Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  Reed stared at the underwear lying in the suitcase, feeling a surge of yearning and angry physical desire. “Elaine,” he implored. “We need to talk.”

  “So let’s talk,” she replied, without interrupting her packing.

  Reed waited, to restore his tone of voice to a semblance of calm. He didn’t want to seem upset. He noticed the music, at very low volume, just above a whisper, coming from a stereo set on the bookshelf. He noticed that sound, and heard the rain falling outside the window, and the sound of his own breathing. He heaved a sigh: “Did you know I’d be on the committee?”

  Elaine tucked a stray lock of hair behind one ear. “Well… I imagined you might,” she said, continuing to focus on the suitcase. “Two days ago, when you told me that you would be going to Washington.”

  “You imagined I might,” Reed echoed her words. “You didn’t tell me that you would be one of the candidates. Do you realise what an awkward position that put me in?”

  Elaine decided to look him in the eye. “Oh, come on. Nothing’s really happened yet. I still have to go through another level of the selection process, don’t I? And after all, no one knows about us.”

  “You’re wrong.” Reed stood up, intending to walk over to the window, but he gave up the idea and dropped back onto the chair. The room was too small to move around. Too small to hold them both. Too small to hold everything in it: the two of them, the suitcase, the fresh memories of that afternoon in Washington. “There are people who know about us, here in New York. And the people in New York can talk to the people in Washington.”

  “Someone knows about us?” Elaine said. “That seems impossible. With your obsessive attention to detail, the way you keep from being recognised in restaurants, the way you avoid being photographed by the paparazzi.”

  “They know.”

  Elaine seemed to give the matter a moment’s consideration before getting back to the job of packing her suitcase. “It’s funny to think of anyone wasting their time talking about us,” she said. “People are weird,” she added, as if this settled any issue.

  “Elaine,” Reed sighed, beginning to lose his patience. “Don’t pretend you don’t understand. I was put into a critical position today. I was forced to act unethically, and I committed a grave violation of my responsibilities. I had to pretend I had no relationship with you. I was forced to play-act, and it’s not something I enjoyed one little bit, it’s not the way I work.” He crossed his arms and gave her a serious look. “It’s not my style,” he added.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s not your style,” she echoed him, in a vague tone, tucking her hair behind her ear again.

  Reed felt like telling her to stop doing it. That gesture. That typical gesture of hers, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, almost shyly. One of the gestures he’d fallen in love with, at the beginning, gestures that were like movements of an imperceptible dance. Now he understood that there was more to them, and that everything he had at first taken for shyness, mysterious and enchanting, was most likely indifference. Profound indifference. Here you are before me. You’re tired, excited, you want to finish packing. Tomorrow you’re leaving for Washington. You got what you wanted.

  Reed stood up, at that point, determined to ask the question. The real question, the terrifying question. “Is that why you came back to me?” he asked. “After we broke up? Did you come back because you knew I’d be sitting on that committee?”

  Elaine shut her suitcase. She snapped the lock. She unlocked it and relocked it a couple of times. “Sometimes I just don’t know what to say to you,” she said. “I really just don’t know what to say to you at all. Do you think I’m that much of a grifter? To come back to you in the hope of gaining some personal advantage for myself?” She pulled the suitcase upright, as if she were about to leave that very moment, and gave Reed a weary look. “If I’d really wanted to take advantage of you, I would have told you that I loved you, I would have led you on. But I didn’t. I never said that I loved you, just that I missed you. I came back to you because I missed you. Is that so hard to understand?” She stood waiting for a few seconds. “I guess it is,” she went on. “It’s complicated for you. You need to complicate things. You need to imagine my coldness, my harshness, in a thousand different ways. I know that’s what you do. I could practically not exist for you, Reed. You aren’t in love with me, you’re in love with the image you’ve constructed of me. Fine, do whatever you like. You can keep the ghost of me. But the real me, the real Elaine, has a flight to Washington in a few hours.” She took a step forward, almost touching him. “The point is,” she hissed, “that, no matter how things went, I deserve this candidacy. I know it, and you know it too.”

