The Superman Project

by A. E. Roman

  “You need a new shirt,” Mimi said, pulling at my collar. “I saw a shirt on Westchester. Black. Short sleeves. It would look nice on you.”

  “You got me a shirt last month, remember?”

  “A man cannot have too many good shirts, or shoes, or watches.”

  She glanced at my Timex.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said.

  She laughed, sniffed at me, slapped her fleshy thigh, and scolded me with her red-polished fingernail, “Are you smoking again?”

  “No.”

  Max came scampering out of the kitchen, holding Boo in her arms, wearing a long white shirt, shorts, a red towel cape, and a black tie.

  “Didn’t I tell you to stay in the cocina with that Chihuahua?” Mimi scolded. “You want to get me arrestado?”

  “Is that my tie?” I asked, pointing at Max.

  Mimi laughed. “She would not come if she could not wear it.”

  “I got a new superhero name,” Max said and held Boo up for Joey to get a better look at and vice versa. “I’m Black Cherokee and this Chihuahua is my partner, Agent Moon Willow. Wanna see my penknife?”

  “I’ll take your word for it, sweetheart,” said Joey.

  “Am I too fat to be a superhero?”

  “No, you’re the right size,” Joey said. “Perfect.”

  “I’m not a dope. I’m good at spelling, reading, writing. I have the highest reading score in my school in Detriot.”

  “What about math?” Joey said.

  Silence.

  “I’m not gonna lie to you,” Max said. “I’m not so good in math.”

  “No worries,” Joey said, tugging on her/my black tie. “There’s still time. But maybe you should concentrate on getting through elementary school?”

  “Good idea,” said Max. “Brilliant!”

  Joey laughed and held out his cheek and pointed.

  On cue, Max, on tiptoe, planted a kiss on Joey’s cheek.

  When charmers meet.

  “Hurry,” said Mimi, ushering Max back into the kitchen area, away from the wanted man known as Joseph Valentin.

  I turned to Joey and said, “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired,” he said softly and ate his food and squinted at me, as if pained by the white glare of the countertop.

  “Why did you get involved with TSP?”

  “To do good,” he said and pointed into the dark. “There are things out there that are not right, Chico. We’re too attached to material things and the need to be famous and have that as the idea of success. I didn’t make it to Tahiti, you know? I decided to go west. I met a girl on a bus in Reno. She took me home to Arkansas.”

  “Kirsten Smith?”

  Joey nodded.

  “Since when were you ever a Marxist Feminist?”

  Joey smiled like a new day. “We were kids,” he said. “We lived in an attic in her parents’ house. We were in love. I made art. We went to college. I played in a band with her brother Larry. We joined the Peace Corps together. I met Gabby and Solange. After the Peace Corps, Kirsten and I broke up and I came back to New York from Africa and got a job in an art supply store and went to classes at the School of Visual Arts where I was lost and confused and bumming around with Giovanni Vaninni until I reconnected with Gabby and Kirsten and they introduced me to Hari and Mara and Father Ravi and TSP and I found a new ambition. I decided that as a human being, as an artist, as a citizen, as an American, I had to stay involved. I needed to stop being scared and alone and make a difference. TSP made me feel empowered and unafraid. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I was trying to bring awareness to people. Now, the NYPD is trying to pin Gabby’s missing on me. They need one person to pin it on and I’m the first contestant. People can’t imagine something existing like a conspiracy. They need somebody to pin all this stuff on. That’s my role. You know how we grew up. You know the pressures. Unemployment, guns, crime, violence. You know how hard it was to keep our noses clean. I just want to find Gabby and run away to India and make my paintings and forget TSP. To just be a man. To just be alive. To take my lumps and survive and do my work. Maybe that’s enough.”

  He took off his Yankee cap and his long black hair fell down around his broad shoulders.

  “The Superman movement as I knew it has changed, Chico. Giovanni was right. It’s an experiment gone wrong. When it started, it was a revolutionary model of spirituality. The original plan was for it to become a worldwide human rights movement. It would offer the power of community and transform the lives of people suffering everywhere. It isn’t that anymore.”

