True Heroes (85 page)

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              Power attempted to cover Caleb’s eyes. ‘I want to see her reaction.’

              ‘You’ll be able to feel it from my heart speed. Let me see her.’

              It backed further into the cave behind Caleb’s pupils and listened with ringing ears against Caleb’s corroded. Alice’s finger suddenly moved from his, and she moved quickly and closely to his face. “Are you saying you figured it out?”

              ‘All the evidence you’ll ever need is in her eyes.’ “I’m saying that, and that I can finally make you as happy as your deserve to be.”

              ‘I know.’

              “Then…maybe we could try again.”

              “We can, but I’m not going to put you through this again.”

              She sat back. “What do you mean?”

              His chin dropped again. “I mean I won’t keep you on a yo-yo string. If we do this again, and if we’re together again, it has to work. On the other hand, we could stay friends and have one another in a lesser way for the rest of our lives.”

              He looked up in time to see her chin drop. “I don’t think I could ever explain what it was like to see you, but to not really be seeing you.”

              “You don’t have to.”

              She looked up and into his eyes. “Let’s be together.”

              “You know it’s a risk right?”

              “The biggest one I can possibly make, according to you.”

              “It’s true.”

              “I don’t know what I have faith in, but I do know that it involves you. I need you around.”

              He leaned forward and connected his forehead with hers. “I have no more destinations in this world to arrive at without you at my side.” ‘Her eyes are closed; all of those spewed ideas and thoughts running along the back of her eyelids at the speed of light. I wonder what it tells her now. The same as always? Or does my voice whisper something else to her internal workings?’ Her eyes opened. ‘She wants to kiss me.’

              ‘Please stop.’

              ‘I’m sorry I’m not trying to rub anything in.’

              ‘Then stop.’

              Their heads remained leaned as Caleb whispered, “What’s the rest of your surprise?”

              She suddenly smiled and grunted a small laugh. “Yours is better. But I guess mine feeds off of yours too….”

              “Do I have to kiss you to get you to tell me?”

              Whatever small space that had accumulated between their crinkled foreheads was closed instantly; their skulls thudding together with a pair of smiles and Alice’s enthusiasm reeking within her voice. “You don’t have to. I don’t think we’ve ever needed a reason to kiss.”

              “Alice,” he started in a strengthened whisper that cajoled the hairs along the back of his neck, “there has only ever been one reason to kiss.”

              They leaned the lower part of their faces together. “And what’s that?”

              “We simply can’t help it.” As they collided softly, exhaling sharply amongst the opposite softness of landing, their hands found one another’s again for an extension of undetermined time.

              They broke apart for breath. “I think I missed that almost as much as I missed you.”

              Caleb smiled widely and used his power to color his breath as he exhaled. “Ditto. What’s the surprise?”

              “Ah, David has a conference in New York next week, and he offered us seats in the car so he doesn’t get lonely. I’ve been trying to convince him to leave sooner so we can drive somewhere else and have a vacation first. What do you think?”

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              Caleb hoisted the two heavier bags into the back of the SUV. ‘You got shanghaied into this.’

              ‘No, I wanted to go with.’

              ‘And pay for everything? Car rides, plane tickets, and hotels?’

              He smiled while ducked behind the tall baggage. “You really don’t get it do you? Money does not matter to me. I’m using it to make them as happy as I can.”

              ‘David doesn’t deserve happiness.’

              “Who are you to say what he deserves? He’s never killed anyone.”

              ‘I never said I deserved to be happy either.’

              Caleb heard footsteps approaching. ‘Deal with whatever you have to deal with. I’ve dealt with mine.’

              ‘Do you honestly believe you’ve improved yourself?’

              ‘I know I have because I’ve never felt more natural. I know what I’m doing is right because it’s what I’m being pulled to do. What are you pulled for?’

              ‘Myself, as I’ve always been, and always will be. Just like you.’

              Caleb smiled sideways at David as the trunk closed. ‘I don’t need to prove anything to you. I’m sorry if you don’t see it. Man, am I sorry.’

              ‘One of your many drives has always been to prove things to me.’

              Alice came out of her apartment with a smaller box under her arm and quickly found the backseat. ‘There’s nothing to prove.’

              He knocked on her window before settling into the front seat. “You finally woke up?”

              “I’ve been up. You were the tired one last night.”

              “I agree, and yet I still got up before you.”

              She leaned forward and slung her arms under the raised headrest and across his chest. “I talked to myself when you came out to help David.”

              He turned his head towards the source of her voice. “What did you want to be alone for? I thought you’d had enough of that.”

              “It was a process thing. I wanted to get up with you and be by you the whole time, but I didn’t. There was something bugging me, like, what happens next? What do you and I do next? Then, I told myself that you and I haven’t even reached what we’re supposed to yet, so I stopped worrying. That took five minutes then I talked more in the shower. Is that a good answer?”

              Caleb leaned his head against the rest. “I don’t think I can deal with the ‘good’ anymore. What we’ve always had was ‘good,’ and it wouldn’t have ever lasted. We could have something perfect now, and the only way that can be true is if we deal with what’s right, not what’s just good. The right answer is that it doesn’t matter what we become, or what’s next. The truth is that what we’ve always had is what we’ve needed to have, and it could lead us to something even better.”

