A Once Crowded Sky (33 page)

Pen closes the book, places it back down on the floor near the shards of glass. His hands are dotted with blue ink, which now purples his bloody palms. Star-Knight remains unconscious across the office. He kept his promise. He never said a word. Outside, a wind rumbles against the windows, starting up a clattering that goes on for a while.

1

The Prophetier Origin Special #2 of 2

Everyone knows Ultimate’s origin. It’s been retold into cliché. The mad scientist molds metal into man, activates an energy meant to animate his steel statue; but in that moment of creation, the instant the spark becomes life, something explodes, something
cracks
blue, the scientist is killed right as his greatest feat, The Man With The Metal Face, rises from the table.

Everyone likes that story; they like telling it, and they tell it often, and they tell it well, though they do tend to leave out the boy’s mother. His mother too died that day, but no one ever mentions it. Also it wasn’t an explosion that killed them. In fact, there wasn’t any explosion at all.

Still though, best to start with the father. You see, the boy’s father had been working for decades on building a robot man. He’d gotten rather far along in the process, but was having trouble finding a power source capable of sustaining the thing, of transforming all that sculpted metal into something that might benefit mankind, a robot to explore space or do our farming or whatever was the man’s most recent fantasy.

His father’s last test was judged to have no more potential than the
hundreds that had preceded it. As the boy understands it, as men had long ago split atoms of space to produce nuclear energy, his father split an atom of time, releasing a wave of nonlinear energy he optimistically calculated would perpetually move the great metal man.

His father performed the experiment in his lab, which was a small shack in their backyard—he’d long ago been rather forcefully ejected from any legitimate institution due to his rather odd ambitions. After the test, the robot man remained, as usual, inert, and the boy’s father left, only to discover a few hours later what a success he’d finally achieved when the well-powered Man With The Metal Face woke and killed him. And, obviously, his wife. We mustn’t forget the boy’s mother. Not again.

The boy saw it of course. He’d already been tucked into bed, but he’d snuck out of his room that night. A Superman comic clutched in one hand and a blanket in the other, the boy was determined to get his dad to read him this one more story before he went to sleep. He was only a few feet behind them, watching them quarrel over nothing, when the metal man burst through the wall, screaming, demanding something, and when he didn’t get what he wanted, flinging his metal fists right through the boy’s parents.

The boy gasped, and the robot man turned. Prophetier remembers well the metal face, the eyes focusing in and out, clicking and whirling. The robot stepped toward the boy, and the robot screamed; he screamed and screamed, and it took some time for the boy to understand what the words were.

“Explain me!” the robot yelled. “Explain me!”

And the robot neared the boy, and the boy saw his parents’ bodies reflected in the metal, the image smudged behind a few streaks of blood.

The boy should’ve broken. All that violence. His parents gone forever. It should’ve broken him forever. But he knew better. He wasn’t stupid. He knew this is just what happens sometimes. In fact, it happens all the time. It does, it really does. In the comic book stories. And the boy knew those stories well.

The boy adored comic books in all their endless glory. From before he could read, the boy would sit on his father’s lap flipping through another one, explaining to his father why this particular muscleman was beating upon this particular bald man. The boy’s father rarely left his work, but when he did, they’d pass the hours this way, enjoying the stories
revealed in the funny books, stories of suspense and adventure, death and resurrection.

The boy understood these stories. It wasn’t so hard. Why his parents were dead on the other side of the room. He understood. What else could it be?

Remember Batman’s parents. Superman’s parents. Robin’s parents. Captain America’s parents. Spider-Man’s parents. Iron Man’s parents. The Thing’s parents. Hawkeye’s parents. Magneto’s parents. Daredevil’s parents. Green Lantern’s parents. And on and on. Parents die, that happens, that’s when the adventure begins.

When the boy saw his parents, saw his world crushed beneath the metal, one might imagine he feared that it was all a fiction, that all stories amount to nothing, all that love and energy spent had no explanation beyond inevitable death; but, no, not for one second did the boy hesitate or think any of that.

The boy remembered the stories, and he knew that his parents’ death was rebirth, their fall was the ascendancy of a new story. “Explain me!” the metal man shouted at the boy. “Explain me!”

And the boy stretched out his arm, offered the comic book to the metal man. “You’re a story,” the boy said, and the metal man stopped and for a moment stood still and silent. Then the metal man cocked his arm, but the boy wasn’t scared, and the metal man grabbed the colored, crumpled paper from the boy’s hand and launched into the sky, flying away into a dark blue night.

The metal man left the boy alone. But the boy wasn’t worried. He’d come back. The boy’s parents lay dead, and they died for a reason. The boy knew the stories. They all come back. That’s the rule.

