Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

“Fine,” Sabrina nodded. She got down two mugs with the Starbucks logo, added hot water and one tea bag per mug. She handed one to her visitor and commented: “I think I can help.”

  Mystique-Chad blew on her scalding tea, gazing with thinly disguised affection at the woman sitting across from her. Sabrina was more than just her trusted supplier. They had first met many years ago at the time of their political activism, when Sabrina was in the same political struggles as Mystique. Mutant liberation and that whole array of bizarre old-fashioned illusions. They hadn’t succeeded in liberating much of anything, but they had been arrested just a few months apart.

  Their stories ran parallel. They had served their sentences in different prisons but they’d been released around the same time. Since then Mystique would drop by every so often with the excuse of buying a little grass, always in disguise, and Sabrina never suspected, or gave no sign of suspecting, that the overweight young man who came to see her was her old comrade from the days of the radical struggle.

  Sabrina put a sugar cube in her mug. She stirred the tea with a long spoon, blew on it, and took a cautious sip. “I like doing business with you. There are so few people left any more who ask for something to help them relax,” she pointed out. Her thick eyelashes shaded her eyes, which brimmed with a mixture of slyness and honest concern. Since she’d been released from prison, she’d managed to eke out a living by peddling dope. Before serving time, she’d had some modest superpowers, but it had been too many years since she’d used them and she must have lost them altogether by now.

  Sabrina went on with her speech. “From what I remember,” she said, “there was a time when people wanted that. Back then, I wasn’t in this line of work, but I did have the impression that people used to go to dealers because they wanted something to help them relax. Or at the very most, something to help them have fun.”

  Mystique-Chad kept listening to her. A trembling column of steam rose from the mug she held in her hands.

  “Now all they want is something to help them tough it out, to keep them on their feet like sleepwalkers. Like cardboard cut-outs.” Sabrina took a pause to sip her tea. “They want chemical crap with names I’ve never heard. Or cheap cocaine refined with who knows what… What do you think they use to make that crap, rejects from some paint factory?”

  Mystique-Chad nodded repeatedly. She understood what the woman was talking about. Something had changed during the years they’d both spent in prison, and it wasn’t limited to the capricious shifts in the narcotics market. It was something much more universal. It was something in the vibrations people put out. Something in the radio waves of reality, something to do with the world’s innermost desires.

  But she hadn’t come to talk about that. She was here to buy some grass. Simple, pure, old-fashioned grass. Not that she was much of a dope-smoker. Sabrina’s grass was just a good way to soothe the anxiety of all the pressure she’d been under lately. A way to calm the shocks of painful excitement that swept over her more and more often these days, these nights, these sleepless dawns. To keep from shuddering awake in the aftermath of some sick dream with Detective De Villa. To have some peaceful nights and get to work rested.

  After their tea, and once their little transaction had been completed, they walked together to the door. “I see you on TV sometimes, on that bizarre show,” Sabrina said. She stopped in the doorway, clasping her arms around herself, sniffing the scent of the rain-washed street. “You’re all great. You’re great. Mystique is great. Give her my best wishes, as always. I wonder if she even remembers me. Tell her that old Sabrina still thinks of her.”

  Mystique-Chad headed off down the street. After a few yards she turned around, and saw Sabrina standing in the doorway, in her light-coloured dress. The falling rain was cooler now. She continued down the street, a small bag of marijuana in her pocket, in the rhythmic overwhelming sound of the downpour.

  Meeting Sabrina again was always a strange experience. It only took a minute for the details of the visit, the discussion of drugs, the Starbucks mugs, the taste of the hot tea, to have all vanished in a puff of flimsy, ambiguous, distant colour. The same colour that dominated her memories of Lexington. The isolation cell, the meals, the harsh light of the infirmary. The faces of the people she had met there. The visits from her lawyer. Sixteen years in prison. Sixteen years immersed in that colour, like in a sepia photograph. She wondered if Sabrina’s memories of prison were the same colour.

