True Heroes (28 page)
Caleb’s chewing slowed. “Still a mystery within the enjoyment of life.”
“Is that what you’re doing here? Enjoying life?”
“Ah, no, I already told you why I’m here.” The image of Carol’s figure flashed within Kain. “As a psychologist in training, I’m sure there’s another question you’ve been aching to ask since you heard my reason.”
“You caught me. Why are you so apprehensive about yourself? You talked about suicide, you walk around here in bare feet like there aren’t dangers or like you don’t care, and you’ve condemned yourself to a masochistic nightmare that you’re just sitting here and taking needlessly; what’s this all about? What was wrong with just moving on from her and living your life?”
A smile snuck across Caleb’s face as he flung the box onto the table and swallowed his bite. He reached over with his chop sticks and reeled the noodles Kain wasn’t eating across the table. “Your dad, I’m sure, told you I was the only one to enter his office and not leave a convert, right?”
Kain chortled. “He sang about that in disgrace.”
“I bet he never told you why though. Open that.” He pointed towards the folder with a small rock keeping the papers from soaring away.
He picked up the heavy manila folder and carefully flipped the top flap open. The first paper was a sheet of medical gibberish and a picture not much different from the one he had of Caleb. He flipped a few more pages and had his eyes caught by the word “police” on the third. Scanning quickly and expertly, he read the paragraph describing an event in which Caleb was hit by a car. It was a single paragraph nearly two pages long, most of which describing the lack of complications the detective noticed subsequent to the accident with Caleb. ‘They used “suspicious” and “skeptical” about twenty times in this report.’ “So, you kept this report as a joke right? It’s filled with mistakes.”
“Mistakes?”
“Well, I mean it says you stopped a car going fifty miles-per-hour and, oh how about that, you weren’t hurt at all. This has got to be a joke.”
Another slurp of a group of noodles resounded while Caleb raised his head and made no emotional jest through his face. He simply stared down Kain’s disbelief. “They didn’t believe it either. Even with the evidence staring them in the face, but that doesn’t make it any less true.”
Kain laughed. “You’re in on this too? No, I’m not that gullible.” Kain suddenly began deducing between the lines. “I can see this is the end of our conversation. Thanks for the few answers I did get.”
“Keep reading. The last three pages are the only things I’ve ever tampered with in there, and my sources are impeccable.”
Kain had his hands on the chair arms, fully ready to support his weight and stand from the scene, but something kept him down. A pressure coming from somewhere that moved his hands back to the file and nearly forced his eyes to continue reading. He continued to flip as Caleb stared off, his curiosity rising as he saw medical stamps on some of the pages where the language became more familiar to him. Mathematical equations, psychological evaluations, and newspaper snips highlighting heroic acts flashed in front of him right through the last page. ‘Here it is: all the evidence you need to make your decision. Maybe not....’ The back page of the folder flipped closed, and he wanted so badly to believe it, but he couldn’t.
“Satisfied yet?” Caleb twisted the last of the noodles around his chop stick and engulfed them.
“Not even close. I just can’t believe something like this.”
“All right,” Caleb shrugged. Kain’s horizon changed then; the man who was aligned with his line of sight perfectly was suddenly beneath it. He gripped at his chair and accidentally dropped the file and its contents to the ground. It felt as though he was seat belted in as he tried to jump down but simply couldn’t. He glanced at Caleb, and saw a smile mocking him and his panic. One of Caleb’s fingers lifted and lowered back to the table, the chair following the path perfectly and setting back to the earth. He took a few deep breaths and his head bounced from one movement to another, trying to rationally comprehend what just happened, all the while the flying papers suddenly lined up perfectly, flying around the short wall and to Caleb’s back where they stacked back in Caleb’s hand in the folder, a little over a second later. He carefully placed the filled file back on the table. “Satisfied now?”