  Reed embraced her. There was nothing else he could do. He gripped her so tight, for a moment, that he could sense the fragility of her bones. He hugged her so tight he could kill her. Elaine issued no cry of pain. He might possess superhuman strength, but she had strength of a different kind, a nameless strength, obstinate, unpredictable.

  He kept embracing her. He could feel her heart pounding against him. He wished he could leave her, leave and never come back. He wished he could fall at her feet and wriggle, naked, extending around her legs, become a worm imploring her for pity. He wished he could do all these things.

  Then they kissed. Everything happened in a flash. They fell onto the bed, grappling together, desperate and on fire like a pair of falling stars, starting to undress, continuing to kiss, exchanging saliva, the fluids of one in the mouth of the other. Reed was appalled. He felt excited and yet impotent, hopeless. Their bodies. Their panting. Elaine was stimulating his penis with delicacy, with fury, pulling it towards her, persuading it to elongate, and Reed let himself go, let the flesh flow forth, without restriction of any kind. His penis had become a tentacle. Elaine wrapped it around her, panting, bringing the tip of it to her mouth. Reed shaped one of his fingers into the form of a penis, a second penis to slide into her, feeling his own body undulating in an unstable fashion, ready to stretch out into a thousand tentacles, to wrap himself around her with the suppleness of a demon. It occurred to him that there was no desire in all this. Only a need for union, the necessity of fusion, the need to possess the other, in order to make her forget what it felt like not to be possessed.

  “Elaine,” he breathed as he came on her, and for an instant he saw the scene as though from a distance, from far away, from an infinitely remote point of view, he saw the monster-man spurt his sperm, and the snow-coloured girl take it all over her face, he saw them together on the bed, in that room, on the surface of the city, in the middle of the nation, on that planet surrounded by empty void, by dying stars, by galaxies striving to wrap themselves around each other.

  He spat out the last few drops. With a dissatisfied sigh he recomposed his body.

  *

  A few hours later he woke up in Elaine’s bed, cold, naked. The minute he tried to move, he felt all hell break loose in his body; he lay there contorting, breathless, under the sheets. That pain. He thought back to the sex they’d had that night. His own body, deformed, on top of hers. Was that real? Did that actually happen? No question, the pain he was feeling right now was real. And so was the sense of emptiness. Elaine had vanished. In the half-light of the bedroom, Reed could see enough to know that the suitcase was gone. He lay motionless, trying to master the pain and anxiety by listening to the traffic noise outside as it slowly grew louder.

  It was still dark. Reed reckoned it must be about six. He ought to get moving. There he lay, in that bed that wasn’t his, in that unfamiliar apartment. I suppose this is a romantic scene. Or maybe just a depressing one. Oh, the scene in which he finally got up, groaning with pain, and donned his clothes. He looked for a note, a message from Elaine. He found nothing. He called a cab. Back home, he took a shower, and even before Annabel got in, he was already at his place, seated at his desk, the way he was every morning. It was all so romantic, it really was depressing. The gleaming surface of his desk refl
ected his silhouette. The telephone was chilly after its night of sleep. The computer screen came back to life with a whisper, and he stared at it hesitantly, as if in a dream. Here was his life, here were his everyday things.

  Even the thoughts that surfaced intermittently in his mind, over the course of the morning, had an unreal flavour to them. But they kept coming back. Why did I do it? Why did I give a positive vote on her application? My God, what have I done?

  At least Bernard isn’t with her.

  The morning went by. The afternoon went by too. Reed tried to focus on his work, without much success, and to brace himself against the chaos of his own thoughts. The telephone emitted a low-battery signal, a solitary electronic lament that made Reed jump in his seat. He rummaged through a drawer in search of his charger, and that was when his fingers chanced to close around the business card he had been looking for some time ago. Dennis De Villa. The police officer who was convinced that the superheroes of the old guard were in some kind of danger. Reed smiled a weary, disenchanted smile, and thought to himself that no one could help him now, and the only real danger he faced, at this point, was to go even further out of his mind, sink still deeper into the morass of ridicule and torment.