  She wondered what colour Sabrina’s memories had of their long-ago political activism, of their revolutionary naivety. Like a sepia photograph. Something that must once have existed, perhaps, but in another colour, in a different atmosphere.

  She came to the end of the street. Perhaps Sabrina was still standing in the doorway. Who knows. She decided not to turn around, because she knew that from where she was, she would be unable to make out any human figure, and that there was no gesture that could be glimpsed through that rain, which made everything blurred.

  *

  Transform yourself into a man. I’m begging you. I want to feel a man’s body. In the prison showers, back in Lexington, or in a distant corner of the yard during their exercise period, the other female convicts would implore her to transform herself into a man. Other times the female prison guards asked her the same thing, with voices either violent or desperate, even though they knew well that she couldn’t do what they asked. She just couldn’t. For all the years she spent in confinement, her power of transformation had been inhibited by an electronic bracelet. That had been the worst punishment of all: to be unable to use her power, to feel it languishing in her body, in her muscles, in the depth of her belly, down to the most intimate recess of each vein. To feel it burn like an illness without an outlet. If she could have used her power, would she have satisfied the yearning requests of the women in the prison?

  For many long years, the torment of being unable to transform herself was mixed with the climate of grim sexual hunger at Lexington, the claustrophobic solitude of the bodies around her, and the clamp of her own solitude. The gelid odour of the bedclothes in the cell. Her bluish body, naked, in the prison shower room.

  When she got out the world was there, all around her, with its unrecognisable flavour, with its millions of moving bodies. It had taken her weeks to get up the courage to begin transforming herself again. It finally happened in a restaurant toilet. She’d locked herself in, undressed, and turned into the young waiter who had just served her a lettuce-and-avocado salad a few minutes earlier. Nothing else happened. She stood there, alone, in the confines of a small toilet, with the appearance of some nondescript man. She might have cried. She must have cried.

  A few months later, she made her debut in show business. Mystique, mutant former extremist, a new national comedy star. Along with her fame came the rising tide of rumours, the chorus of grotesque suppositions about her private life.

  But there was nothing to figure out. No secret, no shadow, no torrid secret affair.

  She wasn’t frigid and she wasn’t apathetic. By no means. When her power was set free to manifest itself again, she had believed that soon the rest of her energies would begin circulating as well. Romantic energy, sexual energy. She’d believed that it would happen. She’d believed that she’d find someone to help her reconnect with the world, someone who would serve as an electric contact, someone she could hook up with to get back in touch, at last, with the circuit of the world’s erotic current.

  In that period, she’d taken a look around. Most of the men she met at work were colleagues of Gary’s, or television network executives who shared Gary’s style. Elegant, airbrushed men, with over-sophisticated voices, with too-perfect laughter, men who preferred five-hundred-dollar-a-bottle brandies, who were members of prestigious clubs. Men who appeared so thin to her eyes, nearly nonexistent, like adhesive decals attached, in an indelible manner, to the way of life that fed and sustained them. Mystique wasn’t interested in going to bed with a way of life. She wanted to go
to bed with an individual. She already found it irritating to have to interact with those men for professional reasons. Sure, she was working for them, but she hadn’t reached the point where she found them attractive on any intimate level.

  There were other kinds of men, creative men, writers, directors, men in show business, and friends of men in show business. Men that sent her flowers every day for weeks, men she agreed to go out with a couple of times, only to find they bored her, men full of frustrated ambitions or overabundant narcissism, men fixated with themselves who, on the first attempt at sexual intercourse, would wind up making the predictable request. Naked men begging her, moaning, sweating, chewing on the bedsheets in their frenzied impatience, asking her to take on their appearance. Transform yourself into me. Please. I want to have sex with myself.

  And what about actors, those mysterious and sometimes alluring individuals, who could also be ridiculous to the point of tears?

