The Superman Project

by A. E. Roman

Montague, New Jersey. Utopia Farms. Utopia Farms was once a working farm that TSP members shared in operating. It occupied acres and acres of fenced green land and included an enormous three-story, twenty-eight-room, multimillion-dollar lodge.

  Utopia Farms was up for sale now, on the market with no bids since last August, all but abandoned.

  Dense woods surrounded organic gardens and pastures once used for the llamas and alpacas whose luxurious fur hides represented a high-priced cash crop for TSP. Zena said that the TSP members who usually tended the gardens and canned and packaged the farm-grown vegetables and fruits, mostly the wives and children of stockbrokers and money managers, who would prepare meals and relax with nature, picnicking, hiking, bird-watching, swimming, and boating on the property’s twenty-acre lake, would not be back for financial reasons. The married couple who lived on the property and cared for the animals had divorced and left the lodge.

  We parked and stepped out of the car, as Chase and Elvis, drunk on beer already and full of takeout from Punta Cana, guided us, laughing and chopping needlessly at the forest with a machete, through the great green property.

  I was just about to play my tell-me-everything-you-know card when I heard Chase scream, “Get away from me!” I turned and saw Pablo Sanchez waving a small ring and grabbing at Chase Gupta.

  “I love you!” Pablo yelled. “Elvis doesn’t love you! This is all his fault!”

  “Why is it always blame with you, Pablo?”

  “Pablo?” I said and ran over and reached out for his arm. He whipped around and said, “I didn’t know it, Chico. I never saw Yayo coming but who knew I had to be twice as careful with Elvis. He runs another man down. He takes my work. He takes my girl. He takes what’s sacred. He’s just as much of a killer as Yayo. Maybe even more.”

  “No,” Chase said. “You’re all mixed up, Pablo.”

  “I guess it’s that easy nowadays,” Pablo said. “Love is like changing a shirt.”

  “Go home, Pablo,” I said.

  Pablo screamed, “Fool! What a fool I am! How stupid! How could I have been so wrong about you, Chase! This is how it’s all done, you trade, you move on, you forget! It makes me sick!”

  “Let her go,” I whispered.

  “Fool!” Pablo shouted and released Chase.

  “Go home, manito,” Elvis said, not without sympathy.

  “Go home, manito?” said Pablo, charging at Elvis. “Go home, manito? You swindler! You have debts to pay! You make a profession of stealing the work and women of other men! You sickening, rotten, petrified so-called friend! While the real man, the true man, the honest man, The Superman, gets nothing!”

  “I don’t want any more trouble,” said Elvis, backing away, almost near tears again. “I loved your mother. I loved Esther like she was my own. This isn’t a comic book, bro. We’re friends.”

  “Do you think it’s that easy, God damn it? You drop a fake tear and all is forgiven? It’s not! One of these days somebody’s going to break your legs, Elvis. And you will crawl away on your belly like the snake you are!”

  Pablo charged again and flailed and threw punches at the air just inches from Elvis’s pretty face and Elvis didn’t fight back but just kept dodging and moving and peddling away beyond fat Pablo’s rage, almost laughing and crying at the same time.

  I grabbed Pablo. Zena came running, too. She stepped in front of Pablo and stopped him in his tracks.

  “Listen to me, Pablo,” Zena said in a soothing but stern voice, and grabbed Pablo’s face. “She doesn’t bloody love you, Pablo. Here is the truth. Chase doesn’t belong to you. She’s not your girlfriend. She never was. Your friendship was just that, a friendship. A platonic thing. Don’t blame Elvis. It’s not Elvis’s fault or your fault or even Chase’s. There are these accidents we call love. The accident of meeting someone and then choosing that someone over all others for an indefinite period of time. Sometimes an hour, a week, a day, sometimes, rarely, hardly ever, almost never, no matter what they say, a lifetime. There are lots of things we can control, Pablo. But we can’t control that. We can’t control who loves us and who doesn’t and for how long. I used to believe that love was something I could control. But I don’t anymore. What’s most offensive to you is not your delusion. You can always forgive delusions. What’s most offensive to you is that you have been bloody deluded and now, even though you know the truth, you still worship your delusion. You were wrong, Pablo. Forgive yourself for being wrong. It’s over. Let her go.”