  “What is it?”

  “A monster,” Joey said. “A mutation. A betrayal of what it once was and was meant to be. It is a debilitating escapist program, and a money cow for a select few at the very top called the Superklatura.”

  He ran his fingers through his long black hair.

  “I didn’t kill Gabby. I didn’t hurt her. I didn’t do anything. She ran off. You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Eat your beans,” I said.

  He ate a forkful of rice, avocado, and beans, chewed, then looked into my eyes. “Make it stop, Chico,” he said. “You can make it stop. You can make the world make sense again. It’s clearer to me tonight than it’s ever been since Gabby disappeared. You’re the one. Esther Sanchez is dead. No one trusts anybody. Not at TSP. The left doesn’t know what the right is doing. You’re the only one who can help me make the world make sense again.”

  “I’ll do my best, Joe,” I said. “When Samantha gets here we’ll get down to the precinct and get you checked in and lawyered up and we’ll start sorting everything out. I believe you, Joe. I’m gonna go hit Mara Gupta and Hari Lachan hard and low as soon as we have you settled.”

  He nodded.

  I felt bad watching him eat, head down, wide back and massive arms from lifting weights but he looked like a kid to me. He looked fourteen. He really did.

  My cell phone rang.

  “Let me take a wiz before your friend gets here,” Joey said, swallowing his last bite.

  “Cool.”

  Joey headed into the kitchen where Mimi and Max and Boo were shelling green beans.

  My cell phone rang. I picked up.

  “Hello, Yankee.”

  “Hey?” I said. “How’s Madrid?”

  “Great,” Willow said. “On the way here I got accused of stealing a melon. A group of friendly young men surrounded me and an Arab girlfriend in a nightclub and said really interesting things about our mothers, and a little Spanish boy stopped me on the street in Madrid to tell me how much he hated Americans and how much he hated black people even more. You?”

  “About the same,” I said.

  “Do you miss me?”

  I remembered our kiss. It was a nice kiss. “To be honest, Willow,” I confessed, “I think I’ve met someone.”

  “You bastard!” Willow said. “You give me false hope and then before we even start, get our groove on as Max would say, you cheat on me while my back is turned? What’s this heifer’s name?”

  “Zena.”

  “You dropped me for a warrior princess?”

  “You don’t want my drama.”

  “What makes her so deserving of your drama?”

  “She’s in trouble. Maybe.”

  “You love the damsel in distress, don’t you?”

  “It’s a living.”

  “Nicky was right.”

  “He’s one to talk. Anyway, I’m at Mimi’s with a friend. He’s a fugitive from the law.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re making all the right moves as usual.”

  “It’s a curse.”

  “The reason I’m calling,” she said. Pause. “I might not be coming back to New York.”

  “What? What about Max?”

  “I already called my sister in Detroit. She’s agreed to come and pick Max up at the end of September.”

  “The end of September? Jesus.”

  “Max loves you.”

&nbs
p; “I love me, too. That’s why I said Jesus.”

  “Is she being a pest?”

  “Nah,” I said. “She’s a doll. She’s a superhero with a sidekick now.”

  “What?”

  “Long story.”

  “I’m sending you some cash through the mail.”

  “Don’t send cash through the mail. The mailman will steal it.”

  “The mailman has no time to worry about silly things like cash; he’s too busy plotting who he’s going to kill if he can get his hands on a machine gun.”

  “True dat.”

  “I have translations to finish; I’ll call you again. Kisses.”

  “Right back at ya.” I hung up.

  Joey still wasn’t back.

  I checked my Timex.

  I waited five more minutes.

  No!

  I rushed out, behind the counter and into the bathroom at the rear of the kitchen, past Mimi and Max on short wooden stools, shelling green beans, Boo chewing on the discarded green shells and growling like they were alive and resisting and he was taking them down. I threw the bathroom door open. The small window above the toilet was open and I looked out and there was an alley and a fence and rows of Brook Avenue tenements but no Joey. On the windowsill was chipped paint and cracked wood chips and a note scribbled in red marker on a white hand towel.