And indeed the boy saw The Man With The Metal Face only a few minutes later. Peering through the new hole in his house, the boy began to notice a blue glow humming in the backyard, coming from where his father’s lab once stood. The boy stepped over his parents’ bodies, walked outside, and bent over the dirt, which now bubbled blue. And the boy scratched a circle around the glow, releasing a stream of light.

Later, when he could see all the stories, the boy would understand what had happened. His father’s experiment had cut into the fabric of time, releasing the energy that powered Ultimate. Like in all these types of things, it had something to do with Einstein’s unified theory and dead
cats that are alive and all the rest of that incredible, typical stuff. But that’s not too important. What is essential is that this experiment had cut a hole in our universe, an incandescent gash leaking time, spitting out a stream of energy that contained the infinite images of the future.

Of course no one could comprehend the totality of what was actually flooding out of the rip; instead the color was shaped by the perceiver, whose unconscious mind sought out the images of relevance among that cacophony of reality. Some people would have seen their parents, their friends, or even their future life, its love and loss; the boy, of course, saw The Man With The Metal Face. He saw the robot flying again and again out of a blue sky, wearing a cape like the one from the comic the boy’d given him. And next to Ultimate, tucked close to that metal skin, stood a boy not unlike our boy, gleefully shouting, “Time to feel our metal!!!”

Pen was there. PenUltimate served by Ultimate’s side as the faithful, awesome sidekick. As in the boy’s story, Ultimate had come to Pen, had killed Pen’s parents, but instead of abandoning him, Ultimate pulled that boy closer, taught him how to be part of the myth, how to put the good above all else.

And if PenUltimate could do it, if he could come back from all that seemingly meaningless tragedy, then the boy too could rise. He too could be a hero. Of all the fantasies, which other could possibly be his favorite? He collected Pen’s stories, poured over them, memorized them, recognized that the boy was him, he was the boy, riding the clouds, The Man With The Metal Face always at his side.

The boy grew and watched the stories come true as the fictions claimed the skies above. First Ultimate emerged, soaring, inspiring others. Then Star-Knight came. And PenUltimate, the real, in the flesh and wires, PenUltimate! He emerged from the stories in the spout, and he joined the thousands of heroes saturating the world with their adventures.

Eventually, inspired by Pen, the boy started to play along in this magnificent game, calling himself The Prophetier, using his access to the tales’ conclusions to fight alongside all these heroes. The boy took to the sky, merged with The Blue. Thoughts of his parents’ deaths were fused with his elevation into the plotlines of these fantastic fantastics. He had followed Pen, and Pen had given him a reason to go on, and the world was wondrous.

But then Pen left. Pen walked up to The Man With The Metal Face
and rejected his destiny. He said he was sick of the game, that it scared him, that he wanted to live a normal life, safe at home with his wife. Pen forgot about his parents’ sacrifice, Ultimate’s sacrifice, Prophetier’s, and he left the game. Prophetier’s favorite hero escaped the unearned bliss of the story.

And how did that make sense? PenUltimate was the answer; his fate was the boy’s fate. How could that make sense? It was wrong. The story was wrong. And the boy saw that mistake in the light, how Pen’s leaving triggered the end of the story itself. Without Pen, without the boy who came back, the story itself no longer had purpose.

No. No. No. Pen had to learn how important the stories were, that they could not be rejected, for to turn your back to the stories was to reenter the house and face all that the metal had done, all that blood. Pen had to understand the importance of the metal man, of the opportunity he was given, of what it means to look into that metal face and see your tears, see the reflection of yourself plastered on its bloody, handsome features—there are heroes there, Pen, there are heroes!

PenUltimate ran from the story, and Prophetier peered into The Blue, praying, for hours, years, searching for a solution, demanding Pen come back, please, please come back. The boy begged and begged; and, eventually, the story provided.

From The Blue came a tale where the sidekick rises again. Pen’s decision to leave the game actually leads him to be the only player left in it. When a threat comes, he has no choice but to start playing. As he plays, helped by a haunted, heroic mentor, Pen begins to transform, to see the worth and the need for the stories to go on. Pen overcomes obstacle after obstacle, including the last-second betrayal of his own mentor, until he is finally ready to give everything for the game.

In the end, Pen throws himself on the light opened by the boy’s father, and Pen knows at that moment the true worth of the shine, the promise of beautification found in its burn. He is no longer the boy who left; he is now the greatest of them all, and he dies as the greatest of them all, and all the heroes come back, all the powers blow forth, and the game goes on once again!