me, but if he knew anything, I had to pry it out of him.

  “Okay. Talk.”

  “Hold your horses, Spectacle. First let’s discuss my terms…information for amnesty? What do you say, Specta—”

  I gave his rib cage a super strength flick with my index finger and I heard a pop.

  “Fuck! I think you just broke one of my ribs! Goddamn it, are you fucking kidding me?!”

  “Just te
ll me what you know, Delusion, and try not to pass out from the pain.”

  “Alright, alright…all I know is…I heard from some people that your dad, he was a regular at this superhuman underground fighting ring, okay?”

  “Where?”

  “It’s under…under 100 Ton Gym,” Dr. Delusion passed out while I held him up by the folds of his hoodie.

  I tossed him onto his gaudy golden couch with my eyes still tightly closed. I tied him up with some zip ties that I keep in one of my costume jacket’s inside pockets, just to be totally safe, which was not an easy thing to do blind. I sat down on the couch, took a deep breath of relief, and rested for a few minutes to shake off the effects of the airborne SUHP. I kept my eyes closed as a precaution, but there were still some minor visuals assailing me in the darkness. There were floating geometric shapes piecing together and rearranging and exploding apart like a little psychedelic laser light show just for me. I saw the half destroyed matchbook tumble by the colorful shapes as if it were in the weightless vacuum of outer space. I saw the vague outline of my father drifting at me in the darkness, but this time, he wasn’t a morbid terror. This time there was warmth in his eyes and a smile on his face, and maybe even a hint of pride. Then, he was gone.

  Chapter 6: Amateur Hour

  I put on a costume for the first time almost a year after my powers manifested. Comics and movies make it seem like it’s totally feasible to be a high school superhero, but the truth is that it’s a time management impossibility. I was a senior in high school, and I had to deal with schoolwork, applying to college, standardized tests, constant extracurricular responsibilities, not to mention girls. On top of all of that, I was attending a boarding school that regimented every hour of every day and kept tabs on students’ whereabouts at all times. There was no room in that packed schedule for gallivanting around in brightly colored tights. And even if there was, that wasn’t even something that registered as a possible lifestyle choice for me.