by Chuck Austen
“What’s the big deal?” she said, not realizing that it might be the ‘little’ deal that was Morgan’s problem.
He resisted only a little, but squealed and moaned the entire time, staring longingly at each piece of clothing as it fell to the floor, like a small dog just the other side of the fence from its food bowl.
Sophie finally got him down to his underwear, and Morgan struggled more seriously with her as she tried to slip them off. Before long the minor struggle had turned into a full-scale battle as they each strained and complained, one against the other. But it was only fabric—Wopplesdown Struts fabric, at that—so it was inevitable the undies finally split, ripped, and tore away in Sophie’s hands. Morgan shrieked as if he’d been hit rather hard with an ugly stick.
“Oh,” Sophie said, a little sadly, staring at Morgan’s exposed ‘flea’. Then, ever the effervescent optimist, she rocked back on her heels and bounced—once, twice, three times. “Well,” she said, smiling pleasantly at Morgan. “You’ve got a pretty long tongue, right?”
It took a moment for what she was saying to slowly awaken Morgan’s hamster, but once he was fully alert, the little fellow fairly leaped into the wheel and sprinted madly, as if the finish line was finally in sight, and this time, this time, he would get there. “Yeah,” he said—Morgan, not the hamster—smiling back at her. “I do.”
“Good enough,” she told him, and tossed aside the shredded briefs. Then she put an arm around Morgan, clapping one hand on his bare ass. He perked up like I hadn’t seen since that day he learned Marvel had finally fired that one writer he thought was ruining the XMen.
What was his name?
“Down on the floor,” Washburne said, refocusing my attention.
Slowly, we complied. Wendy and I got down last, and most reluctantly, staring through Washburne’s soul the entire way.
“What’s in the suitcase?” he asked Henchman Number One?
“Nothing,” the thug replied. “Some paint, a couple a g-strings, and a buncha funnybooks.”
“Comic books!” Morgan, Wendy, and I said simultaneously.
“Shut up!” Washburne said. Then turned back to the thug. “Take the g-strings and the comics. You can leave the rest.”
Then slowly and confidently, he turned back to us, a bit more relaxed in his moment of superiority.
“I’m telling security to be on the lookout for…um…whaddayacall…streakers,” he told us. “Streakers. What a weird fuckin’ place this is. Anyway, so don’t get any ideas you can run through the convention and get out of here if you’re fast enough.” Then the little toad laughed, though for the life of me I don’t know why, and he and the thugs backed out the doorway.
Before closing it completely, Washburne stuck his sweat-slicked head back into the room and smiled the only smile I’d seen him offer since I’d laid eyes on him. It looked completely out of place. Like a bowtie on a baboon.
“And don’t bother coming back to Nikkid Bottoms,” Washburne said, a giddy, chuckling, sadistic glee in his voice. “That door will be closed by the time you get there.”
Sophie’s head shot up almost as rapidly as mine.
“What?” we both said.
“Sorry, Sophie,” Washburne told her, though clearly he didn’t mean it.
“Washburne, you bastard!” Sophie spat, revealing a darker side that jolted me and excited Morgan. “If I can’t get back home, I will rip your fucking nuts off and feed them to rats!”
And somehow, I believed she would.
“Not if you can’t catch me, and you can’t catch me, you can’t catch me…” he said in a weird, playground singsong. “Because the door will be clooooosed. Just like this one. HA HA HA!”
And as promised, he closed the door.
We were on our feet in an instant, but I already knew from the rumbling, and thumping, and clicking sounds in the hall outside that we were pretty much sealed in. As Morgan, Sophie, and Waboombas struggled with the doorknob, I paced the room like a weasel on a leash, looking for any way free, and more importantly, something to wear once I had exited.