“This is too…too—”
“Insane? You’ll find that word has a different meaning here, and even more different depending on whom you ask. I can assure you that everyone in this place and outside has or will be insane at one point during their life. That one moment when you’re taken over by something else that isn’t you. It helps us know that the world isn’t a lonely place; it’s what shows us living people what is right and what is wrong.”
“But you stopped a car going
fifty
on a dime….I don’t even see the mathematical possibility there.”
Caleb flipped to the twenty-third page and placed it in front of the skeptical man. “I produced this,” Caleb said while pointing to his power output, “and the car only produced this much,” pointing to the much smaller amount for the BMW.
His eyes skipped down to the bottom of the page, and there resided an interesting note he read aloud, mostly to convince himself rather than enlighten anybody. “Obviously, the boy created this tremendous force out of a need to save someone and not just himself. He couldn’t have possibly created this with no motivation; no, this power came from the undeterrable desire to save this lucky girl from the darkness of death. Remarkable.” Kain decided to extrapolate what he could. “So, he’s saying you’re like a superhero?”
Caleb lost his humored smile and genuinely frowned. “I’m a defective piece of human genetics that’s been internally mutated and deformed into something physically and mentally stranger than normal people, but I’m nowhere near a superhero. I’m not even a regular hero. Heroes don’t make mistakes. I’m just a guy with a talent for tantalizing people with ideas of greatness before screwing lives up.”
Kain suddenly found himself too deep into the illusion to pretend he was playing along. ‘He thinks he’s a crystal when he’s really a diamond. My dad found his dream in this kid.’ “But you’ve gotta know you’re still human, which means mistakes will happen. You’ve gotta tell the world about what you can do.”
“Says who? Who says that everything I do is the right decision? I mean the truly right decision.”
“You can’t doubt yourself that much or no one would follow you.”
“Can you imagine how the world would react to me?”
“Yes, I can. Caleb,” he talked with his hands and body as much as he did with words. “You could give people hope in an entirely new way. Have you read the news lately? The world is dying around us because nobody is willing to stand up and say what’s wrong. And the few who do don’t have the power to stop any of it. You have both.”
Caleb just leaned his head back and stared at a cloud between the web of leaves; the darkened fluff made so by the hiding sun behind it blasting out of the outlines while still barely dulled behind the moisturous mist. “I’ve actually thought of coming back, making an impact the world can see. Maybe after I fulfill my promise to Carol, maybe if that grief doesn’t kill me, I’ll put my new philosophy to the test.”
“What’s the new philosophy?”
“Remember how I tried to kill myself?”
Kain nodded eagerly.
“Well the same doctor who calculated and toiled with a great deal of that math you read told me one day that since I use more energy than other people that I would die early as my body wouldn’t be able to hold the strain.” He began to drift off again. “It’s amazing what a bullet to the head can teach you about your immunity to death.” He pulled out the final page of the folder and pushed it towards Kain. “Here’s the critical point of my energy versus my physical self. He believed that my body would eventually reach this point—he predicted it would happen when I turned thirty—and I’d be done. Since there was no real precedence of…well, me, he had to pick and guess at a rational starting point, and that’s why his math was wrong.” He flipped the page over. There was a single graph, and it wasn’t very interesting as it was just a straight line hovering right above zero joules. “My body at rest and my body empowered have the same, straight lined outputs with my power supplementing any critical point I could ever approach. My power basically refuels my entire body all the time; the mitochondrial energy reserves of my cells never run out and can reproduce rapidly as long as my energy exists. So,” Caleb smirked a little and sat back, his eyes revealing true scorn and sour feelings, “I’m effectively immortal as far as I can tell.”
Kain sat back, not concerned with math or science at this point. “What’s this have to do with your ‘new philosophy’?”
“You’re sitting at my table!”
