Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  By now, he felt far away from him. Far away from that overgrown, submissive boy, from that heavy man in his thirties who had too long ago given up gyms and wrestling mats. Far away from that man with the overly sensitive skin and the face of an ageing child, with his freckles and his receding hairline, far from his tiresome loyalty, his irritating consistency, and his same old enthusiasm for the same old things. Robin still got excited about every stupid new electronic gadget. He spent hours in the basement of their house in the West Village, like a teenager, modifying electronic circuits and fine-tuning the weapons with which his costume was equipped. He’d never got tired of being a superhero. He was convinced he could go on forever. Compared to him, Bruce felt like he was on another planet. He had long ago grown weary of being the caped defender, of fighting in the streets, of technological gadgets. And above all, he had grown weary of Robin.

  The next step had been to start humiliating him in public. It started one summer afternoon, one of those hot afternoons that seem designed to make people edgier, crueller, or more fragile. He’d made a comment about Robin’s physical condition in front of strangers, prompting a few embarrassed giggles, and those giggles had rung the starting bell, ushering in a new season of cruelty. On another occasion, he’d taken Robin out to dinner for his birthday, pretending he was being nice, letting Robin order whatever he wanted, then he’d summoned the waiter back to the table and informed him that the gentleman had changed his mind, and that he’d only be eating a salad tonight, because of his evident weight problems. Ha ha! The look on Robin’s face!

  Humiliating his old lover was an amusing pastime. Laughing at him behind his back was even better. At parties, the minute Robin went to get a drink, Bruce would make some wisecrack about him, about the way he dressed or his bad breath, after making sure he had someone around him stupid enough to laugh, and sufficiently insensitive to go on looking at Robin, for the rest of the evening, with a treacherous smile.

  When he was certain that Robin was watching from a distance, he’d flirt shamelessly with anyone—male or female—who was young enough, well aware that Robin would be obsessed for days by the faces of those people, even by the faces of those who didn’t matter in the slightest, people that Bruce would have forgotten just minutes later. He knew that he’d won when he saw Robin hurry away, crushed, red-faced. “Wasn’t that your boyfriend?” someone might chance to ask.

  “Him? More like my secretary.”

  When he chose to take someone home, he’d make sure that Robin knew it. He’d leave the bedroom door open so that Robin would hear every last sound. Bruce’s sadism swelled in waves, for days and weeks, only to fall quiet all at once like a wind that had been placated. Then came very different nights. Nights when Bruce would tiptoe into his ex-lover’s bedroom. He’d creep silently up to Robin’s bedside, careful not to wake him, and he’d watch him sleep, studying him calmly, trying to fathom the mystery of that man’s faithfulness. Why on earth do you still love me? he’d whisper in the silence of the night. I’m old, vain, and insufferable. Why on earth are you still with me?

  In the semi-darkness of the bedroom, he stood watching Robin’s pale, trusting face, with the inevitable trace of pimples triggered by some psychosomatic disturbance. At times like that, a surge of tenderness bubbled up in Bruce, from some distant forgotten place, and his hand would reach out to stroke that face, tracing small curves, as if filling it with question marks. Was this the fate of every love story? What had happened, and how could it be that things were ending like this? Was I ever really in love with you, and what did it mean to be in love?

  You’re not enough for me, he’d whisper in the end. You’re not enough for me, no one’s enough, he’d add, in the tone of someone asking forgiveness, knowing full well that tomorrow everything would go back to its usual way. The next morning, Robin would still have the same shortcomings, his same introverted, tiresome, annoying ways, his skin problems, his bad digestion, his lack of humour, and Bruce’s cruelty would return, the same as ever, atrocious, implacable, the baffling cruelty of unrequited love. On one of those nights, Robin had shivered. His respiration had quickened, and Bruce had understood that he wasn’t asleep. Without opening his eyes, Robin had seized his hand, running it over his face and then his chest, sighing, almost sobbing. It must have been close to dawn. Robin’s skin had the whiteness of a spectre. “Don’t leave me, Bruce. I feel so lonely, Bruce.” He’d gone on squeezing his hand, rubbing it over his body, harder and harder, over his white body, ever lower, towards his straining groin.