  Pablo relaxed. “She’s right,” he said as I released him, tears in his eyes. “I’m through with you, Chase.”

  “Go home, Pablo,” Zena whispered.

  “I don’t love you anymore, Chase!” Pablo yelled, moving past us, back in the direction from which we came.

  “Go home, Pablo,” I agreed, as I saw him go in the direction of the parked Mini Cooper. “Go home.”

  EIGHTEEN

  We went into the empty lodge, through the wide wooden doors to the living room, bookshelves stocked with philosophy, six large plush sofas and matching love seats that sat under the shade of tall potted plants, through the huge kitchen where everything still sparkled and shone like liquid mercury, down a hall with five lavish bedrooms, each equipped with its own Jacuzzi and sauna, up a long wooden staircase, to the second floor, to the art studio marked GABBY GUPTA in gold. And all I could think was, if this is the spiritual life, bring it on.

  Elvis and I went in and searched the contents of the large open area filled with Gabby Gupta’s nudes while Zena and Chase picked at Gabby’s old art supply storage room on the top floor. I stared at the poem by Elizabeth Bishop, tacked to a dusty window:

  so many things seem filled with the intent to

  be lost that their loss is no disaster

  “This is great, papá,” said Elvis, while searching. “After you find Gabby, you should join TSP. Zena could help you get into the Superklatura. As a member of the Superklatura, you can do anything you want, Chico. You get to skip levels at TSP. You don’t have to follow what the other members do. And I wanna thank you for what you did for me. I don’t have many friends I trust. All of my old good friends are either dead, in jail, or they left town. Pablo trusts you. I trust Pablo even if he’s too stupid to see what a good friend I am. You’re Puerto Rican like me. I trust you. I guess, you could say you sorta inherited me.”

  “I feel lucky.”

  Elvis put his fingers under my nose and said, “Smell that.”

  I slapped his hand away.

  “You don’t like the smell of pussy?” Elvis asked.

  “Charming.”

  “I’m kidding.” He laughed. “I washed my hands.”

  He moved closer to me by a stack of piled blank canvas. “It’s not Chase,” Elvis said, sniffing his fingers. “I went to this bachelor party with that public defender chick that Chase was complaining about. It was on Central Park West in this penthouse. They hired strippers. Get this, over the television is a portrait of the last supper by some downtown artist. Playing on the TV below it, pornography!”

  “Adorable.”

  But Elvis continued. “We all sat in this circle, right? While these strippers dance and kiss and rub themselves. Then the groom, he got pulled to the middle of the room, stripped naked, and the strippers they touch the guy! Right there in front of us! And, get this, no matter how much the girls rub the guy, the groom won’t grow. We all start to laugh and laugh and laugh. The groom, right, he looks up and around the room, everybody laughing, even the strippers, even this lawyer chick, and he laughs too. He’s laughing and we’re all laughing and the strippers are laughing then suddenly he begins to cry!”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, this guy, he’s a rich computer geek, he just balls up like a baby, in the middle of this fancy living room and he cries. He cries like a little bitch in front of everybody.”

  “Maybe he’s allergic to strippers.”

  “What’s not to enjoy!” Elvis said. “These bitches w
ere fine. It was like Gabby and Zena times two. Two girls, one white with blond hair, one black with red hair, bikinis, thongs, big fake tits. I slept with the white one and my lawyer. Married. Two kids. Husband’s a pothead loser works for the MTA, managing tunnels or some shit, and she’s a total undercover freak. I can still smell her. Smell my fingers.”

  “No thank you,” I said. “I’ll wait for the movie.”

  Elvis sniffed his own fingers and shrugged.

  “Well,” said Elvis. “Thanks for not telling Zena or Chase about that night.”

  “What night?”

  “That night at Pablo’s,” he said, as if he didn’t want to get too deep into the details. “I wasn’t exactly keeping it together.”

  “Oh,” I said. “The crying.”

