by Seth Jacob
“Words have meaning. Your father called himself a Titan, and I made monsters for him to battle. He wanted to be ‘The Man of Myth,’ and so I became the devil. And what do you call yourself?”
Countless videos and images of me washed over the walls and the floors and the ceiling and replaced the blank nothingness. This was yet another room in which every surface was covered by screens, and The Punster had used it to create an elaborate display of shifting images and video, all of me. I became a crimefighter right at the start of the Digital Age of Superheroes, and The Punster had hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures and videos of me to choose from online.
Both walls of the long hallway were plastered with a collage of my own drunken face. My wasted face grinned at me and looked down at me with dilated eyes and video played of me clumsily leaping across rooftops. There were dozens of camera phone videos and pictures, from all different angles and throughout my ten year career, of me pounding shots with The Millennials, of me dancing while high out of my mind on SUHP, of me throwing up in the middle of the street after drunkenly fighting Armadillotron. It was a mosaic of digital imagery and video, floating and rearranging across the walls and beneath my feet and above my head, and it was all dedicated to a decade of debauchery.
“You called yourself ‘The Spectacle.’ And what a spectacle you’ve made of yourself, son,” The Punster said.
I walked through the hallway displaying the undeniable evidence of my abuse of drugs and alcohol, and I did my best to ignore it. My many injuries, the exhaustion, the blood loss, and the SUHP cocktail coursing through my veins, it all combined to create this experience that I wasn’t walking in a hallway with screens on every surface anymore. I was walking through a tunnel of my own memories. I was struggling through a corridor in my consciousness that I really didn’t want to see, and as soon as I got to the first door in the hallway, I opened it and tried not to make eye contact with the morphing montage of my inebriated eyes.
“Where are you going?” The Punster laughed. Behind the door was another much smaller and narrower hallway with a right turn only a few feet into it. It was also a white void of blank walls.
“You still don’t get it, do you? I could end you right now. I could easily blow up this whole maze. I might not even be in this building anymore, did you even consider that?” The Punster asked, and I said nothing. More images and videos of me splashed across the walls of this cramped hallway.
This time, the mutating jumble of images and videos reminded me of every mistake I had ever made. There was a patchwork of photos of the time that I fought Dragon General and he threw a pickup truck at me. I was twenty at the time, just a kid, and I didn’t think at all about where that truck would land after I got out of its way. Blog posts and internet articles and shuffling photographs flashed before my eyes as I turned the corner in the narrow hallway, and they all reminded me of the dozens of people that were severely injured when that pickup truck fell out of the sky.
Around the corner, the left wall was a cluster of photos of a fight I had with Captain Haiku. I was so distracted by the people filming me with their phones, so concentrated on showing off and looking cool on social media and firing off half witty one liners, I didn’t even notice a van full of Syllabullies pull up and whisk their boss away. The photos of me smiling with fans and signing autographs afterward showed that I obviously didn’t care that I lost him.
Every time I was just a fraction of a second too slow and an innocent person got hurt. Every time I was careless and accidentally let a supervillain get away. Every time I was a showboating asshole focused on getting as much attention as possible instead of doing my job. Every unprofessional and criminally irresponsible thing I had done that had been caught on camera, The Punster found them all and smeared them all over the walls.
“I could kill you any time I want to, but no. Not yet,” The Punster muttered. The hallway ended in a dead end. I had to turn back and face my failures all over again.
“Because that’s not the game, Spectacle,” The Punster said. Still, I said nothing.
I returned to the larger hallway. As soon as I opened the door and reentered that shrine to my own public drunkenness, I realized that I couldn’t remember which direction I had come from. I was lost.
“Uh oh…which way is the entrance? Or are you too entranced by yourself to remember?” The Punster taunted. I thought I heard his voice coming from one of the doors in the hallway. I opened it, and entered another smaller corridor of whiteness.
“You haven’t got a clew, have you?” The Punster asked, and still, I said nothing.
More images and video appeared on all the surfaces of this new hallway, but they weren’t pieced together in a rearranging collage anymore. Now, I was confronted by giant visions of myself that loomed seven feet tall on the walls, and they were depictions of me savagely beating supervillains.
There was a video playing on a loop of one of the many times I fought Master Boson. My fist struck Master Boson’s face and knocked several teeth out of his radioactive mouth, and probably broke his jaw too. The video just kept repeating, my fist kept colliding with Master Boson’s chin again and again, and it was hard to look at the agony in Master Boson’s eyes and his utter helplessness and the viciousness of my own attack.
I walked past it, and on the opposite wall, there was a string of colossal photographs of an encounter I had with Professor Dinosaur. Each of the photographs focused on a super strength punch to Professor Dinosaur’s midsection. I saw myself pelt his stomach and sides with punches that could have cracked concrete, and in the last photograph Professor Dinosaur fell to his knees and I kicked him right in his scaly snout.
The end of the hallway lead me left, and then right, and then left again, and throughout the snaking passageway, there were immense images and looping videos of a vigilante brutally thrashing supervillains and henchmen. I saw a superhuman man beating up costumed criminals that were much weaker than he was, that he deliberately chose to fight because they were much weaker than he was, and it filled me with nauseating shame. I came to the end of this corridor that was devoted to the cruelty of a superpowered bully in a mask, and I didn’t want to believe that it was me.