              Her arms suddenly tightened around his shoulders, and he could feel her breath against his neck. “Do you really think that?”

              He lowered his voice. “I hope for that, but if it didn’t happen, there’s no way I could be disappointed.”

              The driver’s door opened as they kissed with Caleb’s neck at a deep angle. “Killing him just to get a kiss?”

              Alice smiled and pulled away with her smile wide. “Nobody deserves that, do they Caleb?”

              He smiled widely as David took the driver’s position. “Everybody says that.”

              She laughed sharply as the door closed and the car started. “Sit back. Relax. We’ve got ten hours to kiss and feel on one another.”

              “Do you feel left out David?” The driver’s eyes shifted from the road to Caleb and back. “Do you want a hug?”

              David pushed back on Caleb with no humor on his face. “Not the driver.”

              Alice’s sweet laughter could be heard from the back seat as everyone returned to their seated spheres. They hit the highway quickly and Caleb’s eyes were scanning the unfamiliar signs while the sound of rubbing cardboard kept his power’s interest. ‘That’s one of your boxes.’

              ‘What’s it say on the side?’

              His power slid around the leather seats. ‘Nothing.’

              He cocked his head to the side. “Did you bring my comic book collection?”

              A light book fell into his lap. “It appears as though I did. And what does this type of stuff say about him, David?”

              David smiled. ‘That may be the first smile he’s ever shown us.’

              ‘And oh, will I treasure it.’

              “If you’re asking my psychological prognosis, it would seem as though he’s trying to hold on to an infantile state of mind as a semblance of a simpler time.”

              Caleb moved his eyes from the passenger window to the front. “Top page of my file talks about how bad my childhood was.”

              “Which is why you keep them around. To remind you that you always have something to fix.”

              “I’ve run out of anything to fix.”

              “You can’t believe that.”

              He turned his head. “Alice, do you have anything about me that you would change?”

              She lowered the comic from her eyes. “Nope.”

              Caleb rolled his head back and looked to David. “I’ve got the health of a boy in a bubble, enough intelligence to survive, and the one hiccup in my mental state has changed in a way that I can now answer any question on a universal scale at any time, so I’m not changing anything anymore, and I’m perfectly fine with that.”

              “You can’t be. It’s in the human condition that we must always think something, or our minds wouldn’t operate correctly.”

              “Do you hear what you’re saying?”

              “Be nice,” Alice projected loudly from the back.

              “I am. I’m just asking if he really understands what he just said.”

              David adjusted his hands on the wheel. “I do.”

              “You can’t, because if you did, you’d realize the paradox you just tried to fork out as fact.”

              “How does that go?”

              “Here,” he said as he lifted the comic, “this, right here, is a culmination in a thought process put into unchangeable, slightly-valuable ink and taken away from the realm of affective thought. Of course the author can always go back and ponder over it, but that’s completely different, and on a completely arbitrary level that we can all but chalk up to imagination, which we can choose to engage in or ignore at any time. Does our brain have to operate at all times for us to live? Yes, but the way you’re talking about it makes our brain seem like a terminator on a treadmill. If you’re going to try to talk about truth in anything, you have to be consistent with everything. You’re looking between levels for definite answers.”

              “Ah, I didn’t know you had twenty years of experience under your belt too.”

              Caleb smiled despite David’s tone. “All your experience offers you is a photo album. It makes no difference in regards to me, or to my situation because I am not them.”

              “And yet it’s your experience that has led you to this moment.”

              “No, it is a pull against my will that has brought me to this point. If I had gone off experience, I’d be dead from the negativity of the answer that equation would spit out.”

              “Would you say that you’re experienced in thought? It would seem that you are if you can think this deeply.”

              “What I would say is irrelevant, but the truth of the matter is that I have the ability to think not because I have experienced experience in thought, but because I have the ability to think. But the ability to think isn’t necessary. Plenty of people go through life without awareness of their thought, so thinking, and consequently experience, are not necessary faculties of life.”

              David threw one hand off the steering wheel. “You’re trying to convince me that my entire practice is worthless?”

              “Eh, subtly and without the will for destruction, but yeah that’s the basis of it. You do help people, but it’s nothing more than trimming the hedges away from the road. Something more has always needed to be done.”

              “Well, I’m glad the world has found its answers inside of a mentally handicapped man.”

              Caleb took the comic into both hands and said flatly, “That’s a very rational reaction.”

              The next hour went by with the soft thrumming of changing music being the only constant noise that mixed with the consistency of the aerodynamic threads of wind engulfing the car at cruising speed. Caleb had exchanged comic books with Alice several times as they passed into drawn out country; her mysterious selection strategy making coherence of story line, or even of character, impossible. ‘She must be closing her eyes and choosing. We went from Green Lantern to Batman.’

              ‘Not exactly an alphabetic method, I agree. She has her own method. Her eyes are locked and decided upon each grown-up pamphlet she hands you before it ever leaves the box. Half of them are on the other seat, the “no” pile as far as I can tell.’