  “Well,” Elvis said, “it wasn’t exactly crying.”

  “No?”

  “No,” he repeated. “It was more like anxiety, like stress or anger, you know? It was more like angry crying, you know? About what was happening. Like why me, why now, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We gotta take over, you and me,” Elvis said, resuming his search. “We’re both working the same angle, Chico. You and me, we’re alike. I can tell. We’re not guys who end up living with our mothers, working some dead-end job. These Dominican kids like Pablo, they don’t get it. No business sense. They work dead-end jobs or sell street drugs and think it’s gonna get them somewhere. You, you’re Puerto Rican like me. My father was a professional wrestler and he fought and saved enough money to buy a bodega and that bodega’s practically mine, so I understand you. You’re a businessman like my father. But that’s not enough, papá. You’re restless. I can tell. I’m good that way. I can read people. My mother was a Santera and she had the gift, too. One minute, you’re working for Pablo, the next minute, boom-bam-ala-kazam, you’re running around with the boss’s daughter and making moves in Jersey. You got plans, papá. Like me. There’s no shame in your game. We gotta build a partnership. You and me, with Chase and Zena, we could run TSP. I’m talking millions. Selling this property alone. We could go places. Places our folks only dreamed about.”

  Elvis angling to get me to go in with him on some kind of hostile takeover of TSP made me wonder if any of these people ever talked to each other.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Maybe we should sit down and have a meeting.”

  “Vaya,” said Elvis, slapping my back.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” I said, getting closer to Elvis, drawing him into my web. “I sometimes dream about the rotten foster home where I grew up and sometimes I imagine myself trampled by anonymity, an avalanche of nobody-ness.”

  “I understand. That’s my nightmare, too. Pablo don’t understand. Forgive us, Pablo, if the only thing we see worth doing now is being rich.”

  “So your goal is to be rich, too?”

  “I’m gonna be the next president of TSP, you’ll see.”

  “I thought they tossed you out because of the Esther Sanchez thing?”

  “I’m working on that.”

  “What about Hari Lachan?”

  “He’s in a wheelchair. Superman? C’mon. Think about it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess. How did he get in that wheelchair?”

  “He got hit by a car on Eight Avenue right outside TSP, last September. I heard the bone was sticking out of his leg and everything.”

  “Mara might still make trouble.”

  “I can take care of Mara in the long run. I see the way she looks at me.”

  “What about Zena?”

  “Zena will come around once I get Mara,” said Elvis. “Are you cool?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m cool.”

  “I knew it! I took a chance on you, brother, and I won. Birds of a feather. You work your side of the street with Zena. I’ll work mine. We’ll find Gabby. I’ll meet you in the middle.”

  “Sounds good, brother. I wanna run with the winners.”

  We shook hands. Then I remembered that “smell my fingers” line of his and took it back as quickly as I could.

  “You help me,” Elvis said, “and I will make your dreams come true. If what me and Chase know and are planning works out, you’ll be set. Pablo can stay living like a loser. Stupid jerk doesn’t know a gold mine when he sees one.”

  “What’re you planning?” I asked.

  “Soon, papá,” he said. “Soon.”

  Then he looked at me and asked finally, “You think that kid Yayo killed Pablo’s mother?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  Then Wagner began blasting through the halls of the lodge. I heard scuffling outside Gabby’s studio, and then a man screaming, and more scuffling, and then silence.

  “What the hell?” I jumped out of the room into the hall.

  Zena came running down from the top floor.

  “I’ll go down,” I whispered.

  “No,” Zena said. “We’re not supposed to be here. Don’t go.”

  “It sounds like somebody’s in trouble.”

  “It might be Hari.”

  “I thought you said you had an arrangement?”

  “No need to shove it down his throat.”

  “We haven’t done anything, Zena.”

  “Do you really believe that?” she asked, looking into my eyes.

  “No.”

  A loud BANG!

  I ran past her, down the stairs to the living room on the first floor.

  Nothing.

  Dark. Silent. Empty.

