Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  Reed, you need to go to see him. They’ve finished the autopsy. You and Sue can go and take the body away. He found himself standing in a chilly room, immersed in the light of a neon tube. It was a room at the coroner’s laboratory, and that body lying on the table, covered with a sheet, must be their son. He and Sue drew closer to the table. Sue was wearing dark clothes, and didn’t say a word. Reed avoided her gaze. They had seen each other since the day of the attack, of course, but they’d never really spoken, as if there was no need, as if talking had become something impossible by now. Nor did they talk there, in that room filled with the smell of formaldehyde. They did nothing more than to stop beside the table. Without making any conscious decision, Reed reached out and seized the hem of the sheet.

  It was a blackened corpse. The face was gone, charred, and not a trace remained of the hair. The chest was a road map of patches ranging from black to red, depending on how much the skin had resisted the heat, with the large Y shape of the autopsy incision, stitched back up hastily, like some incomprehensible signature. Reed looked at the body. He wasn’t overwhelmed by the sight: he’d seen dead bodies in his time. He’d seen burnt, skinned, exploded corpses. In the old days, that was just part of the fighting. What he did feel was uncertainty. There was nothing in that blackened body on a lab table that resembled his son. He stood there, for a long string of seconds, trying to recognise a detail, a fragment that would allow him to draw a line between his son, the person he had helped to bring into the world, and that corpse. He couldn’t see it. There was no evidence that the body belonged to Franklin, and he was just about to say so to Sue, in the grip of a demented sense of relief, when his gaze happened to rest on the corpse’s right hand.

  It was intact. It was clenched into a fist, in a defenceless way that reminded Reed, somehow, of the clenched fist of a newborn baby. Reed studied the hand. He stared at the knuckles, the creases of the fingers, until something stirred inside him, and the image that he still had of Franklin, the blond youth, the athletic young man, the pride of liberal America, suddenly aligned with the corpse before his eyes.

  He felt a sort of dolorous spark. Reed closed his eyes, opened them again, and understood that in that instant the universe had changed. It’s me. I’m right here. All this is real, Franklin is dead.

  The cloak of stunned bafflement of the past few days slipped off him. The truth came down upon him like a sword. His mouth fell open, his eyes lifted. He saw his wife standing in a halo of light, an older woman, her hair a mix of blond and grey, her face still pretty, but too pale, twisted in a grimace of intolerable pain. He saw her mouth, and recognised in it the mouth of his son. He saw her eyes wide open, and in them he recognised the eyes of his son. He mirrored himself in her eyes, and she saw her own reflection in his, and the torment passed back and forth, from one to the other, over and over again, strengthening as it did, leaving them paralysed, speechless, unable to touch, each on the opposite side of the table. Each of them chained to the eyes of the other, as if suspended in some equilibrium, aware that the minute they untangled themselves they would both fall, hurtling in opposite directions, plummeting down into horrifying chasms, towards their own lonely hells.

  *

  The hardest day of Reed Richards’ life dawned cloudless, from early morning, dominated by a cruel and magnificent sun. Light filtered down onto the city like a ghost, whitening the streets and polishing the air.

  In mid-morning Ben showed up, wearing a large pair of sunglasses which made him look like an old-fashioned gangster. “Here,” he said to Reed, holding out another pair of sunglasses.

  “I don’t need them,” Reed said. “Never worn sunglasses in my life.” He was sitting on the edge of the bed, in his bedroom, already dressed for the ceremony. From the adjoining room came the muffled voices of Annabel and Doctor Szepanski.

  “Take them,” Ben insisted, slipping the sunglasses into the breast pocket of Reed’s suit jacket. His rocky hands seemed incredibly delicate. He stood there in front of Reed for a few seconds before asking: “Did you get any sleep last night?”