There wasn’t much in the way of either doors or clothing options. There were some plastic chairs, food containers, a table, bottled drinks, hors d’oeuvres, posters, and a sofa. I checked the posters, but they were small, rigid, and translucent, so they could be lighted from behind, and wouldn’t obscure anything that needed obscuring, except maybe Morgan’s little gentleman. The plastic containers were a similar translucence, milky-clear, and equally useless, and the hors d’oeuvres were miniscule, and fairly flavorless to be honest.
But there were plastic knives.
And the sofa was made of fabric.
I began digging at the sofa like Freddie on a sexually promiscuous teenager, and immediately snapped the knife. I grabbed another, and shattered that. Then a third. A fourth. After nearly putting my eye out with the fifth, I finally gave up and screamed in anguish, throwing things, upturning tables, and knocking over folding chairs.
I was about to shatter a metal and plastic seat through one of the windows overlooking the convention floor when I realized the broken shards of glass would rain down on a cluster of innocent children below. The energy drained out of me as I watched them—laughing, giddy, little toddlers wearing Teen Titans costumes and striking poses for their parents, who smiled with pride and joy at their…eh…prides and joys while taking picture after picture after picture.
Stupid superheroes. They’d failed me in every way.
Superheroes really were for kids, not adults, like the ninety percent of the people out there on the convention floor right now. Not men, like me or Morgan, or—well, maybe Morgan. Superheroes were really designed with children in mind. Batman. Superman. The Hulk. The colorful costumes and simple morality tales spoke to young minds in ways they could understand, told tales that uplifted them, encouraged them, and, hopefully, in some ways, helped set them on a course toward being good, honest, and ethical adults.
Not that it helped. Lots of people who loved them as kids still grew up to be non-heroic—or worse, to take your comics, your girl, and call you one of life’s ‘extras’.
Of course, superhero comics now didn’t have the kind of clarity they once had. Maybe that’s where they had failed me. These days, the bright colors of our supermen were muddied with endless shades of gray. Good guys who weren’t really good guys, bad guys who weren’t really bad guys, problems without easy solutions.
Many of you may not know this, but within the last fifteen to twenty years, superheroes in printed form (and through osmosis some of the films based on them) have become a weird, hybrid form of adult/child entertainment aimed almost exclusively at grownups who—for complex reasons no one really cares about—have become virtually the only remaining audience for them.
These modern superhero readers don’t want to let go of their cherished supermen, their beloved paragons of virtue, their men-ofwill who are always right; but as adults, these fans have now experienced the grays of the world, and therefore can no longer reconcile the multiple tonalities between dark and light, sort of right and maybe wrong, with simple tales of cartoon heroism. Yet, at the same time, they still want the happy ending, the good fight, the easy answers of childhood. They want their brightly colored, spandex-clad ubermen who violate civil liberties at will, with impunity, and government sanction, even though those tales are primarily only suited for the minds of the young—or Bush administration officials. In other words, comics fans today want their entertainment to reflect the grays and the realities, and the darknesses of the real world, but they still want someone to punch the bad guy and make it all better.
Hell, don’t we all?
I certainly did. Wisper apparently did.
Maybe that’s how superheroes had failed us all. Given us simple answers we still longed for. Still believed in, simple answers that blinded us to the complex solutions often needed for real-world problems like ‘love’, ‘fame’, ‘peace’, ‘wealth’, or ‘hap
piness’. Realworld answers don’t come in pure, undiluted forms of clear, pleasanttasting liquid inside convenient, plastic bottles with no FDA warnings on the label.
Without some confirmation from me, Wisper couldn’t see through the thin mist of grays that hid the mostly good—mostly wanting to be heroic—man I felt was inside me. And could I blame her? Earlier, on the floor of the convention center, confronted with something stupid from my past, I couldn’t see through the even thinner haze of grays to the clarity of what she offered. What should have been the most important thing in my life. Freedom. Control. Love.
Her.
Instead, I had insulted her. Fallen back on old ways and hurt the last person I ever should have.
Spent, sore, and deeply frustrated from everything that had happened to me this past few days, I lowered the chair I still held over my head, set it on the floor, and slumped down into it, feeling its cold plastic adhere to my bare ass as an unpleasant reminder that I was stuck here.
