Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  Mystique saw none of this. She went for her run as the sun was rising and the park was still deserted. Apart from her run, she never left the apartment. Her cleaning lady had done some shopping for her and the refrigerator was well stocked. Fresh vegetables, trays of organic food, spirulina protein bars, and other provisions from Whole Foods. No need to go out. Her apartment was a comfortable, self-sufficient, protective fortress.

  The city’s summery atmosphere remained outside, like a gas too dense to make its way through any fissure in the windows. Mystique cancelled the handful of social dates on her calendar and spent two days practising her Szepanski. Her sole contact with the outside world were the text messages from Chad, whose weekend seemed to be as homely as hers. Chad was spending his time watching TV, and he didn’t fail to alert her when the old doctor appeared on the screen. Szepanski managed to pop up a couple of times, even in the weekend programming.

  The doctor talked about his bestseller, mentioned the scabrous topics described in the book through veiled euphemisms, ignored any unfriendly comments from the other guests on the shows, and winked into the TV cameras. There was no doubt. He was a star. A number of snippets from those shows immediately went viral, and Mystique watched them over and over, rapt, hoping to pin down some new nugget that might help her to transform into that man.

  As for the incident with the Ecuadorian driver, she was embarrassed that she had called Detective De Villa. She had no idea what had come over her. A woman with a past like hers, with as much experience as she possessed, rushing to call the police for something so trivial.

  Now that she thought about it, she was pretty sure the poor driver had nothing to hide. She was sure he had blathered on in that weird way just because he was tired or for some other harmless reason. Sometimes people let themselves go. Sometimes they raved senselessly. She felt certain that the police would run checks on Santiago without finding anything significant, and that no group of anti-superhero fanatics was conspiring against her. She continued to feel confident that she was in no danger. Or at least that’s what she kept telling herself.

  On Monday, after yet another day in the office, after an interminable meeting with the writers and another equally interminable, draining meeting with her producers, as she was leaving the studio she found someone waiting for her.

  In the almost deserted parking lot, the detective was leaning against the bonnet of his car. Mystique squared her shoulders and marched towards him. She couldn’t believe it. She really couldn’t believe that a few nights ago she had given in to the impulse to call this man.

  Dennis De Villa moved away from his car and walked to meet her. “Good evening,” he whispered. “I thought you’d never get here. Do you always work this late?”

  “Good evening to you,” she snarled. For an instant, she was flooded with a frustration so powerful it almost made her head spin. That man had already wormed his way into her dreams at night, and the last thing she wanted was to keep seeing him in front of her. “Yes, always this late. So do you, I see.”

  “Oh,” he said, failing to pick up on Mystique’s confrontational tone. “Practically speaking, I don’t work on a schedule. Let’s just say I’m one of those cops who’s never off duty. I never stop being a cop,” he said, starting to laugh. His laughter sounded a little more mournful than usual. He turned solemn again, looked around, and said that he’d come because he had some news for her. Without warning, he headed back to his car, leaving Mystique with no alternative but to follow him.

  This time, he wasn’t wearing his grey suit. He wore a pair of casual trousers and a shirt that highlighted the sculpted shape of his shoulders. “That driver,” said the detective. “Santiago Gomez. Apparently he had nothing to do with the notes you received or the group we’re trying to track down.”

  “I guessed as much,” Mystique sighed.

  “Still, we arrested him today. We found out there was something else he was hiding.”

  All around them the evening smelt of burned paper, dry soil, and newly watered yards. The parking lot was silent, while from the street came the intermittent wheezing of traffic. Unsettled by the detective’s words, Mystique asked him to explain.

  “Like I told you, the man had nothing to do with the notes or the group… On the other hand, we did find a corpse in his house.” He said the word corpse in a hush. He looked down discreetly and then continued: “It was his wife. Apparently he killed her months ago. It seems they hadn’t been getting along since they’d moved to New York, and he killed her in the midst of an argument. He hid her body in the freezer and went on with his life. He went on working as a driver.”

  Mystique’s throat went dry. She tried to think of something to say, but no words came. The first thing she imagined was the face of that woman, curled up in a freezer. She imagined the marble-hard skin, the sealed eyelids, the ice-encrusted hair. She imagined the body spattered with frozen blood. Crystallised tears rimming the eyes.

  “That driver was no danger to you, or at least so we believe. But if you hadn’t told us about his odd behaviour, we wouldn’t have uncovered this murder. It was nothing but a coincidence. A fortunate coincidence, if we can use that term.” Dennis De Villa put his hands in his pockets and stood next to the car, his eyes still downcast, the sunset at his back. His reddened eyes seemed more upset than ever. For some reason, talking about this case seemed to cost him a great effort. “A man who killed his wife,” he said, as if to sum up the whole story, without another word.

  “My God,” Mystique pondered, struck both by the news and by the distress, unquestionably sincere, that the detective was displaying. “That’s why Santiago was talking in that tone. That’s why he said those things.”

  De Villa stood motionless. His only movement was the rhythmic heaving of his chest beneath the fabric of his shirt. Backlit, his hair was bathed in the fading glow of the sunset. Eventually, he emerged from his reverie, swung open the passenger door, and said he would take her home.