  “I don’t know,” Reed answered, turning his head away. Ben’s physical proximity wounded his eyes. He had always assumed that in this kind of situation reality would simply blur, dimming like in a dream, but since he’d laid eyes on Franklin’s corpse the day before, everything appeared crystal-clear and very close. Faces and objects seemed to press against him. Now that the blinding rage had vanished, things appeared so distinct. So sharp-edged. “I don’t know,” he said again, turning away even further. “I might have closed my eyes, I’m not really sure. I don’t think it makes a lot of difference.”

  “It’ll make a difference soon. You’re going to need some strength, Reed. There’s going to be a big crowd, and you’ll need to be strong.”

  Maybe Ben was right. When they left later in a car with dark-tinted windows and drove across the city, the streets were half-deserted. There was almost no traffic. Many shops had their shutters rolled down. The waiters in the few restaurants that were open stood, behind the plate glass windows, like guards standing watch over a long-lost monument. The mayor had proclaimed a city-wide day of mourning. New York was weeping over its latest wound, the death of its latest idol. In the pitiless sun, groups of people walked in silence towards the cathedral. Half of the city seemed to have converged on the site of the ceremony.

  Looking out of the car window, Ben began to cry. At first Reed didn’t notice because his friend was wearing dark glasses, and his tears flowed silently. “This city still has a soul,” Ben said. “Everyone loved him, they really did love him.”

  Reed looked at that rock face and felt an urge to move away from him and from his tears, but the car was too small. He couldn’t get any further away. So he lifted his arms and took the rough wet face of his friend in his hands. He held it close.

  “Forgive me for what I said,” Ben sobbed. “That day on the beach. When I said that Franklin wasn’t doing enough. When I said…” By now the car was within sight of the cathedral. Hard to say how big the crowd outside the church must have been. At a glance, tens of thousands of people. Special military squads were patrolling the neighbourhood, dozens of television crews dotted the scene. Ben glanced out of the window. He gave himself a shake, rummaging through his pockets in search of a cigar, to regain his self-control.

  Reed let go of his face. His friend’s tears were scalding his fingers.

  Ben took a chomp of his cigar and spat it out in disgust. He started crying again. “They killed him because they were trying to harm us,” he said, as the car pulled up to the kerb. His massive body vibrated like a meteorite. He grabbed Reed by the arm, and added with a burst of rage: “They killed him because they’ve got it in for us, for what we were, for what we represented. But I still can’t understand it. Whatever we old superheroes might ever have done, how could they bring themselves to do this to us?”

  “I don’t know, Ben.” Reed wriggled free. He put on the sunglasses that his friend had given him and opened the car door.

  The crowd fell silent. A sudden vacuum seemed to settle onto the street as Reed got out of the car. Tall, stiff, alone. Thousands of throats tightened, while he entered the cathedral, his shoulders bent under the weight of thousands of eyes.

  Inside, in the dim shadows of one of the largest cathedrals on earth, another crowd was waiting. The country’s most important men and women filled the front pews. Reed was escorted to the central pew. Sue was there, motionless, her face as white as ice. Reed sat down next to her. In the absolute silence, he could hear the rustle of their clothes coming into contact, and Sue’s jagged breathing. He could imagine the effort and the pain it cost her to sit there, under all those eyes, without giving in to the temptation to turn invisible. The same effort that it cost him to stay still, without deforming, without plunging his hands into his own chest, into his hip, to try to tear the pain out of there. A million shards of glass seemed to be plunged into his rubber flesh.

&nb
sp; It was Sue who had insisted on a public funeral. For Franklin. Because that’s how he would have wanted it. So they sat there, side by side, motionless, the Rubber Man and the Invisible Woman, while the pipes of the majestic organ swelled, spreading their music throughout the nave. At that sound, the crowd shivered. A thousand necks bent forward. A thousand hands gripped the wooden benches. The mystery of death was among them, once again, with all its vast, indifferent power.