  HELP ME

  Then I heard sirens and rushed outside. I ran out of the Cuchifrito, signaling for Mimi to hold on to Max. I was met by a swarm of men in bulletproof vests jumping out of three unmarked cars and a van. One of them rushed up and shoved a gun in my ribs.

  “Don’t move!” he said.

  I put my hands up, hard metal promising cessation of all toil and trouble, poking my third rib, remembering that I never did ask Joey about that comic book and said, “Don’t worry.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Same night. Parkchester. Turns out that the police had been following Pablo Sanchez, who had followed me to the Bronx, and when the cops finally figured out who the big guy was they called for backup and I almost got a bellyful of lead for my troubles. It took every string Samantha could pull to keep me out of a holding cell.

  “Thanks, Sam,” I said into my cell phone when I heard breaking glass and a high-pitched scream. “I gotta go.”

  I ran down the hall to the bedroom again and flung open the door, ready to let the kid have it. But the room was empty and the air conditioner was running and the window was broken.

  And Max was gone.

  I had fifty-two heart attacks and ran to the window.

  I saw her in the backyard, looking up at me with frightened eyes, in a pile of glass and that red towel tied around her neck. There was some blood running from a cut below her chin. I jumped out the window and picked her up.

  “I don’t feel good,” Max said.

  I ran her back inside, to her room, sat her on the bed, and ran and applied a clean towel and alcohol and a Band-Aid to her bleeding chin.

  It was just a small cut, luckily.

  “What happened?”

  Max reported that she was jumping from the dresser in her bedroom to the bed, trying to fly. She would jump, hit the bed, then go back to the dresser and repeat the jump, again and again.

  It was fun, she said, like Superman, like flying.

  Then things went terribly wrong.

  She jumped.

  She bounced.

  She bounced right out the window.

  Backward.

  Luckily we were on the first floor and she bounced out the window into the grassy area outside in the yard on her backside.

  “I almost died, Uncle Chico,” she said dramatically.

  I sat down on the edge of her bed. “Listen,” I said. “It’s okay to play, Max, playing is good, but from now on, I don’t want you opening windows and trying to fly or jumping on anything and trying to fly. No flying, this is a no-fly zone, understand?”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “No flying unless you’re on a plane or a helicopter, understand? And if you’re gonna go out a window, I’m gonna be the one throwing you out, understand?”

  She chuckled. “Yeah. Or maybe I’ll throw you out the window.”

  “I wanna see you try.”

  She came over and tried to lift me up. I stood up on my toes and said, “You’re stronger than you look.”

  She nodded. “I’m real strong. Feel my muscle.”

  I did. “Now you,” she said.

  I made a muscle. She squeezed and I pretended that she was killing me.

  “Suffer, baby, suffer!” She laughed. Then she shook her head and said, “Uncle Chico, there ain’t no God is there?”

  Long pause. What the hell do you say to that, Santana? “Depends on who you ask, honey.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I try not to think about it.”

  I put Max into bed with those Black Falcon comic books and went back out.

  When the sun came up, I was waiting impatiently for Mimi, still pacing inside the Parkchester apartment with Boo. It was past our bedtime. I needed answers. I dialed Zena. (I still had her Mini Cooper.) Nothing. I dialed Giovanni. Nothing.

  I didn’t wanna do it, but I did, I dialed Pablo. “Have you seen Giovanni?”

  “He’s in the hospital,” said Pablo. “Bellevue. He’s in a locked ward. The only way to get in is if you’re crazy or suicidal.”

  I paused.

  “What’re you thinking, Chico?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Is Giovanni crazy?”