  He’d heard nothing from Elaine. He began fooling himself that everything was just fading into oblivion, into a glimpse of unreality. Nothing’s going to happen. She won’t be selected for that mission. No one will be selected, no one is going. But in the end his phone vibrated, and reality surged back, iron-hard and relentless. A few words on the screen of his phone. That ruthless message. I made it, Elaine wrote in the message. I was selected, I’m going up in the space probe.

  *

  A month later, in a morning washed with whitish light, while outside the erratic winter held the city in its fist, Reed found himself in Doctor Szepanski’s consulting room. He was naked, lying on an examination table. The room was immersed in silence: only the breathing of the two men and the noise of the ultrasound machine that emitted distant signals, intermittently, like those of an underwater sonar device.

  “Everything’s fine here too,” the doctor said, staring into the monitor next to the exam table, while his right hand manoeuvred the ultrasound probe over Reed’s lower belly. Without raising his eyes from the monitor he flashed a self-satisfied smile. “It’s funny,” he said. “After all these years I still get a charge out of seeing what’s in there. Inside the body of a superhero. It somehow takes me back to when I worked for the government—I mean, you remember what it was like back then, too, don’t you?”

  Reed took a deep breath. He could feel the probe sliding over his belly, skating along on a layer of chilly gel. “I never took part in your research programme,” he said. “I wasn’t willing to put myself into the hands of you government doctors.”

  Szepanski gave no sign that he had heard him. He sat there, gazing raptly into the monitor, repeating several times: “All good. All good here, too.” Without warning he grabbed the tube of gel with his free hand and absent-mindedly squeezed out a freezing cold spurt onto Reed’s groin. “Let’s take a look down here,” he said.

  Reed kept himself from complaining. It was he who had requested a complete ultrasound check-up. He tried to catch a glimpse of the monitor. From where he lay, he couldn’t see a thing. At most, he could see Doctor Szepanski’s profile, his weirdly tiny nose, his exaggeratedly taut cheekbone. Szepanski must be seventy-five by now, but his face looked almost ageless, in a disquieting way.

  “In those days,” the doctor resumed, “every time a new superhero agreed to be examined, it was like a party. We were as excited as little children. We expected to discover who knows what, inside the bodies of you super-people.” Then, trying to justify himself: “You could have been a strategic resource for the nation, that’s why we had to study you.”

  “Sure.” Reed didn’t have much more to add. Back in the days when Szepanski was the head of the government centre for medical research on superheroes, he too had assembled a small team of scientists to subject his own body to experiments, along with the bodies of the other members of his group. That’s the way things were back then. People thought it was possible to learn the secrets of any given body. They were convinced that they could plumb the depths of who knows what truth. It was the end of the Sixties, the Seventies, with a tail stretching on into the Eighties. The golden years of his life. The authentic era of the superheroes.

  “Everything I know I learned back then,” Szepanski summed up with a triumphant smile, grooming his dyed hair as if the monitor were a mirror on a vanity table.

  Reed noticed the doctor’s taut cheek, the lack of wrinkles or any creases of expression. Here we go again. He must have had more surgery done. The doctor had had his first facelift twenty years ago, and he hadn’t stopped since, it seemed… “Oh!” Reed cried out. A shiver had run through him after Szepanski squeezed more gel onto an especially sensitive part of his body.

  “Since we’re at it, let’s check things out down here too,” said the doctor distractedly, manoeuvring the probe onto Reed’s testicles.

  Reed heaved a sigh. The only thing that worked with doctors was patience. He turned his head and looked away, tired of trying to divine the theoretical findings of the ultrasound, by reflection, on the cosmetically enhanced face of Doctor Szepanski. He lay there, looking out of the window. Dust motes floated in the shafts of light that filtered through the glass, like so many microscopic worlds. He could feel the probe sliding, almost caressing now, on the small mass of his testicles, and he was just beginning to feel more relaxed when Szepanski started up again: “And your sex life? What can you tell me about your sex life?”

