Super Born: Seduction of Being (28 page)

I was so enthralled and happy to see her that I
forgot to record any of it, hoping she would fly by again. Her
image disappeared and then returned, this time higher in the sky.
Now I filmed until she disappeared, then let my camera dangle from
my wrist as I wrapped my arms around the person nearest to me, who
happened to be a man about my age in a brown suit who I didn’t
know. We jumped for joy together. Then I picked up a petite young
female reporter who I had never seen before and spun her in a
circle before putting her down. Then I turned to the next person
near me, a reporter who turned out to be a very large woman in a
suit whose buttons were straining to stay closed. I knew I was in
trouble if I tried to lift her, so I smiled, dropped my arms, and
then yelled something up into the sky as I pumped my fist. The
large reporter picked me up and buried her face in my chest as we
spun joyfully together.

***

“
Mom!” yelled Paige as she burst
into our apartment. “Mom? Did you hear? The B.I.B. is
okay!”

She’d found me lying on the sofa in the living
room with an unopenned laptop on my belly. I sat up slowly, like an
old woman, holding my ribs as I did.

“
That’s great. How’d you hear about
it?”

“
It’s everywhere, the Internet, the
TV.. I was really worried, but somehow, I knew she’d be okay…by the
way, you should really use that thing,” Paige said, referring to
the laptop. “Anyway, she flew over the news conference this
morning, so they had video of her coming out in the daytime, just
so people would stop saying she was dead. Wanna see?” Paige asked.
She pulled up the video on her phone of the B.I.B. that had been
taken in the sky above City Hall that morning.

“
Oh yeah, isn’t she just somethin’?”
I said a bit sarcastically as I watched myself on the video,
remembering the extreme pain I felt as I flew.

“
She is just so awesome. She was in
that big explosion and came out just fine. I am sooo glad she’s
okay….oh, and how you feeling? Is your flu any better?”

I produced a little fake cough. “Yeah, I think
I’m a lot better than yesterday…I got out for a little while
today.”

“
I don’t know. You sure you should
be going outside already? Maybe you should see a
doctor.”

I smiled. “I’m a lot better already. Don’t
worry.”

The ring tone of her phone rang the first verse
of some pop song Paige liked. She looked at her phone. “Oh, it’s
Kelly. I gotta take this…What’d he say?” She said and then walked
away, back into her little teenage world.

It had taken an excruciating effort to fly that
day, so I was glad to see that I had gotten my point across. Now
everyone knew I was alive and Camino probably thought I was
indestructible. But I wasn’t.

It was true that my powers had saved me. That
explosion would have collapsed a normal person—for me, it just
emptied my lungs of air. But had I been ten feet closer…who knows.
I noticed I was healing faster too. Yesterday I could barely move,
today I could fly, tomorrow or the next day I would be myself
again…whatever that was.

I knew Camino was behind the blast. The public
embarrassment I’d caused him at his offices must have been too much
for the little baby to bear. Amazingly, I wasn’t angry. He had
taken his shot. If I were him, I probably would have done the same.
The next shot would inevitably be mine, and I wouldn’t miss. I felt
no revenge or motivation to strike at him right away, but I also
felt no mercy.

Those days of healing alone had left their
mark, though. I had almost died. I had almost abandoned Paige to
this uncertain world, and for what? Did anyone really care what I
did? Did I matter? Was the risk worth the price?

I thought back about how those questions had
haunted me that morning. The doubt was like poison that crept
through my veins. If I had wanted the B.I.B. to just stay dead, I
could have left her that way. Everyone believed it. I’d had a
chance to end it all, to change directions. Was helping the
ungrateful a cause worth the price of someone trying to kill you?
With my powers, I could have slipped away and become whoever I
wanted. It would be so easy to just leave this all
behind.