  “Nah,” said Pablo. “He’s an artist. He goes for days and sometimes a week at a time without sleep and works and gets ideas. He calls them visions. He thinks it’ll make him a great artist. Joey was always on him to get more sleep and stop drinking and stuff. TSP even has its own rehab program. Giovanni wouldn’t listen. He’s been to Bellevue lots before, it’s like his vacation place, when he gets too worried or stressed out, he breaks down, says he feels safe there. They know ’im at Bellevue.”

  “Gotta go, Pablo.”

  “What’s up, Chico?” Pablo asked. “What’s the plan? I’ll pick you up!”

  “Look, Pablo,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss but I’m tired of humoring you. Listen. Joey probably killed his wife. Then he ran away. Your mother was murdered by Yayo for drug money and I start connecting things that aren’t connected. Jesus. I actually thought I had been poisoned the other day. It’s over, Pablo. I like you. You’re a good man with a good heart. A loyal friend. And I’m sorry about your mom and Joey. But you gotta stop following me, bro. You need help. Go see a doctor. Take care of whatever this thing is that’s got you obsessed over Joey. But don’t call me unless you wanna catch a movie or go bowling. Otherwise, this Joey case is a dead end, closed. I don’t care about that comic book or the money. You can get on with your life. It’s over, Pablo. Gotta go.”

  Did I believe that? No way. But I didn’t need Pablo mucking things up anymore.

  Sometimes luck finds you, as Nicky Brown loves to say, and sometimes you make your own luck.

  Bellevue Hospital. First Avenue and 27th Street. The blissfully air-conditioned ground floor—Psychiatric Department.

  I sat in the waiting area, a strip of floor between an intake window and a row of plastic chairs lining the wall, scanning Father Ravi’s Superman and waiting for the male nurse to get back to me about Giovanni.

  Joy called.

  I answered my cell, and I said, “You won’t believe where I am.”

  “Disneyland?”

  “Close,” I said. “Bellevue.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “You’re nuts.”

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Nicky,” said Joy. “He lost your cell number. He called here. Left a message no number to call back.”

  “Sounds like Nicky.”

  “He’s coming back to New York. He’s looking for you.”

  I thanked Joy and she cursed me and I hung up and walked to the wi
ndow as soon as the nurse came back.

  “Giovanni Vaninni is not available for visitors,” said the Filipina nurse; she looked about thirty, with glasses and black hair, perfectly protected from me behind a glass partition.

  “I have to talk to him,” I said. “I haven’t slept all night. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  The Filipina nurse arched an eyebrow and leaned over her desk to make sure that the cop and his gun were still seated at the doorway. She leaned back and said, “Are you okay, sir?”

  I checked her ring finger.

  No ring.

  I pressed a worried face close to the glass partition and said conspiratorially, “I need your help.”

  I slid my card through the slot.

  “One day,” I said. “You might need a friend. Call me.”

  She screwed up her face and said, looking me up and down with a suspicious eye, “You are a private investigator?”

  “That’s what they wrote on the card.”

  She examined me from top to bottom. “Your shoes are from hell and you need a nicer shirt, that one’s nasty and disintegrated.”

  “I’ll try harder,” I said.

  “And better pants,” she said. “Those are disgusting.”

  “I’m taking notes.”

  “It’s obvious you’re not married,” she said. “A good woman would make you shave and look neat. You are not terrible-looking but you wear bad stuff like a bum.”

  I thanked her for her fashion tips and added, “Maybe we could help each other.”

  A smile played at the corner of her lips. She casually removed her glasses.

  “Chico,” I said.

  I noted that she was wearing a rose pendant and rose earrings.

  I took a shot. “Rose?”

  “Rosie.” She smiled big.

  “Beautiful name. It fits you.”

  “Hold on.”

  I watched Rosie the nurse as she unlocked and opened the bolted ward door. I slid through the door, and Rosie locked the door behind me.

  Going into the ward, I thought that being in a psych ward must be a lot like being in prison or going on a blind date. Strangers introduce themselves by their first names and what they do—or what they did wrong that brought them there.

  I heard the creak of a metal door and a bolt slide shut and the world go away as I followed behind Nurse Rosie.