  Bruce stood there, inert, for a few seconds, in a daze, then shook himself, with a stab of pity and disgust. He’d pulled back his hand.

  Robin had twisted on the bed like a snake struck by a mortal blow. “On the nights I go out on patrol, everything out there seems so senseless. We were heroes, Bruce, and we were together. I feel lonely. More and more alone.”

  Bruce had walked away, his head spinning, and after that night he’d never entered Robin’s bedroom again. At times he fantasised about Robin leaving, breaking the chains of their reciprocal dependency. But he knew Robin would never leave. He lacked the strength, or perhaps he just didn’t know where to go. Robin limited himself to going out three or four nights a week, in his superhero costume, solitary, silent, a hero without his captain, a follower without his leader. He’d come home exhausted at sunrise, after dozens of patrols around the city.

  Bruce never knew how many criminals Robin fought on those nights. He didn’t even know whether there were still criminals out there to fight, criminals like there were in the old days, on the street, criminals you could identify and challenge to fight. Times had changed. This was New York and these were the Nineties, coordinates in the space-time continuum that one day would be looked back on and regarded as an ambiguous time, full of light and perverse promises. The streets were being cleaned up. The police were using summary methods. According to official figures, major crime was being swept off the streets. Who knows. Did that mean, perhaps, that the crime was moving elsewhere? Bruce had the impression that the world’s crime was actually slithering all around, sidling off, blending in everywhere, concealed in every home like the hand of a ventriloquist inside a dummy. Evil still existed, more than ever, it had just got harder to recognise, more difficult to pin down. It reverberated around people like a strange magnetic wave, and you couldn’t say where it came from.

  He had told Robin to stop it more than once. No one from the old scene went out to patrol the city any more. It made more sense to leave that work to the iron-fisted mayors and the police chiefs, to the Rudolph Giulianis and the William Brattons and all the nice officers of the law who were paid for it. “You’re out of shape and you’re alone now. When you’re the only one still doing something, doing it becomes dangerous. Isn’t it time to stop?”

  *

  Music whispered softly from the stereo. Bruce waited for the girl to join him at the table. She came over with a look of polite interest, glancing at the paper object that he was holding up. “What’s that?”

  “A calendar,” Bruce explained. He smiled indulgently, as if she were begging him to let her see it. Then he handed it over.

  The girl laid the calendar down on the table and started turning the pages.

  Bruce stayed watching her, waiting, peering at her face as she reacted to each picture.

  “They’re superheroes,” she noted, as she went on turning the pages.

  “Of course they are,” said Bruce. After all, wasn’t she the one who had asked him if superheroes still got together?

  In truth, none of those superheroes had met the others for those pictures. Each of them had been photographed on a different set, and practically none of them belonged to the old guard of heroes. For the most part, they belonged to the scarcely known new crew. A certain Iguana Man posed on a desert dune, wearing nothing but a scaly loincloth, his muscles smeared with lubricant. Another named Black Crystal had his picture taken at the mouth of a volcano, with
one hand placed to cover his private parts, the other hand lifted to create a small sphere of light. An unlikely Ice Champion had earned the February page, posing in a snow-covered forest, naked and unashamed, leaning back against the trunk of a tree in a lewd pose. Bruce had no idea who any of those people were. He guessed they must be mutants, and that they worked on TV or something like that. You couldn’t say that the calendar had actually caused them to meet; however, there they were, one after the other, picture after picture, month by month.

  The girl got to July. She paused, staring with a vague expression at the picture of Bruce. In the picture, Bruce was standing by the side of a swimming pool, naked, wet, his body gleaming in the sunlight. His leg muscles were taut, like right after a gym session, and his cock stood out, white, lustrous as a seashell, while the rest of his body was perfectly tanned. His relaxed smile gleamed white too, and tiny drops of water illuminated his hair, making it look as if it were made of light. “You have a nice physique,” the girl commented in her polite tone of voice.

