Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (37 page)

“That was close,” he said. “What did you want again?”

The world. Everything,
I thought
. A secret plan.

“A motorcycle,” I said. “I want someone to see us. For real this time.”

He gave me a weary gaze. “That’s not smart, and you know it.”

“But it fits,” I argued. “You know, how Penguin used to ride in one, his sidekick in the sidecar.”

Apollo grinned. “I think you’d look good on a bike.”

“Really?” My eyes were bright.

“Yes. Behind me, with your Greta Garbo eyes, I think you’d steal the show.”

Those silent eyes that he admired fell. “But not on the front of the bike?”

“No. Too dangerous, like I said. I’ll take that.”

He thought he was being admirable. He thought he was being a hero. I swallowed hard, folding my arms over my chest. I didn’t want to tell him that villains road motorcycles and danger was still danger even if you were being noble. We had no leather jackets, no way to protect ourselves from the asphalt. A nurse who used to take care of one of the other foster kids told us once that motorcycles were really organ donations on wheels. Skin could burn off, completely deglove itself from the muscle, as soon as a crash happened. Boots were needed. Helmets were good. Protection was always imperative if you wanted to stay alive.

Apollo acted like he was the sun and he could keep the road warm. His name was a God’s name, and he thought himself truly immortal. For a second, I imagined a crash on the bike and both of us spilling into the road. I imagined sunlight radiating out of his wounds— and nothing but black and white picture shows coming out of mine.

Another cop car zoomed by. It didn’t even bother to slow down.

“We know what direction the police are taking,” I said, gaining strength. “So we know where to avoid. I want a bike. Let’s go get one.”

He smiled again. Sunlight shone in his hair. “Okay. You have a deal.”

VI

During our years in foster homes, apartments, and motel rooms, I collected stories. Like bugs and mites, the stories I found dangled like modifiers of city life. They were writer’s prompts, vague and incomplete, that lined the walls and stained the carpets. I could speculate far too much about the movements in the next room, the water dripping from the pipes, and the photos on the frontman’s desk as we slipped him our credit card. But while every thought and ending was true to me, hotel clerks always eyed our credit cards skeptically. Our real names had always required a special type of longing to believe.

When we stayed in motel rooms, I stole the soap and toiletries to help myself remember. I counted and added the different pastel shades to my collection in the bottom of a thrift-store suitcase. The soaps always left a white line at the bottom of the bag. Each time we took a trip, I found a different commodity to steal. The first time, it was crackers. Then the peanut-butter packets that were part of the free motel breakfasts (which we spawned out to lunch and dinner). I was daring for a while and started to take the towels. Then I realized they were charging our credit cards for them. The soap was my favorite, though it made my hands feel coarse, like they didn’t belong to me. I dropped the bars in the shower, and the soap wore away into half-moon chips, which I held up to the light at night but always failed to conjure up anyone.

One night, we stopped at a store and Apollo left the motorcycle on the kick stand while I went inside through the window. I left my suitcase and took the cash, thinking it to be a fair trade. But the money we stole was always so transient, so ephemeral. For a collector like myself, there always had to be something else around the corner. Money, which the Joker set on fire in
The Dark Knight
, was never important. I wanted things that I could attach my name to and say were really mine. Even the bike only offered a temporary fantasy and illusion. We hadn’t crashed yet, though we had come close. I still didn’t know what we were really made of.

We passed by a used bookstore and I pointed out the window desperately. The yellow sign that displayed the name
Dixon’s Comics and Cards
made us both yield as we turned a corner. The store was part genre fiction and part comic books. Next to the yellow sign was a smaller red one that informed us that the store also offered trading. One comic book for any issue of
The Amazing Spider-Man
; one old cracked-spine of a Stephen King novel or copy of
The Lord of the Rings
, and you could take your pick from the trade bin. We stepped inside and a bell rang.. Neil Gaiman’s
Sandman
peaked out from one of the bins.

“How much do we have?” I asked Apollo.

“Enough money, G—”

“But how much other stuff?”

I wanted the allure of paying for comics with comics. Of trading in the only form of currency that seemed to matter to us and getting something in return. But like our proverbial parents, the ones who had made us orphans, we were broke. The man behind the counter would not want to hear me wax poetic about my old life. I could not trade our stories for stories, not yet.

Apollo pulled out a five, a ten, and then raised his eyes.

“Are you sure you want this, G? There are so many others.”

“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” I explained. I held
Sandman:
Preludes and Nocturnes
to my chest. “I need something to read.”

VII

From the back of the bike, I watched Apollo smoke. I got off and joined him. He offered me a cigarette; I declined, and we went into our already established script.

“No, thank you. Haven’t you heard? Smoking is bad for you.”

“And so is sun, and fighting crime, and yet, here we are.”

“Fighting crime and breaking the law are very similar.”

“And our lungs are only ours for breathing, like our bodies only for eating. Nothing else. Never for pleasure.” Then he smiled and touched his stomach. I could almost hear the ripple of hunger tear through him, like a frost quake after an ice storm. “You hungry, Greta?”

I smiled. “Always.”

He smiled again as he tossed away the cigarette. Once he had mounted the bike, he extended his hand to mine and helped me on. I wrapped my arms around his waist, holding a fist in the middle of his stomach. We drove, and I felt the weight of the wind, and Apollo’s smell against me like a kiss. We found a diner, went in, and ate until they kicked us out.

When we were kids in foster homes, Apollo would always get up in the middle of the night, pace the room, go to the kitchen, and then back again. His midnight snacks became feasts at four a.m., and he’d find me. Even in the houses that separated us, put him with the boys and me by myself, he’d find me. He’d crack the locks on the fridge door, if they had one, and he’d bring me loaves of bread. Candy, milk, ice cream, and meat. He would always find me.

