Erotic Lives of the Superheroes
Page 33
“I was invited in by your assistant,” he said apologetically.
“Susie? That dear girl,” Mystique muttered.
“If I understand correctly…” De Villa hesitated and lowered his voice, almost as though about to ask an intimate question. “Your body can transform itself into the body of any other person you choose, right? That’s your power.”
“Correct.”
“An interesting power.” The detective tipped his head in a gesture that seemed to show respect. He thought it over for a few seconds before adding: “You’re good at your work… Your show has a nice pace. Very entertaining.”
“Thank you,” said Mystique, wondering what the man was driving at.
“Do you think there might be some link between the popularity of your show and these messages?”
“Oh,” she sighed. “So many people watch the show. I have no doubt that a few of them are crackpots. Like I said, though, I don’t see anything so threatening in it.”
“Or do you think,” the detective pursued, “that they might have something to do with your past?” The question had come out a little harsh. De Villa seemed sorry about that, and added in a softer tone: “I mean, with your troubles with the law…”
“I see no possible link, Detective De Villa,” she replied in a chilly voice. “At the police academy they must have taught you, I would imagine, not to rely on unfounded guesswork…” she suggested. “My past is truly, irrevocably past. I no longer have anything to do with those events, and that is as much as I care to state. In fact, I don’t believe that I should discuss those matters with a policeman. Not without my lawyer.”
De Villa raised both hands in a sign of surrender. “That won’t be necessary,” he smiled. “This isn’t an interrogation.” He had a small smile with a vague twist of almost childish shyness to it. The kind of smile that must cast spells over plenty of women, but which she just found annoying. “I certainly haven’t come here to accuse you of anything,” he resumed. “I’m here to help you. Possibly to protect you.”
Mystique limited herself to a sceptical expression.
“Do you think that your power,” Dennis De Villa asked at this point, “would be enough to defend you if these messages happened to… Well, if they happened to turn into something more serious?”
“What are you talking about?” She stared at the clock on her desk. “If it ever became necessary, I’d know how to defend myself from some stupid psycho.”
“I understand,” said De Villa. He put his hands together and sat gazing at her, enigmatic, with the rapt expression of a poker player. “I won’t take much more of your time,” he promised. “Tell me a little more about the notes.”
Mystique considered putting an end to that conversation. She could do it. She had no obligation to waste her time talking to the guy, with his irritating questions, his ambiguous manner, and his reddened eyes. She levelled a hostile glare into the detective’s eyes, and he caught her off guard when he said: “A rare form of conjunctivitis.”
“Huh?” she said with a start.
“My eyes. The reason they’re reddened is that I have a rare form of conjunctivitis. I’ve had it since I was very young.”
“Oh,” Mystique replied, at a loss for anything to say.
“Now that I’ve revealed my secret,” said De Villa with another of his smiles, “maybe you would be so good as to tell me something about those notes.”
Mystique was caught between the desire to respond to that smile and the urge to toss the detective out on his ear. A sense of weary exasperation seethed inside her. She picked up a pen from her desktop and drummed with it on the wooden surface. “Three notes,” she finally gave in. “In the mail. Two here at the office, the third at home.” She pulled open a desk drawer and extracted a sheet of paper. It was a piece of white paper, apparently blank, except for a single phrase printed in the middle. “This is the only one I kept. The other two were identical.” She held it out to De Villa, who took it between his fingertips and studied it.
It was a piece of paper. A rectangle of mute, white, almost glowing matter. An anonymous note that had come in the mail, bearing nothing but that inexplicable phrase:
SO LONG, MY MYSTIQUE
Both their gazes lingered on the paper. “As I’ve told you more than once, it hardly strikes me as a threat,” Mystique said. “Gary had no reason to call the police.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll hold onto it,” said De Villa. He pulled a plastic envelope out of his jacket pocket and slipped the note into it. “On the contrary, I’m afraid your producer did the right thing. Did you know Reed Richards?”