  Bruce went on looking at the picture. That portrait inspired in him a profound, pure, almost painful pride. It was a different piece of work from Quirst’s sculpture. In artistic terms, it was a lesser work, of course, nothing more than an ordinary calendar shot, but still, in that photograph he was beautiful with a tender, almost vulnerable beauty.

  Of course, he knew about all the criticism that the photograph had prompted. A superhero like him! A public figure with a past like his, with his prestige, reduced to showing off his dick in a pin-up calendar. He was the only superhero his age featured in the calendar. There he was, with his trim body, surrounded by other men thirty years his junior. There he was, with his muscular legs, with his firm abs. Still riding his wave. Still alive. Bruce could have looked at that photograph for hours, comparing his body with the other bodies on the calendar, every last muscle, every detail, without entirely grasping the truth of that image, without ever being able to reach a final verdict: it’s me, I look great. Do I look a little ridiculous? And if I do, does that matter? Isn’t mankind as a whole ridiculous?

  The girl looked at the picture for a few more seconds, before turning to the next page. Disappointed, Bruce found himself studying the portrait for the month of August.

  Bruce suppressed his urge to object. He felt sure that none of the portraits after his were of any interest. “Now, you just take him—the Spinning Top,” he let slip, noticing she was lingering on that page. “What kind of superhero is he? Nobody knows what he’s supposed to be able to do. It isn’t clear what superpowers he has.” The girl nodded without conviction, and went on studying the picture of the young man with a taut physique, a serious expression on his Hispanic features. Bruce felt increasingly indignant. “It’s certainly not clear who that guy’s fighting against. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think he wasn’t even born in the U.S., so you tell me what he’s doing here. These new superheroes are incomprehensible to me. They have powers that nobody understands but them,” he continued, until he sensed that the girl’s smile was strained with embarrassment. It dawned on him that he was coming across as an aged scold, with perhaps even a hint of anti-immigrant racism.

  The girl decided to shut the calendar. “Don’t get mad. The best picture in here is the one of you.”

  Bruce stepped away, annoyed at his own impatience and at the slightly hypocritical tone in the girl’s voice. He didn’t want to hear those kinds of remarks. He didn’t want pro forma compliments. He expected other people to believe in him, in an absolute manner, without reservations.

  He snorted in annoyance, wondering whether he ought to change the music on the stereo. Even that wouldn’t be enough though. The intimate atmosphere in the room was dissolving rapidly, like the oxygen in an aeroplane losing air pressure. Now he felt the urge to move around. He left the girl in the living room and shut himself in the bathroom.

  He splashed cold water on his face. With his damp hands, he brushed back the hair he’d kept thick over the years by diligent consumption of finasteride tablets. The hair he maintained a natural-looking brown with the assistance of a Bleecker Street hairdresser. He turned on more lights. His face looked radiant in the mirror, almost electric, except for the hint of a shadow under the eyes and around the mouth, as if those areas were beginning to sag. He pondered the option of smoking a little crystal meth. It might be a good idea—who knows—it might make his face luminous and convex again, free of sagging, and get things running fluidly, without a hitch, like in a perfect script. He thought how carefree he’d felt a couple of hours ago, at the start of the evening, when the girl was still a dream, nothing but an expectation, when he was still dancing in front of the mirror. He found himself missing that moment. Missing being alone.

  Perhaps he should ask Doctor Szepanski about it. He needed an operation on those marks around his mouth. Doctor Szepanski would have plenty of advice about cosmetic surgery. Bruce had already had a couple of understated facelifts, and in both cases Szepanski, that old reconstructed monster, had recommended the right surgeon. Recently, Bruce had also asked him for advice on the idea of having a little operation done on himself down under, to see if he could become as tight as he used to be.

  Plastic surgery on the mouth and plastic surgery on the ass. What could be more complementary? he asked himself, and at that point he burst out laughing, shaking his head, tapping his face with more cold water. I’m fine, my face is fine, he decided at last, with a blend of triumph and despair.

  He walked back into the living room with a new resolution. Time to get the night moving forward. He headed straight for the couch, from which the girl rose to her feet with an apprehensive look. It must have occurred to her that she’d ticked him off. “I was waiting for you,” she said. It looked like she too had touched up her hair. “I wondered what had happened to you. What should we do now? Do you want me to wash my hands again?”