That night in bed, the rare warm Alberta night made me feel as if I were sweating out everything that had happened to us. It was as if I were in an interrogation room, my skin oily and unrecognizable. My freckles stared up at me and I looked to Apollo, his dark hair matted to his forehead and his body stirring against the sheets. I waited for him to wake up that night, but he was still stuck in a dream.

VIII

I had always liked the DC Universe. It allowed for so much to happen at once. There were too many possibilities for a single Earth to hold, so they just created another one. Earth II. Added another Krypton, and even more inane planets if they wanted. When you read DC, you checked your reason at the door. And I
liked
that, in a way that we get used to certain tastes and proclivities. I also liked Marvel. They had stolen Asgard from the Vikings. It took real balls to get away with something like that.

I sat up all night and into the morning when Apollo didn’t wake up. I thumbed the collected works and comic books we had just bought and categorized my new collection. I reread the stories of Thor and Loki and invested myself in their troubles. They were brothers who had grown up together, with constant strife pulling them apart.

I showered and thought I heard the whir of a time machine opening above me, like the Rainbow Bridge to Asgard, but it was just Apollo. He moved back the glass shower doors, and slipped under the water with me, naked. With his hands steady on my shoulders, he whispered in my ear, like Loki must have said to Thor: “I’m adopted.”

Our foster homes always matched us up, always said we were twins, despite the contrast of my ginger hair and freckled skin next to his dark looks. I didn’t care which reality was a lie.

Everything eventually changes. Maybe after the shower, I would be the one to drive the motorcycle. Maybe we would rob a bank or mug someone, instead of remaining invisible during our thefts. Maybe we would fall against the road and crack into a thousand pieces and become a thousand stories for someone else to pick up and understand.

As our secret identities washed down the drain, our lips met again and again. Even when it was all over, I knew our superpowers would remain forever.

* * *

Ontario writer Evelyn Deshane received an MA from Trent University and is pursuing a PhD at Waterloo.

In the Kirby Krackle

John Bell

You wanted something

I couldn’t, wouldn’t

give:

A murderous rampage

against your

enemies

Your very own genocidal

god raging in the Kirby

Krackle!

When all I wanted

was to retreat like

Thoreau

Into the last wild

places beyond your

reach

Your comic-book

fantasies, video-game

mythologies

New scriptures of

unbridled death &

destruction

I am leaving but

don’t pretend I’m

dead

I am starbound, relishing

my escape from

you

This is my power & it truly

crackles, pulses with

fire

A beacon of loss in

a dark, forbidding

sea

But this won’t kill you—

only break your

hearts.

* * *

John Bell is the author or editor of nearly twenty books, including
Invaders from the North
, a history of Canadian comics.

A Week in the Superlife

Alex C. Renwick

MONDAY

Monday you wake up and all your bones ache, every single one.

People probably don’t realize you ache like this, if they ever think about you. Sure, yes, you can fly and you do have superstrength, but you also take superpummelling, day in, day out. Anybody ever think of that?

You’re like any other guy; you put your pants on in the morning one leg at a time— except they’re not really pants, but tights. And they’re not really tights, but some nanotech self-repairing microfiber developed in some government lab back when you had your regular gig and still punched the clock for the feds. But then you had to go and fall for the Commissioner’s only daughter, had to find out she wasn’t the type to be happy with a workaholic son-of-a-bitch like you. Had to find out she wanted kids —
kids
for chris’sakes, in a crazy messed-up world like this one! — and
that
, plain and simple, wasn’t something you could get on board with.

So you started staying out later and later, calling it work, coming home drunk sometimes, it’s true, but never really meaning to, not really. Eventually she stopped crying, though she never stopped caring (she really is a saint and you never did deserve her), until one night she wasn’t there when you got home three sheets to the wind with your guts so full of bullet holes from those delusional teenage self-styled gangstas you’d tangled with earlier that evening, you looked like a goddamn slab of Swiss cheese.

Bullets can’t kill you, though they sure as hell hurt. But unlike other times your woman wasn’t there that night to patch you up, to cry over you or kiss or even yell at you because you scare her half to fucking death and she’s afraid one of these nights you won’t come home at all, and though this actually all happened what feels like a long time ago you’re still glad she finally got the juice that night to leave you for good.

For her sake, you’re glad.

TUESDAY

You spend Tuesday doing the usual. It’s harder and way more boring than people might think to find crimes or accidents or even catastrophes actually in progress. Back when you worked for the government you had some military-developed superphone, tapped you into police channels, rang whenever the Commissioner needed your expertise. These days you look for breaking news on your regular smartphone (smarter than many, not as smart as others), or simply fly around the downtown core, waiting for someone in trouble to flag you down like a goddamn taxi, for chris’sakes. Some days, you figure you may as well start wearing a light on your head, turn it on when you’re flying around doing nothing so it announces to the world:
Available
.

But today you’re in luck. You spot two guys messing with some poor junkie prostitute near the corner of High Street and 82nd. They chase her into a weed-choked gully out of sight from the roadway and one pulls a knife. All this you see from seventy feet up in the air, so you don’t get details or hear what they’re saying (it’s not like you have superhearing or supersight), but you recognize the unmistakable terror in the prostitute’s cower, the heart-wrenching inadequacy of her brittle-twig arms raised to shield her face from the bigger guy’s blade. The other guy, the littler one, is unbuttoning the fly of his jeans.

You drop like a raptor,
Bam!
, and those guys go sprawling. The knifer squeals when you rip the stupid metalhead T-shirt off his back in one go and tie his wrists so tight to his ankles, he’d better hope the cops arrive before blood loss forces them to amputate later. The other guy’s fumbling with his buttonfly, trying to pull up his pants and run at the same time, gets all tangled and falls.