“Your father was a violent man, too. I can’t tell you how many times I woke up in prison hospitals with concussions and internal hemorrhaging because of the late, great Jack Titan,” The Punster said, and the slightest twinge of resentment surfaced in his calming, grandfatherly voice. There was a door at the end of the hallway with a small camera above it. This door was also covered in screens, and it showed a digital reflection of myself, bloodied and burned and limping towards it with a trail of blood behind me.
“I guess the apple doesn’t brawl far from the tree, does it, Spectacle?” The Punster asked, and any hint of sadness or humanity that had momentarily risen up in his voice submerged back into his detached, tranquilizing tone.
I opened the door, and still, I said nothing in response to another one of his absurd puns. The door opened onto the larger hallway that I had just come from. The Punster had just led me around a circle through that smaller hallway that forced me to look at the violence and brutality of being a superhero, and back to the larger hallway. He was toying with me.
My head was swimming. The long hallway that celebrated my intoxicated face in a shifting montage of hundreds of pictures was spinning around me. I braced myself against the screen covered wall. Its pixelated surface rippled underneath my fingers. I was bleeding profusely from glass cuts all over my body and the stab wound in my leg and gashes on my swollen face and Master Boson’s glowing throwing star lodged in my shoulder. I had severe burns on one of my legs, and two broken ribs. And on top of all of that, I had just been dosed with a concoction of hallucinogenic drugs.
“Taking a little rest, Spectacle? The game’s not over yet, son,” The Punster encouraged. He was having so much fun.
I forced myself to walk. My drunken smile beamed down all around me, and I moved a l
ittle faster, breaking into a slow jog as I reached the end of the corridor. It bent left into a smaller passage, and now I was running, running towards the sound of The Punster’s laughs. It wasn’t coming from the speaker system anymore, it was somewhere up ahead, it was bubbling up from somewhere deep in the maze and resounding off the walls, and I pushed through the pain and now I was sprinting towards the laughter. I darted around tighter and tighter corners and forks and turns in the maze as the passageway became narrower and narrower, until the walls were almost squeezing my shoulders, and finally, when it seemed like I wasn’t even going to be able to fit in the tiny tunnel anymore, I reached a door. I could hear The Punster’s laughter behind it, his giggling which was somehow childlike and grandfatherly at the same time, and I opened it.
The Punster was standing in the center of a circular room next to a waist high Greek column. One of my father’s golden wreaths sat on top of the marble column. There was a ring of projectors hanging from the ceiling that flickered on as soon as I stepped foot into the round room. The white walls lit up with images. The curved walls of the room showed decades of conflicts between Jack Titan and The Punster.
There were newspaper clippings of Jack Titan fighting The Punster’s gigantic Antdroid, blown up so huge on the walls that the Antdroid was almost life sized. There was grainy news footage of Jack Titan being crushed inside of The Punster’s giant vise while the wordplay obsessed psychopath chanted “Jack Tighten! Jack Tighten!” in his face. There were photos cut out of an issue of Spandex that showed The Punster riding a tank-like sleigh across snowy city streets and towards Jack Titan with his Goons towing it like hazmat wearing reindeer. The caption read “The Man of Myth and The Punster’s Slay Rides.” There were forty years of murderous wordplay projected onto the round walls.
Jack Titan went from a young, vital man to an old, bitter man in a circle around me. He started as an inexperienced superhero in the 60’s whose excitement and idealism was easy to read on his boyish face, even through his golden mask. He looked like he was thrilled to be alive, to be fighting back The Punster’s Goons with their sedative goo harmlessly sticking to his breastplate and whipping around his Golden Sling. You could see it in his eyes. This is what he was born to do.
But as he aged in a ring around me, the fun drained out of his eyes. He dealt with endless pun-themed deathtraps, he fought The Punster again and again, and I don’t know if it was the drugs, but I swear, I could see it in my father’s eyes. He was trapped in a never ending cycle of fighting The Punster, and by the end of their forty year long rivalry, it had worn him down to a nub. And The Punster, his passion and frenzy and untempered madness was constant from the first photos to that very moment as he stood there in front of me. He hadn’t changed at all, and there was no reason to think that he ever would.
“You know, I’m actually proud of you, Spectacle. I was so sure that you were going to die in that museum with all those ridiculous superhero souvenirs,” The Punster said. He wistfully looked around at this circular shrine he had built to his lifelong obsession with Jack Titan.
“I almost had you a couple of times, too. If it wasn’t for your metallic friend, you’d be dead right now and I’d never even get to use this maze that I’ve worked so hard on. I suppose we could call his death…a silver lining?” The Punster asked, and he winked at me. Still, I said nothing. I pulled my fist back and lunged at him. I aimed a punch at the old man’s nose that was intended to knock him out and finally end this insanity.
The Punster caught my fist in his gnarled, arthritic hand.
“What? You were expecting a helpless, elderly gentleman?” The Punster asked. I tried to pull my fist out of his hand, but he gripped it far tighter than any ordinary man possibly could. His warm smile warped into a sneer.