  “No,” said Bruce in a dry voice, determined to get a firmer rein on the game. He pretended to think it over for a moment, then he relaxed into an amiable smile. “I think it’s time to change a little. I think it’s time for you to take your clothes off.”

  *

  Robin died one winter night, in the darkest corner of Central Park, where the forensic squad said that he’d been dragged forcibly, and where someone had cut his throat.

  He must have taken some time to die. He’d left a long trail of blood down an unpaved path in the park, and a fair amount of dirt under his fingernails suggested that he’d crawled on all fours, dying, perhaps in search of help that never came. More blood pooled around his body. The blood had frozen during the night, forming a dark, gleaming puddle, as if every drop of that blood had been transformed into a tiny bright crystal. His eyes, too, had frozen wide open, and when Bruce arrived the next morning he’d glimpsed his own reflection in them: he’d been able to recognise his face, the face of a mature man, all alone now.

  It’s happened, he told himself. It had happened, happened for real, happened with no way back. The man who had been his sidekick for years, the man who had always been loyal to him, the man who had offered him his most fervent love, lay there, lifeless, on the grass at his feet.

  The policemen on the scene had felt obliged to express condolences appropriate for a widower. “We’re so sorry, Mr. Wayne.” “Try to be strong, Mr. Wayne.”

  Bruce was wearing his Batman costume, and wrapped his cape around himself, shivering with a chill in the leaden morning light. They asked him if he knew anything about Robin’s nights in recent times, what Robin was up to, if he had any enemies or for that matter, any friends. Bruce shook his head. No idea. There had been such silence between Robin and him in the last period. Silence, distance, and coldness. Before he died, Robin had scratched some marks into the damp soil with his fingers: tangled, meaningless grooves, along which the blood had gathered in a system of minuscule canals, leading nowhere.

  A slashing sleet was falling now. He had accepted a cup of coffee from a y
oung policeman named Dennis De Villa, a guy who in a few years would be promoted to detective and whom Bruce would keep running into, from time to time, at police ceremonies and other official events. “Try to be strong,” he too had told Bruce. “Try to be strong.”

  Bruce went home in a cab, soaking the seat with his wet costume. When he got there, he waited to take off the costume, frightened at the thought of being left naked, scared at the idea that maybe, once he took it off, he’d never be able to put it on again. For so many years, that costume had been his life. For years, he had been Batman, the Dark Knight, the caped defender with his trusted sidekick. For years, he and Robin had eluded death, night after night, avoiding death’s ambushes, almost laughing in its face.

  In the end he took off his costume. He held it in both hands, wet, lightweight, not knowing what to do with it, as though expecting it to take on a life of its own. He had felt naked and empty. Now what should he do? Call someone, go to sleep? Wait for the reporters to start calling him?

  The only thing he’d managed to do was to watch a movie. The movie that he’d never stopped watching over the years, ever since he was a child, the movie that had always inspired, frightened, and moved him. The movie he’d watched dozens of times, with Robin as well. That old movie, made decades earlier. He sat there, watching the adventures of Zorro, motionless, lifeless, in the living room of his house in the West Village, while outside the taxis drove past, the pedestrians walked by, and the city seemed absurdly unchanged.

  It wasn’t until the end, when Zorro took off his mask, that Bruce realised he was crying. The tears poured down freely, almost flavourless, and Bruce imagined someone else looking at him now, seeing a middle-aged man with a worked-out body, lying on a sofa, weeping silently in front of a movie made decades ago. He’d pitied himself. He cursed himself and felt guilty, lost, exhausted, as if some protective coating had vanished from the surface of his body and the weariness of so many years had plummeted down into him, all at once. He’d sat on the sofa long after the movie was over. He sat motionless as the afternoon stretched out, until there was nothing left inside him, not a sniff or a whimper, no emotion, just a sense of reality, a pure shard of awareness, transparent as a sliver of broken glass: it was over now. Robin was dead, truly dead.