  This is the day of our heartache, uttered the amplified voice of the bishop of New York. Today anyone who still has a heart can feel it breaking. This is the day of the heartbreak of our America… Reed listened, his attention fluctuating. He heard the speech in waves, alternating moments of unbearable intensity with moments when he listened from a distance, from some remote and unknown place. That scene down there: the funeral of my son. From time to time he felt the urge to turn around, look behind him, and search for a certain pair of green eyes. The gleam of a reddish head of hair. He knew that she had come, that Elaine was there, somewhere in the crowd, and the thought wrapped itself around his head like a bandage, without alleviating the pain.

  At the end of the ceremony he was finally able to turn around, but what he saw, with a start, was an army of people marching towards him and Sue. It was time for the condolences. The parents of the dead man were surrounded. The first mourner to shake Reed’s hand was the President of the United States, with an indecipherable grimace on his face. Reed shook the president’s hand under a barrage of photographers’ flashes, despite the contempt he felt for that man. He accepted his conventional words of loss. A disagreeable sensation remained in his hand, and yet at the same time a hint of ridiculous gratitude. The president was followed by the mayor, the chief of police, the editors of the New York dailies, the head of NASA, diplomatic representatives of major foreign countries, and officials from the world’s leading scientific institutions. Not all those people commanded Reed’s esteem. He shook each of their hands with nausea, yet with gratitude, wishing in spite of himself that those hands would never come to an end, that they’d go on touching him, as if those hands, with their damp palms, could suffocate the fire inside him.

  Then came the family of the other victim of the attack, a businessman from Boston who just happened to have been in the George Hotel at the wrong time, from all the police had been able to gather. The widow came up to him, dignified, vaguely hostile, holding her son, perhaps six years old, by the hand. Reed embraced her with a lump in his throat. “My husband was a big fan of yours when he was a boy,” the woman said. “Who’d have ever thought…”

  “I’m sorry,” Reed whispered.

  “We need to be strong. God will help us,” she sobbed.

  Reed was on the verge of collapse. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the television cameras ready to ambush him, drawing closer and closer, waiting implacably for the collapse, the tears of Mister Fantastic. The man who could once stretch out his arms for miles and miles and save a boat that was being swept away by the ocean waves. The man who could join together, like an enormous elastic band, the two ends of a collapsing bridge. Mister Fantastic himself was about to collapse. They could sense it, they could predict it, and they leaned closer now, as another great hero, the greatest of all time, made his way laboriously up the aisle of the church.

  It was old Superman. The crowd parted before him. The living legend made his way forward slowly, trembling, helping himself along with a cane. He wore his old costume with the red cape. Reed walked towards him, and the two aged heroes, distraught, embraced before the cameras of the whole planet.

  Superman wasn’t alone. Reed received embraces from Captain America, Daredevil, Mystique, Thor, and all the others. The entire old guard of superheroes had come. Some of them wore their old battle costumes. The following day, the newspapers would publish photographs of the ceremony, with a list of those who had attended, as well as those who weren’t there: Batman, whose brutal murder was the subject of an ongoing criminal trial. And poor Robin, now practically forgotten, who had also been killed in mysterious circumstances several years ago.

  Namor was there too. The so-called Prince of Atlantis was dressed in an unprecedented black suit. As Reed embraced him he caught a whiff of his brackish scent, the scent of ocean, seaweed, and tears, and it dawned on him that he’d never seen that man wear clothes before. Reed remembered that Franklin had always enjoyed making fun of Namor, that elderly exhibitionist. The man without a shirt. The prince of pectorals. He imagined seeing Namor through the gleaming, endlessly amused eyes of Franklin. He looked at Namor with his pointy ears, moving awkwardly in his black cotton suit, and he saw him through the eyes of his son, the cheerful young man always ready to laugh. He saw the other superheroes, their sagging faces, he saw the television stars waiting nearby, ready for their moment on camera. He saw Dr. Szepanski with his too-shiny face, probably the result of a quick facelift done especially for his appearance at the funeral. He saw all of this and, for an instant, he sensed how grotesque it was, and sensed something unexpected, almost unrecognisable. A spasm of dark, dolorous sarcasm.