  I ran into the kitchen and caught a glimpse of a door closing that looked like it went down into a lower level. I leapt for the door but it slammed shut as I just about reached the doorknob. I tried the knob. It was an automatic lock. I put my ear to the door. It was thick and apparently soundproof. I heard nothing.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I turned and saw Mara Gupta, shaking her head.

  “I’m going to have you arrested for trespassing,” she said, flipping open her cell phone.

  Zena came down, walked past her older sister Mara over to me, put her car keys in my hand, and said, “Go back to the city with Elvis, Chico.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until I see what’s down in that basement,” I said.

  “Ah-hem,” I heard from behind me.

  I turned and saw the blocks of steel called Doyle, Lieblich, and Big Man.

  As I followed Elvis out of the lodge, past a row of photographs of members, the next to last photo was a photo of Gabby Gupta, blond Kirsten, the TSP GUIDE, at some kind of picnic in Peace Corps T-shirts flanked by the mysterious S of the possibly African accent and L of the interminable “man.”

  There was a fourth person there.

  The person implied but never seen.

  The person taking the photo.

  Joey.

  NINETEEN

  Returning to Manhattan with the moon beaming in through the Mini Cooper window, Zena in my head, naked under a thin red nightie, hardly touching, frustrated, not feeling like a Superman at all, I knew that Zena knew more than she was saying and I felt like a puppet with somebody’s hand up my butt. I just had to find out whose hand it was and why.

  I casually questioned Elvis and he told me that Kirsten Smith, an old friend from Gabby Gupta’s Peace Corps days, had been Gabby’s personal assistant, and Kirsten Smith had a brother—a kid named Larry. Kirsten Smith was also in charge of locking up the TSP building.

  By the time we reached NYC, I knew that no one could be trusted, not even Zena, that the truth was being twisted, and that one more good thing was gone.

  After I dropped Elvis off on 163rd, I drove to the TSP building on 47th Street, Kirsten was alone, working on some data entry at the reception desk drinking a Coke from McDonald’s.

  There was one guard doing the rounds, she said.

  Doyle and his goons were up at Utopia Farms.

  It was closing time.

  I went to work.

  “What’r
e you doing back here?” she asked.

  “I missed you,” I said. “Being a private investigator makes you work up an appetite.”

  “Hmmm.” She smiled.

  While I leaned against the desk making with the gaga eyes, she spooned into her story, how unhappy she was without a boyfriend, how her old boyfriend was a gambler and a chain smoker and not passionate enough, how she hated her father back in Arkansas.

  “We get married young in the South. That’s why I left,” she said.

  She reminisced again about the lover she had left behind, a professor, how she loved intelligent men, artists, how she really saw herself as some kind of artist, maybe a writer, and believed she was wasting herself here at TSP as a secretary really, how she was thinking of going back to school and becoming a social worker or even going back to the Peace Corps.

  Kirsten unbuttoned the top button of her blouse. “Is it hot in here or is it me?”

  “You were in the Peace Corps?”

  She nodded. “Right before the Peace Corps,” she said, “I was living and going to school in Arkansas where I met my ex-boyfriend on a bus from San Francisco. He told me that he was a feminist and a Marxist and I became a feminist and a Marxist.”

  “Is that what you are?” I asked.

  “Not anymore.” She laughed. “I like expensive French restaurants too much.”

  I said nothing and leaned closer.

  “May I ask you a question, beautiful?”

  “Sure,” Kirsten said, breathing audibly now, standing up, and leaning into me.

  “Are you a Superman?”

  “Oh, no,” she whispered. “I’m just an ordinary member but I’m working toward it. It’s not as easy as you may think. There are steps.”

  She touched my face.

  “How many steps are there?” I said. “Are we talking Chrysler Building or Empire State?”

  “Empire State. Definitely Empire State. But it’s worth the walk. You probably have real strong legs.”

  Concentrate, Santana.

  “How do you know being a Superman is so great if you’ve never been one?”

  “Oh,” she whispered and leaned closer, almost touching my chin with her lips. “I read the literature. I listen to the stories told by members who have reached The Superman stage. The success, both financial and personal, is amazing. The program guarantees happiness, health, and wealth.”