  Mystique didn’t reply. She was still thinking about the woman in the freezer. About the frost on her lips, her frozen organs, the chill that seeped everywhere, even into her womb. She thought of that body in a casket of ice. When the policemen lifted the lid of the freezer, did the light glitter on her skin? What did a frozen corpse smell like? Sometimes, hearing about a stranger’s death caused her to suffer like this. An ephemeral yet burning pain. “I’m sorry?” she said, after a moment.

  “I’ll take you home. As far as I can tell, the car service hasn’t yet found someone to take Santiago’s place,” he pointed out, looking around the half-deserted parking lot. “We arrested him less than two hours ago.”

  “Two hours ago. My God,” Mystique repeated, thinking of the young driver. “He had such an open face. So tormented. I almost feel guilty.”

  “That man was a killer,” De Villa said with a grimace. “Now please get in. Do you want to stand there all night?” he said in a gentler voice, swinging the car door back and forth.

  Mystique took a step back. They faced each other, she and the detective, like characters in one of those TV series where members of rival gangs meet in a parking lot for an exchange of hostages, a settling of accounts, or something of the sort. She and the detective had no hostages to exchange. They didn’t seem to have any accounts to settle. The breeze tousled both his hair and hers. She considered calling a taxi. Or else, if Chad or Horace happened to come by, she could ask for a ride… She noticed that the detective’s car seemed very clean. De Villa was still holding the door open. There seemed to be something deeply human, almost defenceless about him that evening, in the middle of a desolate parking lot, after telling her the story of a man who had murdered the woman he loved.

  They kept looking at each other. There was a moment of hesitation, a shard of time, hard, razor-sharp, like the needle of a compass hovering between two different magnetic norths. Mystique hung in the balance. Her body wavered for one final moment, and then she slid into the car.


  *

  The seat had a cushiony consistency. The interior of the car smelt of lavender-scented air freshener. The detective drove confidently, not too fast, heading for Manhattan. He adjusted the air conditioning and asked her more than once if she was comfortable.

  Mystique struggled to answer. The news she’d just received about Santiago was stunning. She stared into the windscreen, out onto the black ribbon of asphalt illuminated by the changing lights of the traffic signals. She preferred to avoid the detective’s gaze. That gaze too left her a little stunned, and at the same time curious, and mistrustful. Mistrustful of him and of my own reactions. I feel like I am walking on a thin sheet of glass. I wonder if that’s the effect that a cop is having on me, or if it’s just Dennis De Villa.

  At her side, the man was driving with his cop hands, talking with his cop voice. His cop gestures. His rhythmic cop breathing. The distress he had betrayed earlier, when he announced the news about Santiago and his murdered wife, seemed to have subsided, at least in part. He seemed to be concentrating, and muttered something to the effect that the driver’s arrest wouldn’t solve much. He was referring to the anonymous notes. Learning that Santiago had nothing to do with the notes might be comforting, but it also meant that whoever sent those notes was still out there, unknown, with his unknown intentions.

  Mystique gave a start. It was as if De Villa had touched her somewhere too sensitive, somewhere too exposed, a part of her body whose location was a mystery even to her, but that she knew must somehow exist. The notes. She didn’t say a word about the new note she had received a few days ago. She hadn’t discussed it with anyone and had no intention of discussing it now. She couldn’t see what good it would do. She chose to bring the subject back to the chauffeur. In a calmer manner than a few nights back, when she first called the detective, she told him what Santiago had said. “He talked about destiny. That’s what he told me. Something about how it was destiny that forces you to kill someone.”

  This time it was the detective who acted startled. He accelerated slightly, revving the engine just a bit, to make it through a traffic light. “How destiny forces you to kill someone,” he said, in an awestruck voice. Streaks of light poured into the car with each street light they passed, illuminating his skin with a metallic nuance. “That must have been how he justified it to himself. Do you believe in destiny?”

  “Santiago asked me something similar,” Mystique mused. The scent of lavender had impregnated her nostrils, acting on her like a mild tranquilliser. “I don’t know. Destiny sounds like a vague word to me.”

  De Villa waited before replying. “So then what? What else did Santiago say?”

  “He talked about extinct animals.” She realised that her voice had a rarefied sound to it. Due to some phenomenon, the air conditioning was leaving streaks of humidity on the car windows. “Talked about animals in cages… He asked me if I was married.”

  “Oh,” said the detective. His voice too had taken on an odd sound. They both seemed about to add something, then decided against it and surrendered to the silence. No more noise came in from the street. The windows were fogging up as if it were winter outside.

  The car appeared to be no longer moving. Impossible to see out. Mystique remained still, terrified and enchanted by those unexpected phenomena, while the lights from the street grew blurry, more and more imprecise in the fogged-up glass. It must be their breathing. There was no other explanation. Their breathing had fogged the glass. Their deep, hungry breathing. His breathing, her breathing.