  There had been that television awards ceremony when she was introduced to Chuck Norris. The famous actor with the scruffy red beard. Norris had stared at her all through the evening, scratching his beard above the bow-tie of his tuxedo, shooting her a succession of nervous little smiles, asking the orchestra to play Call Me, and finally handing her his phone number, with a conqueror’s smirk. Mystique had never felt so awkward in her life. Chuck Norris! She and Chad had laughed about it for weeks.

  For a while, every interaction she had with the world of men ended the same way. A laugh with Chad.

  Not that every episode was strictly comical.

  She was clear-headed enough to understand that a woman who couldn’t find anyone she considered attractive was, in all likelihood, a woman who didn’t really want to find anyone. And she didn’t understand the point of all this. What was she trying to achieve with her detachment? Was she trying to punish the world? Was she trying to punish herself?

  In the meantime, sex was evaporating around her. Sex became more and more extraneous, more and more elusive. Sex was a wind that blew all around her. She could feel it but she couldn’t seize it. Sex gusted in the streets of New York, ran along the entire length of Broadway, insinuated itself into the narrowest alleys, waved the flags on the roofs of the hotels. Sex swept the dust along the sidewalks, blew on the doors of the American Apparel stores and the Dean & DeLuca gourmet shops, made its way into the gardens of cocktail bars in the Meatpacking District, wafted along the riverbank, chased across the bridges, and spread out on the other side, in the relative tranquillity of Brooklyn or Queens.

  She could feel it. The constant breeze of sex. She knew that she lived in one of the most seductive cities on earth, a city dominated by an excruciating lust, a sort of constant sexual exhalation. She could sense other people’s sex, she could see them working away, she saw bodies attract one another, gravitate into each other’s orbit to keep from plunging into the void.

  It happened at work, too. It especially happened at work. Horace had screwed the costumier on the show, as well as the costumiers of every other programme produced in the studios, and even little Susie, timid angel that she was, had slept with a couple of the studio technicians. The dancers on the show had fucked each other, one after another, mixing and matching in every way imaginable, men with women, men with men, women with women, in such a systematic assortment that it seemed the result of some scrupulous scientific project.

  The world’s sexual movement was relentless, mechanical, reminiscent of a giant piece of clockwork. She observed it all without envy, with a sense of distance. She was Mystique. The woman who had survived sixteen years in prison. She was hungry for bodies, and not just the bodies she could turn herself into, but she understood that other people’s bodies weren’t the problem. It was her body that had grown too remote, virtually unattainable.

  Her changeable body. Her proud solitary body, the body that refused to mingle with other bodies, preferring to transform itself into them, to know them without touching them.

  *

  On Thursday morning, Mystique dressed carefully. She put on a black cotton dress and wrapped a deep blue scarf—the blue of a sky just before dawn—around her shoulders. She wore a pair of simple sandals. She pulled back her hair and applied a discreet line of lipstick. Sabrina’s grass had allowed her to get some sleep that night, and though the image looking back from the mirror might not have been that of a serene, untroubled woman, all things considered, she looked presentable enough. I’m ready. I think I’m ready.

  At the last minute she changed her mind and arranged the scarf so that it covered her hair as well. She put on large dark glasses in the hope of going unnoticed. The simplest thing would have been to attend the funeral in the guise of Chad or someone else, but something stopped her from doing that. A funeral ceremony demanded a modicum of respectful, sincere presence. I must attend with my own appearance.

  Forty minutes later she was in a little Catholic church in Washington Heights, where half a dozen members of the Ecuadorian community had gathered for the funeral of Rosita Gomez, Santiago’s wife, murdered and hidden for months in a freezer. The woman had no relatives in New York, and none of the people present at the service seemed to have known her personally. The elderly priest celebrated the Mass in Spanish, starting a solemn plainsong at times, his voice wavering in the bare church.