“Reed?” Mystique asked. For some reason, that name triggered a slight jolt inside her. It seemed like a name from so far away. “The last time I saw him was at his son’s funeral… Not much more than a month ago. It already seems like a distant memory.”
“Distant,” De Villa concurred. “Not much more than a month ago. I was there at that funeral myself, and in fact I remember seeing you…” He shook his head, perhaps to say that this wasn’t the point, and went on: “It seems that Reed Richards received notes like this one before the attack that killed his son. Messages with a phrase of farewell.”
Mystique narrowed her eyes. For a moment she felt tempted to take the whole matter seriously. A spark of discomfort shot through her, and she felt the boundaries of her body start to undulate, uncertainly, as though they were about to undergo another transformation. About to transform into something. Into someone. She took a deep breath and went back to drumming with her pen. She thought about that phrase, SO LONG, MY MYSTIQUE, and it all appeared pretty absurd. Almost comical.
“To tell the truth,” De Villa said, “it wasn’t only Reed Richards. Batman received the same note before he was murdered. And we can’t rule out that Robin, a few years ago… Do you remember Robin? We can’t rule out that he received these notes too, before dying in a corner of Central Park.”
“Heavens,” Mystique said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Well, we don’t understand much about this either,” De Villa confessed. “We’re still struggling to put together the pieces in this puzzle. A wave of murders in the world of the ex-superheroes… I’m sure you’ve heard about it. It seems that the murders are the work of a network of fanatics, an obscure group whose objective would appear to be the elimination of what survives of the world of historic superheroes. Our hypothesis is that Robin was their first victim, that is to say something like a starting point… The pace of the murders has accelerated now. Batman, Franklin Richards, Reed Richards…”
“As far as I know, Reed killed himself,” she objected. “He jumped off the Montauk lighthouse.”
“You’re right. He wasn’t murdered. We can guess that Mr. Richards killed himself out of a sense of guilt, if we consider that he was the real target of the attack at the George Hotel. What I meant to say is that we are currently at a difficult juncture… a dangerous one. A truly dangerous moment. We can no longer ignore messages like the ones you’ve received.”
“Wait a minute,” said Mystique. She was starting to understand. “So that’s what this is about. You’re trying to tell me that I’m in the cross hairs of this group. And the messages are evidence of that.”
The detective twisted in his chair. “We can’t rule it out.”
Mystique laid the pen down on the desktop. She tried to evaluate what the detective had told her, considering carefully, as if studying the outlines of a shambling, bizarre geometric figure. “Ridiculous,” was her conclusion.
De Villa twisted in his chair again.
“Maybe you don’t understand,” Mystique went on. “There wouldn’t be any damned reason for someone to bother planning to hurt me. I’m not saying that everybody loves me.” She broke off, amused at the very thought. “Of course not. There are people who hold their nose at the sound of my name. People who are outraged by my transformations and the way I mock public figures, but it’s nothing se
rious, it’s all just part of the game. It’s part of the system.” The detective tried to cut in, but she hushed him with a wave of her hand. “One needs a motive to kill someone. Motive, you may have heard of it. I spent sixteen years in prison, and I met very few people who had wound up in there without a motive.”
“This group doesn’t seem to operate with a great deal of logic,” De Villa managed to interrupt her. He touched the knot of his tie as though it were a precious amulet, and enunciating clearly, he added: “This group could recruit anyone. Think of that girl they sent to kill Batman. They can recruit anyone and strike whoever they please. No one is safe in the world of the former superheroes.”