  Reed looked over at him again. “Why do you ask? Something wrong down there?” he asked, nodding towards his lower body. Then, since the doctor was not saying anything, he replied wearily: “Non-existent, I would say. No sex life to speak of in the past month.”

  “Not even masturbation?” Szepanski inquired.

  “Do we have to be so specific?” Reed objected.

  “You superheroes always have troubles with sex,” the doctor said, pushing the probe against one of Reed’s testicles, making him start in response. “Believe me, by now, I know enough about it. None of you seem to understand other people’s bodies, because they’re so different from your own. That’s why you feel so lonely all the time.” He turned to look at Reed, just long enough to bestow one more tight little smile upon him. In the harsh light of day, his too-tanned skin shone with a sinister gleam.

  Reed started to feel a little exasperated. “Joseph,” he sighed. “If there’s something wrong with me, I wish you’d just say so… But I can’t imagine that my sex life has anything to do with it…”

  “You superheroes have gone beyond desire, that’s it,” the doctor went on without listening. “Your bodies have ventured too far, so you can no longer feel ordinary human desires. You’re stuck in some remote limbo. You don’t have sex for the sake of pleasure, you do it out of a terror of no longer possessing anyone. You can’t manage to come and if you do, you don’t feel a thing.” He put down the probe, and handed Reed a handful of paper towels.

  Reed tried to wipe the gooey substance off his body. He had gel on his torso, abdomen, and groin. He felt like the newborn spawn of some monstrous creature, freshly emerged from the gelatinous womb of its mother. “Interesting… theories,” he commented. “But I already told you what my symptoms are: fatigue. I can’t seem to concentrate…”

  “These days, that’s something three-quarters of humanity is struggling with,” was the doctor’s response.

  “…and this pain in my hip that keeps tormenting me. It’s like there’s an internal tear, a laceration in the elastic tissue of my body,” Reed complained, taking care not to mention that the tear seemed to have a flavour, it was a sensation, it was something so definite that it had a name. Elaine. This tear is her imprint. Her indelible bite.

  “We looked at the hip, too. I didn’t see a thing.”
Szepanski pulled a face, something he may have intended as a furrowing of his brow. Whatever it was meant to be, all it actually resulted in was a single, strange, worrisome movement of his hairline. He decreed: “There’s nothing wrong with your hip. There’s nothing wrong with your belly. There’s nothing wrong with your testicles. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with you at all.”

  Even though he’d been unable to clean himself entirely, Reed started putting on his clothes. He was dissatisfied with Szepanski’s diagnosis. “Okay,” he said. “Taken individually, every part of my body seems to work fine. But what about if you take them all together? Couldn’t you take a look at the body as a whole?” He pulled on his trousers and, feeling a little stronger, stated: “I know something’s wrong with me. I can feel it.”

  The telephone on Szepanski’s desk rang. The doctor picked up the receiver. From his tone of voice it was clear that he was talking to the nurse in the adjoining office. “Just a few minutes,” he said, then hung up and turned to Reed. “Symptoms, Reed. My job is to judge from symptoms. Feeling like something’s wrong is not a symptom. We’ve looked, and there’s nothing in your body.” As he spoke, the flesh around his mouth remained immobile—it had the consistency of setting cement. There was something feminine about his rebuilt cheekbones, and it clashed with the hairy hands, dotted with liver spots, that he rested on his desk. He added: “Perhaps…”

  “Perhaps?” Reed asked as he finished getting dressed.

  “If you were to talk to me about your sexual problems, we could find out more. Certain symptoms are often concealed in that area.” He underscored the last phrase by spreading his hands in an affable manner.

  “I have no sexual problems,” Reed dismissed the subject. He was accustomed to Szepanski’s quirks, but he couldn’t figure out why the doctor was so insistent on talking about sex. His instinct told him to beware. He wanted the doctor to help him without forcing him to talk about his intimate life. Was that so hard? My God, wasn’t that the job doctors were paid to do?