  At that point a panting lament broke out in the church. Raymond Minetta was sobbing, leaning against a column and shouting incomprehensible words. Embarrassment spread through the crowd. Many looked away, perhaps feeling pity, or maybe remembering that old rumour. The cilice. The ball-crushing torture. There was a strange undulating surge in the church, as grief washed up against a wave of guilty amusement. Reed wondered if this is what Sue had had in mind when she’d said that Franklin would have wanted a public funeral. He sought her out with his gaze, but just then she was squeezed, practically suffocated in the emotional embrace of Namor. There’s something grotesque about funerals. Franklin would be laughing at us, he thought, but it did nothing to calm his torment.

  Last of all, Mrs. Glasseye came forward. Reed trembled, afraid he would break into tears. He didn’t try to avoid her glance this time, and she refrained from the usual provocations. This was no time for those sorts of games. It was time to look at each other, to embrace in the awareness of what they’d lost. Reed knew that she could understand him. He knew the real tragedy that woman had experienced. “Reed,” she whispered. “Listen to me. Listen to me, Reed. The coming days will be hard. The coming months will be hard. The coming years will be hard. The pain won’t go away, but you’ll become stronger. If you’re strong enough, you’ll find something to believe in, something to have faith in, and that will help you.”

  Reed held her. He could smell her sweet-scented breath, her hard breasts pressing against him.

  “Your work,” she went on. “You and I were born to hold tight to our work, weren’t we?” she said with a wise smile.

  Mrs. Glasseye moved on to Sue. The two women looked at each other, intuiting the other’s emotions. Sue knew as well. She knew that in the car crash that cost her her eye, years ago, the other woman had also lost her young son. That was her tragedy. That was her grief.

  And so they embraced. The two mothers who had lost their sons stood with their arms wrapped around one another, each breathing through the other’s hair. That day Mrs. Glasseye was revealing a secret. If anyone still wondered which was her real eye, the mystery was solved once and for all. Her real eye was weeping.

  *

  The most spectacular funeral of the decade was over, and the body of America’s most beloved son had been reduced to ashes, and the television crews had gone back to their studios. Hundreds of people had embraced the parents of the dead man—intending to transmit their warmth to them, but in reality leaving them sucked dry like statues eroded by the caress of too many hands. The crowd had begun to scatter, but the day wasn’t entirely over. Reed noticed that Sue was leaving. He saw her go, surrounded by a small entourage of friends and assistants. Breaking away from Ben and the other superheroes who had stayed behind, he hurried to catch up with her.

  “Sue…”

  They were outside, at the kerbside, and the light had sof
tened by this time of day. A car was pulling up silently to pick up Sue. “Are you leaving?” asked Reed.

  Sue turned to look at him. She was wearing dark glasses too.

  “We’ll have to decide what to do with his things. We’ll have to go to his apartment,” Reed said. The words in his mouth were as heavy as pieces of lead.

  “We’ll talk about that,” she said in a distant voice. She adjusted the sunglasses on her face. Her expression was harsh and pinched. “I have to go,” she whispered.

  “My God,” he said, fighting back. “This thing happened to both of us, Sue. He was our son. Don’t treat me like an enemy.” Reed gulped, exhausted by the weight of his own words: “Are you punishing me because you think that Franklin was killed by mistake?”

  “We can’t know if that’s true right now.”

  “If it turns out that I was the real target of that bomb…”

  “We can’t know what happened,” she said again.

  “Sue, I think…” Reed gasped. “We should talk… Sue, I think we should at least hug each other.”

  She wavered. For a moment she seemed to lose control. Her body began to turn transparent. She cleared her throat and her face became fully visible again. “Reed,” she finally replied. “There’s someone else who can hug you. I know everything. There’s someone who’s even younger than Franklin.”