“You’re talking about former superheroes,” Mystique replied. “That has little to do with me. I wasn’t a superhero, I wasn’t with Batman, Reed, and the rest of them. In the old days I steered clear of them and they steered clear of me. I was considered a subversive. A revolutionary. In the old days the whole country was afraid of me… Then I wound up in prison. In the old days I scared the country, now I entertain it.” She raised her arms, pointing at the surrounding office, with a decisive gesture, to indicate what she had become: a woman who works in television, a woman immersed in the exhausting, ravenous, glittering, predictable realm of show business. The queen of the show, the slave of the show. A comedienne. A woman who had passed through the American court and prison system as if through the curves of an alchemical still and had emerged in full compliance with the prototype of a model citizen: innocuous, amusing. “A woman with no enemies,” she said with a sliver of bitter sarcasm.
She leaned forward, piercing the detective with her glare, and asked him not to come around reeling off stories about weird plots, thank you very much. Plots existed in policemen’s minds. Maybe there was some kind of assassin brotherhood out there, sure, why not, a group of people who had sworn death to the old superheroes, but she didn’t see what it had to do with her. Not with all the things she’d already been through. As far as she was concerned, those notes were the work of some poor lunatic. She didn’t need a police security detail and she didn’t need policemen in her way. She’d had police and prison officers on her back for years, she’d been under their power the whole time she was in prison. No, thanks.
In fact, there was just one thing she did need, before heading off to attend a brief production meeting, and then jumping into a car that would take her home, and filling a tub with hot water and luxuriating selfishly in the pleasure of a bath. One tiny thing. An end to this conversation, please.
*
Dawn was heralded by a faint breeze, sweeping over the hill of Morningside Heights and wafting through her window screen, stirring the white cotton curtains. Mystique tossed and turned in her bed, tangled in the sheets, breathing with tiny movements of her belly.
The early morning air had a good smell. That was why she preferred to leave the air conditioning off and the window open, at least until later in the summer. The weather hadn’t become intolerable yet. She stretched out on the mattress, only partly awake, while the gleam of daylight peeked into the bedroom. She was awake or maybe she just thought she was. She kept her eyes closed. She could feel something heavy weighing down on her: exhaustion, lassitude, and there was certainly a reason for all that weariness. The light grew brighter against her eyelids, forcing her to duck her head under the covers. It must be because of the show. The show always left her exhausted. The show made her electric and weary.
She stretched her legs with a grimace and tried to concentrate on memories from the night before. Her memories had uncertain outlines, like so many objects wrapped in packing material. It was difficult to tell them apart. She lay under the sheet, suspended in that uncertainty, in that languor that was both painful and pleasant. She lazily caressed her body. It was like waking up after going on a bender. Was that her, roaming the studio in Vladimir Putin’s body, uttering lines with a Russian accent, stomach muscles contracted: could that really have happened? Dancing in Madonna’s body, swinging her hair and shaking her hips, shooting a smouldering glance into the eye of the camera: a dream or a memory? It must have happened, she guessed it had. She couldn’t swear to it. That was a typical effect of doing too many transformations at too rapid a pace, as she had to do during her weekly show. That confusion. That lassitude. Like going on a bender, that’s right, or some other kind of intoxication.
She continued caressing the skin of her arms, her thighs, the line of her hips. Was that her, almost tripping over Susie at the door of her dressing room, coming close to a stroke in her fright: did that happen? And then talking to a police detective in her office, dismissing him brusquely and perhaps, she had to admit, bitchily: an actual event?! She turned over again, taking care not to open her eyes. Her nude body rubbed against the cloth of the sheets. It wasn’t just her memories from the night before; thoughts of the future also had the appearance of dreams. To get out of bed and face the harsh light of day, to make a fruit smoothie while listening to the news on Ten-Ten Wins: what an odd idea. To throw on some clothes and clap a baseball cap on her head, to head out to run along the trails and steps of Morningside Park: this too was the setting of a dream.