When I finally looked up, everyone was staring at me. Wendy. Morgan. Sophie. Perhaps a bit afraid of my rant, but more as if they believed I might have the answer to our dilemma.
Didn’t they know me? Hadn’t they heard everything Mayor Boone had said about me? Everything Morgan had confirmed?
I had no answers. No one did. Sometimes, there were none. Sometimes the bad guys won.
All good came with bad. Black came with white. Happy with sad. Asian cultures had long ago invented a term for this concept, and even created a picture to help explain the idea for the listening impaired.
Innun Dang it’s called, or something like that. The best you could do—the thing I needed, clearly, to do more of was to see the good, to focus on the good, to embrace the good, and accept that there would, occasionally, be some bad in life.
But never, ever, forget the good. Especially when she was right in front of you.
Wisper.
The videos, the comics, the money, the loss of my mansion and my lifestyle were nothing compared to losing Wisper. The joy that washed over me when I was with her—hearing her voice, her breath, her laugh, being naked with her, touching her, holding her, experiencing everything she offered—was complete. Perfect. Without grays. None of life’s annoying, tonal gradations mattered to me as much as the clarity of Wisper and the love I felt for her, right now, right this second.
That was clear. That was vibrant. That was alive.
And now it—she—was going to be denied me forever, lost in another dimension when Washburne somehow destroyed the storm hole off US 108.
That bastard. He couldn’t have her, so he’d deny her me, and me her. Sometimes there were no grays. Sometimes there is the pure, stark, clarity of right and wrong. And the fact that the Boones were intending to deny me Wisper was wrong. Something a superhero could, and should, fight against.
So where were they? Where were the real superheroes to be found when you desperately needed them to stop villains, open doors, and bring you pants? Where was Spiderman, or Captain America, or even War Woman with her velour-splitting sword when you truly, and honestly…?
That’s when I noticed Wendy’s suitcase.
“What are we going to do, Corky?” Waboombas asked.
And the extension cords connecting the glowing, poster-signs to the wall outlets.
“Say something!” Morgan demanded.
And the fact that the windows opened without needing chairs thrown through them.
Sophie pleaded with me, silently.
I looked around at my fellow heroes and smiled a radiant smile. A courageous smile. A superhero smile.
“We’re going after them,” I said.
Within minutes, we were lowering ourselves out the window on several, twisted-together electrical cords, and dropping to the ground beside the Teen Titans kids.
“Mom, look!” one of the little boys said, pointing at me. “It’s
Spiderman!”
“Oh, dear GOD!” his mother said, as you can imagine, a bit less enthusiastic about my ‘costume’ than her kid.
I had been painted with Wendy’s body-paint, head to toe in blue and red, with enough markings to pass as the worst Spiderman ever. Ms. Waboombas was War Woman, Sophie was a kind of Supergirl, and Morgan was Son of Satan. He really wanted to be Archangel, but we just didn’t have time to make it look right, or manufacture razor wings to his exacting specifications. We were, understandably, in a hurry. So we simply painted him up with red ‘pants’, yellow ‘boots’, and a sort of a pentagram thing on his chest that looked more like a crooked Star of David.
“I don’t wanna be Son of Satan,” he whined, for what must have been the thousandth time. “No cape. No pitchfork. I look like a tool.”
The rest of us ignored him and moved quickly off in the direction of the exits. I can only imagine from the looks we received that the men in white coats had already been notified.
Hair stuck out everywhere, including on the tops of our heads, though we had finally managed to rip free some of the sofa to fashion makeshift codpieces for the boys and thongs for the girls so at least that hair wasn’t visible. But on the whole, we were still barely passable as ‘clothed’.
“Sicko!” the Titan’s mother said, pulling her little one away as quickly as she could without dislocating any of his important bones. “SICKO! THERE ARE CHILDREN PRESENT!”