I remember having walked slowly with an aching
chest and head to where I kept the B.I.B. costume behind the panel
in my closet. I took it out, fully intending to stuff it in the
trash forever. I’d studied it for a second, seeing its rips and
tears and spots of my own blood. Then I remember something clicking
in my head. It was a choice to be normal, or succumb to the
seduction to be extraordinary. Paige had a mom, but to her, the
B.I.B. was awesome. I had a gift and I wasn’t going to waste it.
That was when I struggled to slowly put on the costume and flew
over the news conference to let them know the B.I.B. was back. The
doubts would catch me one day, but it wouldn’t be today.

Now I had to live with that decision. I opened
the laptop and replayed the video taken outside City Hall a. I
watched the close-up reactions of the crowd as they cheered and
danced around. Almost everyone I saw had a spontaneous reaction of
happiness—people who were obviously strangers even hugged one
another. It was great to see the love everyone had for the B.I.B.
It made me smile.

Then I laughed, seeing a familiar face. The TV
news video showed the man I’d seen at O’Malley’s who’d made the
googly eyes at me, the one I’d flashed my eyes at, for who knows
what reason. I paused the video, and replayed it. It was funny to
see him again, cheering while some big woman picked him up and spun
him around.

Chapter 22

I Start the Wheels to
Cataclysm

The next morning, I was up at the crack of ten,
or maybe elevenish, feeling renewed and full of purpose despite a
serious hangover. Joy at the B.I.B.’s return had forced me into a
night of celebrating including a brief stop at O’Malleys. I hit the
computer with a steaming mocha latte in hand (minus the mocha and
the milk), and checked out the Scranton news before logging onto
the B.I.B. website. Other than the “buy one get one” sale on
Miner’s beer, only one item caught my eye.

This was an article about the “City Hall Pipe
Bomber.” Some stiff had confessed to intending to bomb the mayor’s
office. (Sounded more like a civic service than a crime to me.)
However, in the article, it mentioned that he was apprehended by a
group of citizens after he had attacked a woman in an alleyway.
There was an interview with each of the citizens, except the woman
who had been attacked. Witnesses described her as having blond hair
and being thirty or so, but then spoke of how she had left the
scene with her face hard to describe because it was screwed up in
what they could only describe as a “fish face.”

Thirty and blond reminded me of the B.I.B. and
immediately made my morning glory remind me of its presence. But
the fish face struck my memory. I hit the keyboard and found the
picture files I had bought when I purchased the picture of the
B.I.B. taken at Skelly’s. The guy had sent me pictures of the same
woman doing a “fish face.” I pulled them up, and there she was, the
B.I.B., doing a “fish face.”

There she was, blond, thirty, and fish faced.
The B.I.B. had stopped the bomber, not the citizen group, and she
had used the fish face to escape without being ID’d. Sometimes she
seemed like such an sweet, ordinary chick and, at other times, so
unapproachably powerful. I thought about the night with her at
O’Malley’s, the flashing eyes, and tried to put that together with
an ordinary woman. I tried to imagine what she would be like, what
it would be like to stand beside her…and a few other
things.

But I was the only one who knew she had stopped
the bomber. That would be the subject of my blog on the website. I
broke the story on the site and published the fish-face picture for
the first time. Now that’s journalism…right?

I hurried through it because my real goal for
the morning (after sobriety) was to research the only leads I
had—Jennifer Lowe and the other Super Bowl women. There had to be a
connection. I needed to find the other women and learn more about
Lowe.

I did an Internet search for
Jennifer Lowe and found some artists and dog trainers, but found
nothing about “my” Jennifer Lowe other than her little florist
shop. I researched her name for real estate holdings and found
nothing, not even a little bungalow somewhere. I was thinking about
my next clever move, or at least a clever move, when I saw
Lowe LLC
on the real
estate tax listings.

The first listing matched the
address of her florist shop.
Hello,
hello
, I thought. But that was just the
first of a dozen in the city. I crosschecked the listings to
condos, office buildings, and restaurants. This chick had it going
on. Then I checked other cities and found listings for Lowe LLC in
New York City, Chicago, Orlando, Dallas, and on the island of Maui.
If I had known how to do it, I’d have checked Europe and Asia and
probably found more. Lowe was not a mere florist but a friggin’
conglomerate—who melts pens, by the way.