“You’re just like your father. Maybe even worse,” The Punster said, and he jerked my whole body by my fist and flung me into the curved wall of the room. I slammed into the projected image of Jack Titan in his prime. The wall cracked with my impact, I slumped to the floor, and The Punster walked towards me through the soft light of the projectors. His shadow eclipsed the images of my father on the wall behind him.
“He would have done the same thing. Jump into a situation without thinking it through even a little. You followed me down here, Spectacle. You didn’t have to,” The Punster said while I tried to stand up.
“You didn’t have to take that risk. You didn’t have to blindly follow me down here, all by yourself. You’re just like your father…arrogant. Immature. And stupid. Didn’t you think that maybe, just maybe I would take precautions? That I would be prepared for you? For anything? Did you even consider the possibility that I would inject myself with a dose of liquid SUHP to even the playing field?” The Punster said as I barely managed to get up.
“…the temporary super strength won’t last very long, but it’ll be more than enough,” The Punster said, and he hammered me in the face with an incredibly strong jab before I could even get my hands up. I fell back against the curved walls like a boxer on the ropes.
“I didn’t want any of this. I tried to get you to work with me, Spectacle, to begin a new era of superheroics. I tried to bring order to the chaos of costumed crime, I tried to give it meaning. Your father died, and I realized that I wasted my whole life on this childish idea of the ‘archenemy’. I wanted to move beyond that juvenile concept, and establish a legacy…but you’re just like him,” The Punster said, and he rained down super strength punches on my head. My back was up against the wall, the projectors were blinding me, and I did my best to block his punches, but with every blow to the head, I felt unconsciousness pulling me under like quicksand.
“You won’t let it go,” The Punster said and he stopped his barrage of punches. He was out of breath.
I pushed myself off of the curved wall and towards The Punster. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet with his weathered, bony fists up, and he had this look in his eyes, this look of hungry focus like a shark that smells blood in the water. Images of my father’s life as a superhero orbited us. All of my injuries, the blood loss, the exhaustion, the hallucinogenic drugs…I could barely stand as I moved into the center of that room. It felt like a fever dream, like a slippery nightmare that you can only half remember when you wake up, but I remember one thing more clearly than anything I’ve ever experienced. I remember believing that one way or another, this was going to end right here, right now. One of us was going to die here.
The Punster fired a punch at me that could have dented solid steel, and I bobbed out of the way and fired back. My punch connected with his jaw and blood flew out of his mouth. The Punster was surprised only for a second, and then he was furious. He came at me with every last drop of drug induced superhuman power that he had. He threw super strength punches at me with such speed and ferocity that I could only avoid so many of them, and with every jab, with every uppercut and haymaker, I could feel the bones of his sixty five year old fists cracking. We circled around each other, both of us trying to beat the other to death with our bare hands, both of us ducking and leaning and bobbing out of the way, both of us taking shots to the head and the midsection, and this deadly rhythm set in, like we were dancing with each other.
I landed a punch right on The Punster’s nose, right where I had aimed when I first entered that room, and I felt it break. The Punster was stunned, and blood streamed out of his nose. And suddenly…I was hit by this overwhelming clarity. I don’t know if it was the sight of this old man in front of me bleeding all over his wrinkled face and his bright purple turtleneck. I don’t know if it was the imagery of my father, of his decades of fights with The Punster and his pun motif weaponry, that circled us. I have no idea what it was…but I was struck by this realization.
I couldn’t kill him. All around me, I saw my father trapped in a vicious circle. I saw him waste his life away with this rivalry, this obsession with beating The Punster at his own game. What did his attachment to this personal vendetta eve
r bring him? What did it ever bring him but the death of my mother by way of yet another childish pun deathtrap? What did it accomplish besides burdening him with crushing guilt and regret that all the SUHP in the world couldn’t fix? If I killed The Punster, what then? I am not a murderer. Would the guilt kill me like it killed my dad? Would I end up an old man who never grew up, just like The Punster? Just like my own father? How long was this cycle going to go on? I just couldn’t do it.
The Punster sensed my hesitation, and he punched me in the face so hard that his brittle, arthritic knuckles broke against my cheekbone. I stumbled, and collapsed to my knees. He kicked me in the jaw, and I heard his shin fracture with the force of the kick.
“Well…you know what they say…you can’t make an omelette…without breaking…some legs,” The Punster said as he tried to catch his breath. He just wasn’t built to be using this much super strength. I almost blacked out from the kick…but now I knew what to do.
“You really are…the spitting image of your father,” The Punster said, and he spit blood in my eye. He snatched Jack Titan’s Golden Wreath off of the Greek column. He delicately placed it on top of my head, and he pulled me to my feet by my costume shirt. I said nothing.
“Say something you little shit!” The Punster screamed in my face. And still, I said nothing.
“This is it! This is the end of your life, and you don’t have anything? You don’t have any last words?” The Punster asked, and he laid into me with rapid fire punches to my rib cage. With every blow, I felt his frail knuckle bones crunching. The SUHP was wearing off. If I punched him once, it could kill him.