  The only flowers were the ones that Mystique herself had ordered, along with another wreath of unknown origin. Scrolling clouds of incense curled slowly through the air. Mystique had taken a seat in one of the last pews towards the back. At first she tried to understand the words the priest was saying, then allowed herself to be lulled by the simple sound of his voice, the scent of the incense, and the feeling of calm, sad helplessness that reigned over the ceremony. A young woman, murdered. A body shut for months in an icy casket. That body now lay in a cheap wooden coffin, over which the priest was scattering an abundance of holy water.

  When the ceremony came to an end and it was time to leave the church, the few attendees recognised Mystique. A couple of them started looking around, possibly thinking that the presence of a TV star could mean the presence of TV cameras; another couple approached her for an autograph. Mystique preferred to slip away. She felt the taste of a dense melancholy in her throat. It was then that she spotted, in a corner of the church, the familiar figure of Detective De Villa.

  They left the church in silence, no need to speak, walking side by side. The weather outside was a sharp contrast to the cool shadowy atmosphere inside the church. The sun once again beat down triumphant. The streets had dried off at unsettling speed, erasing all traces of the recent rains. According to the weather forecasts, a high-pressure front had settled again over the north-east coast, driving temperatures upwards. The summer was roaring back, angrier than ever. The city was about to succumb to a furious fever, and this time no quarter would be given.

  Dennis De Villa took off his jacket and started to roll up his shirtsleeves. “Sorry, but this heat…” He stopped, and whispered: “I guessed I’d find you here.”

  Mystique unwrapped her scarf too. They stood there looking at each other, in the sunshine, on the sidewalk outside the church. “I assumed you’d come for the funeral.”

  “I did come for the funeral. I sent flowers. I came for the funeral and I came to see you.”

  Mystique ran the palm of her hand over her forehead, where a damp film was already forming. Under the heat of the sun, the sadness of the funeral seemed to dissolve into the bitterish, transparent, and liquid sensation of sweat on the flesh. “I thought that with heat like this New York’s finest would relax their grip a little.”

  “Oh, quite the opposite.” The detective had rolled his shirt sleeves up to his elbows. On his forehead, tiny drops glittered like crystals.

  “I hope you haven’t come to offer me protection for the umpteenth time.”

  “Why not?” He frowned and continued to address her with a heartfelt gaze, bordering on indiscretion, a gaze that made her glad she was wearin
g a pair of protective dark glasses. “Everything okay with the new driver?”

  “Of course,” she replied, referring to the driver who had taken Santiago’s place. The car was waiting for her a few yards up the street. A new surge of perspiration was filming over her forehead, the nape of her neck, and down the line of her back. “I think it’s time for me to go.”

  The detective shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I could give you a ride to the studio.” Even before she had a chance to answer, he added with a hint of regret: “I suppose that’s out of the question.”

  Mystique took some time to consider her reaction. For an instant she thought of Chad, of his theory that the detective fancied her, and how amused Chad would be if he could eavesdrop on this exchange. She imagined herself at the studio, telling Chad about all this. She imagined herself giggling with him at a table in the cafeteria or in the production office, but then that image struck her as less than amusing. She could still sense in her nostrils the scent of incense from the church. “You’re a persistent man. I’ve got to hand it to you. As you can see, right now I don’t happen to need a ride anywhere.”

  When she started towards her car, the detective fell into step beside her. “The first time I saw you,” he said in a confessional tone, “was in another church. Do you remember? The funeral of Franklin Richards. A very different ceremony from today’s. I remember seeing you in the midst of the group of superheroes. I remember seeing you embrace Franklin’s parents, I remember seeing you walk away, alone, through the crowd in the cathedral.”

  Mystique got into the car. The air inside was cool, and it seemed to penetrate her damp skin and blow into her, making her feel as if her body was empty and hollowed out. “But I didn’t see you there. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I ought to be going.”

  Dennis De Villa leaned over the car, one hand holding the open door, his face inches away from hers. He blinked and swallowed nervously. “That day, I remember watching you as you walked away. I remember thinking that one day we’d speak, that one day we’d interact with one another. Funny, isn’t it? Before I even knew anything about those notes. Before I knew that I’d have any reason to meet you.”