So there was at least one other superwoman, ,
and she wasn’t doing like “my” sweetie and fighting crime and
injustice. Somehow Jennifer had found a way to turn her powers into
millions. I didn’t remember seeing her in any of the latest porn or
on a reality TV show like “Melting Pens with the Stars.” So for the
moment her power remained a mystery.

Now the question was, should I close in on
Lowe, or keep looking for the others? The memory of the pen clip
melted into the tabletop made me think maybe the latter was a
better idea.

Chapter 23

First Contact, Getting What You
Want, and Getting Sick

When I saw my fish-faced picture on thebib.org
home page, my hand flew up to cover my mouth, and my chair flew
back a couple of inches, scratching across the tile floor. I moved
in closer and covered the picture with my hand, as if that could
block it from the world. I’m no IT wiz, but even I knew that wasn’t
going to help. (I think you’d have to do that on every computer in
the world to have any effect.) I looked around to see if Paige was
near, nearing full-blown panic.

So far, I had gotten lucky, but that
fish-face trick was well known to my friends and my family, anyone
who really knew me. What would I tell Paige? What could I tell my
family? All kinds of thoughts swirled in my head.
Can I get the picture pulled from the site? Maybe
I should admit it’s me, but say I’m not the B.I.B.?
If I sue to get it off, I’ll draw all kinds of
attention.
What to do? Damn that guy from
Texas, I thought. I put the cursor over the Add Your Comment button
and clicked it. I sent this message to the site: “Hey asshole, that
fish-face picture isn’t the B.I.B., it’s me. Some guy from Texas
took it a few months ago. How’d you get it? I’m gonna sue your ass
if you don’t take it down immediately. No one should believe this
site. That picture is not the B.I.B., just a middle-aged mom from
Scranton who just likes to goof around and blow off steam at a
local bar sometimes. And guess what? She’s pissed!”

* * *

Don’t ask me how, ’cause I’ll deny
it in court, but I knew it was her. Not only her, but the fearful,
vulnerable side of her; the asshole comment notwithstanding.
Something about that fish-face picture had made her scared; so
scared that she was now risking being discovered to to get it
removed. I stared at the picture and wondered,
How could a fish face make me so horny
?

Suddenly, a shiver came over me. Not an “I ate
too many chili fries” shiver, either—it was like my whole body was
empty and frozen in place. I was just a pair of eyes and a brain
reelingwith a joyous, frightening, exhilarating, foreboding feeling
that within my grasp was something that would change my life
forever .

I stared at the page, reread her words, and
thought until the pixels of the screen were burnt into my brain.
Without direction or plan, as usual, my hands began to move the
cursor. I logged in to the back end of the website, found the code
for the picture, clicked on it, clicked “delete,” and then updated
the site. In an instant there was a gigantic hole on the page, but
I had something far more valuable. Through the hit history, I could
now track back and find her computer address.

I fell back in my chair and felt the shivers
come over me again in waves, like the surf on the north shore of
Maui. (Hey, I was there…once…okay, I read about it.) I watched my
hands shaking, even worse than on St. Paddy’s Day last
year.

Little did I know that she was going through
the same thing on her end, minus the shivers, joy, fear,
exhilaration, or foreboding, and probably not the shakes or the
profound sense of glory or connection. Let’s just say she was
friggin’ surprised.

I felt close to her. I can’t explain the
feeling any more than I can explain the way her eyes flashed at me
that night in the bar, or the fact that no one else could see it.
But I felt the exhilaration of a warm pulsation flowing between us.
The thought literally stunned me.

* * *

I stared in shock at the empty space
on the screen where my fish-face picture had been, my mind still
racing in fear. I refreshed the page. I exited my browser and
launched it again to be sure the picture was gone. I looked down at
the hand that had covered the screen and laughed to myself,
half-wondering if my powers could account for something like
this.
Good work!
I
thought, and then tried to make other parts of the site disappear
with my hand, to no avail.