Her reaction was pretty much the same one we got from anyone with enough brains or experience to know what freaks we were. But being that it was ‘all part of the show’ no one stopped us, and no security guards mistook us for the ‘streakers’ Washburne had undoubtedly made good on his promise to warn them about. In fact, far from impeding us in any way, most people were happy to get out of the road and run for the hills at the sight of us. One man did come up to Waboombas and ask her to pose with him for a photograph. She obliged, thankfully without breaking stride, reminding him to come by her booth later for a copy of her comic. Promising he would, he then scurried over to Sophie and requested a picture with her as well. She, of course delighted, obliged bouncily.
“Can I touch your tit?” he asked her.
“Sure!” she said, bouncily.
He reached for it, holding his camera to record the event for posterity and his website, no doubt, when Morgan finally caught on that something was amiss.
“HEY!” Son of Satan shouted, and felled him like a redwood. The punch shocked everyone, especially me, and every eye in the building was immediately turned on us as the stricken souvenir hunter shrieked, and bled, and rolled around on the floor in agony. Sophie turned to Morgan and grinned darkly.
“Wow,” she said, and grabbed his ass again.
All the fuss, unfortunately, drew the attention of security, and as a couple of larger gentlemen in blue blazers set after us, we raced for the exits. They were hot on Morgan’s heels, calling into walkie-talkies, and I knew there would be many more on us soon.
The good thing about dressing like an idiot and running for your life through a crowded convention center is that no one wants to be in your way. The downside about dressing like an idiot and running for your life through a crowded convention center is that when enough people try to get out of your way simultaneously, they end up displaying their poor athletic ability by falling over one another and creating blood clots in the venous system of traffic flow. Wendy and I had come to one of these now, as herds of people fell, and screamed, and rolled over one another between packed tables and jammed booths on either side of the aisle.
Behind us we saw Morgan nabbed by one of two approaching security guys, and Sophie stopped to kick the man in the shins. The second by-passed her and headed straight for us, knowing we were trapped against the fleshy bubble of conventioneers.
I nodded to Waboombas, and she knew what I was thinking without my having to say it. We leaped up on a nearby table and raced across several portfolios of artwork laid before review editors at the Marvel table, hopped over the heads of stunned artists and down into the boot
h beyond, not stopping to look back as everyone called after us angrily.
Behind me, I thought I heard Marvel’s Editor In Chief say, “I hope we’re not paying that guy.”
Skirting attendees and booth workers, Wendy and I dove across a second table on the other side of the Marvel area, scattering some giveaway items—buttons, posters, stickers—and sending them flying into an unsuspecting line of autograph seekers waiting patiently for one of Marvel’s more popular writers to sign their boxes full of comics. As the most recent, highly revered chronicler of Marvel’s most popular characters, the author was being fawned over, and spoke to the crowd from behind his table, absently signing his name one letter at a time. Many of the fans were clearly awed and inspired by his genius, listening intently to whatever he was pontificating about. Or at least they pretended to be.
“I have seen a vision,” the writer explained serenely, and in a British accent, “that showed me America’s world dominance will come to an end in the coming months, when the president and his minions declare martial law, eliminate congress, and take complete control of this country. This act will reduce your nation to chaos.”
Who cares, I thought. I’ll be in an alternate dimension.
Hopefully.
Not far ahead, moving more slowly than we super-powered superheroes through the massive crowd, I saw the Boones, River, and Wisper just reaching the exit. They were flanked by their rent-a-thugs who were paying more attention to the convention and its attendees than they were to their clients. I decided I would have to take advantage of their lack of focus. I jabbed a finger in their general direction, and Wendy snarled an acknowledgement that she too had seen them.
We picked up the pace, but it wasn’t fast enough for me as there was still a good distance between the escapees and us, and because the aisles were still horribly crowded. We decided the fastest way to get where we needed to be was to ruin some very valuable artwork at Mitzi Abromowitz Graphic Collectibles booth by leaping onto her tables and running over them with our bare, painted feet.