Caleb and Kain both looked up at the older man, his mustache bushed and curly while his grey hair left his scalp in tufts as it weakly held to dying roots and eyes that shown a smelted iron of a once strong mind quickly liquefying into obscurity. His cane rose towards Caleb, but he didn’t waver a bit. He simply stood from his chair and glowed down the foot-and-a-half drop from Caleb’s eyes to the older man’s. “Sorry, Mr. Cricles.” His hunched back quickly found the seat which comforted him while Caleb jerked his head at Kain, who picked up the file and walked away from the glaring man. “He thinks the entire world covets that chair when there’s at least a million like it. This is a weird place.” They walked over to a short, white wall and sat nearly perpendicular to the sun setting on the far side of Caleb. He assumed a relaxed posture with his arms crossed and spine bent out, looking as if he was prepared for a casual event. “Anyways, I used to think that the only thing that mattered was power. It wasn’t much different from how you think now: the ends came too fast while the means never lasted. That led to me committing acts that I’ll never forgive myself for, even if I live forever. They taught me, though. All those mistakes taught me that the ends of means aren’t meant for power to blast through, but the means are used to completely make the ends disappear. Control is the only thing keeping the world in perspective. I can control when I feel my insane moments, who lives and dies around me, and the world’s effect on me, but I’m still not ready. I’ll promise you this, Kain: when I am ready to show the world my new self, they’ll see it, hear it, smell it, taste it and want more than anything to reach out and hold it in their hands. They will see how the world can be saved by one man and one idea.”
“That’s how the world should be.”
---
‘Let us dream now, Caleb. Close your eyes and bear witness to a future that rushes like cavalier stampedes surrogated to the pain of hellish night. Here we are,’ his imagination placed him back in his high school, halfway between Hackard’s office and the exit, ‘back where we don’t belong. That’s where we’ve been all of our time alive: limited spaces. Destructible places that suit us as peanut-brittle would suit a legendary knight.’ The scene flashed and the school no longer stood. ‘Didn’t that feel good? Didn’t its own frailty call to you like a pheromone that excites the blood into heroine and elicits a craving for eternal conclusion? That searing addiction you felt for that white flash was simply a moment: a part of time that influxes past, present, and future. That future, oh my Caleb, let me show you.’
Something inside of Caleb clenched and his imagination flew from the school back to the asylum roof. He felt a collision between both sides of his head. His mother’s death clashed against his father’s murder, and Caleb was lost. All that remained was a fury that filled his brain, overloaded his nerves, inflamed and engorged his muscles, crushed his own bones to pieces, and shot his power out at the brightest shade of blue. The building beneath his feet offered no resistance. The drive-way was scraped off like wet mud. The town was blown to the wind. New York City only had a few seconds to attempt cowering or any other involuntary flinch. The state was next. Then, the ocean sizzled away a few feet when the shelf became a grill. Street signs and phone booths in Britain were reduced to atoms. Mountains were blasted away into grating flurries. Ice shelves instantly melted and sent the oceans above all walls. The Great Wall was hit from both sides, crashing it into oblivion’s gate. Back at the beginning, something barely stood. Its knees soon gave way to the insufferable pain of his skinless body, the intense global-killer taking its toll.
The clash between his brain was over. Caleb didn’t survive. It did. Its hand twitched in the powder of the Earth. Before long, its terror was over and its skin began to slowly regenerate.
‘It’s how the world should be, Caleb.’
---
The sun broke out from behind another capturing cloud and reappeared on the horizon; a staircase of thin, wispy clouds colliding the waves of red, pink, and orange together, all leading to the descending globe. Kain glanced back at Caleb, and saw his head turn towards the beating rays of the futile center of warmth in the universe. His head crossed back and down to the waving grass, not blinking but entranced with some detail of the green sea. There was something stunning about him bathing in the awesome power of the sun, and as a tear streamed down the cheek Kain couldn’t see, the young man could’ve sworn that, if you looked into Caleb’s eyes just when the sun hit them, that his already-vibrant blue’s were trying to glow brighter than the sun itself.