  Mystique’s lips parted, as she felt she was suffocating, her body responding to a languid thrill of pleasure. She felt short of breath. The oxygen in the car must have been used up. They sat motionless in the airless interior, the windows closed and fogged. “I’m suffocating,” she begged. Dennis De Villa caressed her face. In his smile was an infinite well of sadness. “I’m suffocating.”

  When she woke up she was breathing hard. Her heart was racing. It was difficult to tell whether she was recovering from the feeling of suffocation in her dream, or if instead her laboured breathing was a sign of some perverse excitation. This time it wasn’t even dawn. Still dark outside. The night was silent and intact on the far side of the window.

  She dragged herself into the bathroom, where she groped blindly for the switch. The light had the effect of a shot of caffeine, sweeping away the last traces of her incomprehensible dream and leaving her wide awake to stare at herself in the mirror. Her face. Her lidded eyes. In the sudden glare of light, her pupils had contracted instantaneously, recoiling like tiny frightened creatures.

  Nostrils flared, lips clamped tight. She couldn’t claim she looked well rested. She mustn’t have slept more than five hours. To go on dreaming scenes like that was certainly no help… This is turning into a habit. Perverse dreams involving Detective De Villa.

  Nothing she had just dreamed had actually taken place last night. She and the detective had talked about Santiago, true enough, but the car windows hadn’t fogged up and the car hadn’t stopped moving. Nothing remotely like it. Detective De Villa had seen her home and wished her a respectful goodnight.

  What the hell is happening to you? she asked herself. She rinsed her face and dried it with a towel. The sensation of the soft cloth against her face. Once again, her body was in a state of turmoil. That night, she’d have to go on air with the show. She continued stroking her face and breathing hard through the towel, to chase that dream away, to chase away all dreams, to chase away what had happened with Santiago and the woman curled up in the freezer, to chase away the presence of Dennis De Villa so that she could think, instead, about the long day that lay ahead of her.

  *

  Vladimir Putin was greeted with the usual standing ovation. Vladimir showed off the muscles of Great Russia, making the studio audience roar with laughter. Oprah, Madonna, and the other characters were given the same giddy welcome. The show went on at a relentless pace. The sketches, the applause, the commercial breaks, the dance numbers, the walk-ons, the moments when she headed backstage to transform herself into a new character, the appearances of Chad who, in this episode, was flaunting his unequalled green tailcoat. Everything seemed to dovetail. Everything appeared well assembled, fluid, and seamless, like a perfectly smooth surface, beneath which no one would suspect the actual presence of an unexpected hole. The schedule had been reorganised at the last minute. It had become necessary to replace a missing sketch: the one that Mystique hadn’t been up to performing, the sketch she just didn’t feel ready to do. The notorious Doctor Szepanski sketch.

  The customary meeting with the team and the director was to take place after the show. Before the meeting, while she was still in her dressing room trying to relax and to get rid of the flavour of the bodies into which she had transformed herself, Mystique heard a discreet tapping at the door. She tidied her hair and called out in a neutral voice: “Come in.”

  Gary Modine, the show’s producer, poked his head into the room. His small green eyes beamed in the half-light of the door. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Don’t worry. I was expecting you.”

  Gary shut the door behind him and strode towards her. He was a fairly tall man, with an understated tan and an elegant smile always stamped on his face. He was about the same age as her, early fifties, and he wore an exquisitely tailored suit. He had manicured hands. Cared-for skin, a thick white perfectly groomed head of hair. The kind of man you could picture at the weekend sipping a cocktail in some beautiful home on the ocean or else swinging a club on the most exclusive greens in the state.

  “Dearest,” he cooed in a well-calibrated voice. “I watched the show from the control booth. You were every bit as wonderful as ever.”

  “Yeah,” was all that Mystique said. She let Gary get settled on the sofa and started wandering around the small space of the dressing room, feeling the usual post-show agitation cling to her.

  “Of course, we have a problem though,” said the producer
.

  “Of course,” she admitted.

  Gary crossed his legs. Peeping out from under the hems of his trousers was the fabric of his impeccable black socks. “Let me be frank,” he said, his amiable smile still in place. “Next week, there can be no more delays. The Szepanski number is going to have to go on. The first ratings reports for tonight have us running even with Namor’s show… Running even. There was a time when we dominated with an average four-point lead. Next week our friend with the gills has a good chance of scooping us.”

  Mystique listened as she continued to wander around the dressing room, in her robe, her body restless as in a state of insurgence. She felt the painful impulse to transform herself again, a thousand times again, transform herself without stopping until her very last breath. The post-show malaise was exacerbated by the awareness that she had failed to perform a particular transformation. The goddamned transformation everyone was waiting for. The transformation she both yearned for and dreaded. “Are we certain,” she ventured, “that Szepanski is the character we really want?” She thought it over and corrected herself: “I mean, I’m pretty sure that next week I can pull it off. I’ll become Szepanski. I just need a little more practice. But are we certain that he’s the character we need to focus on?”

  “We’re more than certain,” was Gary’s answer. The producer shot her a gentle glance of reproof. “Next week, Szepanski is going to be a guest on Namor’s show. We don’t have any alternatives. Namor is going to host the doctor, and we’ll have to have an even funnier version of the doctor, something more captivating than the original.”