Oh, don’t do it. Don’t open your eyes. Her flesh was smooth under her fingers. She breathed a little harder as the light grew stronger. It must have been about six o’clock, but that morning she was in no hurry, because the day after the broadcast she usually indulged herself and went in late to the studio. She kept running her fingers over her skin until she found, almost to her surprise, the soft mass of her breasts. A pleasurable jolt radiated throughout her body. She went on breathing through the sheet. She let her hands slide slowly downwards, then with a spasm she rolled over, her hair wrapped around her face. It was about to happen. She wanted to make it happen. She could feel the boundaries of her body waver, becoming fluid, her flesh nearly on the point of dissolving. Transforming herself in the morning was something different. It wasn’t like during the show. Every fibre of her body seemed to turn upside down, and she felt herself sliding far away, until she almost vanished… Now she emitted a moan, a loud moan in a male voice. She had taken on a different body. Detective Dennis De Villa twisted and contorted under the sheet, naked, touching his muscular thighs, brushing his fingers over his groin and his hard testicles. He went on touching himself with a blend of instinct and astonishment. He ran one hand up over his chest, finding a patch of soft body hair, reaching the tiny buttons of his nipples, while with the other hand he reached down and grabbed himself between his legs. He clutched his penis. He went on thrashing, with raucous moans that sounded like sobs.
He stopped. An instant before coming a shiver ran through him, a shiver so intense that it made the bed vibrate, or maybe the whole room, and then Mystique’s body reappeared, gasping, breathless, as if surfacing from a long underwater dive. She arched her back over the mattress. She didn’t stop moving her fingers. The tips of her fingers stayed on the small, hard peninsula of her clitoris, continuing to brush it until it began to hurt, and until a rhythmic contraction shook her from within. She let go. She curled up panting, trying to capture that pulsation a little longer, the hot, blessed pulsation, the pulsation that started from the space between her legs and spread out, in waves, like the radio signal from some minuscule star.
It lasted a while. It died out slowly, fading away, as the lucent day triumphed. Mystique opened her eyes. The world was there, all around her, inundated with light. She sighed. In spite of her weariness, in spite of a faint, undulating sense of melancholy, she decided it really was time to get up.
*
“Listen to this,” said Chad, perched on a corner of the desk and holding a copy of the book that the whole nation was talking about by now. The book’s cover was in garish colours; it looked freshly printed. “It says here that Batman wasn’t the faggot he seemed to be. It says he got aroused by watching girls wash their hands. It says he loved to have them stick those nice clean hands up his ass.”
“But there’s a lot more here,” Chad said with a delighted smile, determined to persuade her that this was an important book. “It says that he once had a girl dressed as Zorro do it to him. It says he was considering having anal plastic surgery done on himself.”
“Anal plastic surgery?” Susie echoed in amazement, looking around in search of enlightenment. She immediately dropped her eyes, blushing, disconcerted by the sound of her own words.
“Jesus,” said Horace after leafing through a number of pages. “Here it talks about another poor girl. As far as I can make out, this one had sex with a certain Cement Man…”
“That must be Ben Grimm,” said Chad. “Szepanski changed the names of the superheroes, but it’s not hard to guess who he’s talking about.” He shifted his perch on the edge of the desk, with the casual ease of a ballerina, getting more excited by the day’s revelations. That book, smelling of fresh ink. The long-awaited bombshell by Dr. Joseph Szepanski.
“Jesus!” Horace said again, as he went on reading. “It says that the girl had the unfortunate inspiration to give this Cement Man a blow job.” Horace looked up with a mocking smile, widening his mouth almost to his ears. “Chad, can you imagine? What do you think it’s like to suck a cement dick?”
“I don’t know,” Chad replied, pretending to think it over. “Rough?”
The two men burst out laughing. They laughed and laughed, satisfied with themselves, while Mystique shook her head and went over to sit on the window sill. The half-open window let a bracing breeze into the room. She brushed the glass with her fingers and glanced out at the tranquil skyline of Astoria. Low buildings alternated with old industrial structures, seedy-looking overpasses, and ongoing construction sites. “Careful not to laugh too hard,” she warned Chad. “That desk is starting to creak.”