Big Superhero Action

by Raymond Embrack

  She lit another cigarette, started speaking in English.

  “You killed him tonight,” she said through the smoke.

  “Yes.”

  “You killed your father for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you are my angel,” she said. “Right?”

  Said in a way that told Simon she might kill him if he disagreed.

  “Yes.”

  She drove them home, to the large old brownstone surrounded by tall razor-sharp hedges. She took him to the master bedroom. It was his first time seeing it. The bedroom had the burned wax smell of candles mixed with cigarettes. The decor consisted of pictures of angels, Christ in some of them, but mostly angels. Illustrations of angels that had to be from past centuries, so beatifically archaic they’d have frightened the Amish.

  The dress was a glossy darkness clinging to an eclipse ending at the moon glow of her thighs. She took off the boots then the dress. Moon glow, red landing strip, one tattoo: a red hammer & sickle below the pierced navel. The thickening curves held dense bottomless skin that never exposed past her surface, like she was made from opaque moonlight.

  He looked around at the angels.

  He said, “You’ve been praying for me to come to you.”

  She said, “Yes.”

  “Here I am.”

  “How old are you?” she asked her stepson.

  “Sixteen.”

  “You have to be my man now.”

  She kept the gun to Simon’s head while he gave her oral sex.

  She kicked him until he was a wheel of pain.

  The taped-up angels watched as slowly she took him apart. Then she put him back together with some parts moved around.

  Afterwards she slept with the .38 revolver to his groin. If Simon tried to move out from under the barrel, she pressed it into his scrotum in her sleep. Simon had no idea how she could do that.

  Dr. Playground tried to feel what the boy felt, find his kink. There was no turn-on there. Even then the boy was faking it.

  29

  “The Doctor looks pissed.”

  Dr. Playground wore the exoframe full time now. He had Man Mafia One wear his full time too. He should have been contrite. Instead the henchman was making the first strike: The Doctor looks pissed.

  “I am way pissed. You had a bad last week, Vincent.”

  Shuffling three mug shots with blank stares, Man Mafia One stared blankly. He had the quality of not giving a fuck. He seemed never to give a fuck. Dr. Playground admired his work on the Man Mafia exoframe, one with a built-in disintegrator that could micro-manage Man Mafia with one click. The asshole kept shuffling mug shot faces.

  “Stop that.”

  The faces stopped shuffling.

  “Tell you how bad your week was. The Siren Syndicate is back and signed with AXIS. Two of you dead in one day: Number Four and Number Nine. One dead gumare, Tori Lynn Electra. Apple Gotti found nude with a bullet in her head. The Customizers down in flames faster than the Twin Towers. AXIS had a strong week. We had a weak one.”

  “No denial.”

  “You’re down to few clones.”

  “We’re good.”

  “Your mafia got decimated.”

  “We’re good. As long as there’s one guy.”

  “What’s your cloning limit?”

  “Never found out. There may not be one.”

  He turned to Xoir. She had no answer.

  He turned back. “Give me a number, Vincent.”

  “My max was thirty.”

  “But you’re stingy with it.”

  “Fewer is a better guy,” Man Mafia said. “You want a better guy. Nine and Twelve are not as choice as Six and Seven. I could fill a bus with guys but they wouldn’t be choice guys. Guys like that don’t last long or they’re mostly good for doing time. Don’t forget my name uses the word man in the singular. I am a one-man organization.”

  “Mine isn’t.”

  “Understood.”

  “Know who your leader is.”

  “Understood.”

  “Say it.”

  “Dr. Playground is my leader.”

  “You had a shitty week, Vincent.”

  “I had a shitty week.”

  “Know what I say to that?”

  “What do you say to that?”

  “I say fuck it. AXIS is sucking its own dick tonight. Let them.”

  Dr. Playground turned to the floating screen. He gazed at the boy’s face. He wondered if he had had so innocent and androgynous a face at the boy’s age. He could hear the music of pedophile attraction even if it rang with a hollowness. Was he tone deaf to it?

  As Man Mafia had emotional coldness for his equalizer, Dr. Playground had his own, turning it up, slide-showed YouTube shots of the skinny boy cross-dressing topless wearing only a tiny white skirt, until MM made a face. That said fuck you, Man Mafia. He changed photos to a different boy, said, “Brief him.”

  Xoir briefed Man Mafia: “Kieran Aspen. Former Chase Juniper schoolmate. Sexual relationship. Relocated to Quebec. His parents have kept him from making contact. No phone, no texting. For his part, the boy goes along with the ban. We texted him as Chase. Contact made.”

  Man Mafia: “So you gotta be queer to get the key?”

  Dr. Playground said, “Who do I have to suck to get out of this town?”

  He turned to the light globe marked with translucent yellow-orange arrowed lines.

  “The Unidentified Flying Behemoth flies outside the Limit, follows the sun as it crosses the globe.”

  With one forefinger he drew a vertical ellipse. With the other he drew an intersecting ellipse.

  “What is the common denominator of the two?”

  For thirty seconds he played with the air parabolas. “The Customizers…that’s on hiatus. Chase Juniper is what we’re doing now. We go to Quebec, we watch Kieran Aspen. We monitor communications. When Chase shows up we take him.”

  30

  It felt infinite. It was a drug. UFB streaked after the sun with infinite power.

  You soared for miles off one burst of energy.

  You landed in ocean and kept going, hit the ocean floor, arched your back, propelled yourself all the way to surface, broke surface, kept going for miles more.

  The fourth time around Earth he started getting it.

  Slip outside the source you had to walk.

  The source had specific locations.

  Parts of China.

  Parts of Greenland.

  Parts of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Parts of North America.

  One part of North America was the core. The power radiated from there.

  The sun watched.

  He was following the sun along Earth’s orbit.

  He was traveling along alien graffiti.

  The graffiti was alive.

  The graffiti was not alive.

  They had a language that lived life spans.

  They had a language in which each word used ceased to exist.

  They had words that could only be used once.

  They had words that were never used no matter how many times they were used.

  They became the other spoken to.

  They became the opposite of the other spoken to.

  He destroyed everything in his path.

  He built everything in his path.

  He was translating the sun.

  He translated stars.

  Planets are the dominant life form in this solar system.

  Cities are the dominant life form on this planet.

  31

  Man Mafia had a long bloody origin story.

  The Palm Springs, California area had a high concentration of Indian gambling. Tribes in the Palm Springs area included the Morongo Band of Mission Indians and the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians. Another Palm Springs area tribe, the Penado-Yanez Band of Ontiveros Indians, was awarded a $15 million judgment against the federal government. With help from legislation introduced by Representative Son
ny Bono, the tribe purchased non-Indian replacement land where they constructed a gambling casino near Rancho Mirage, an exclusive, upscale community 10 miles east of Palm Springs whose residents once included former President Gerald Ford.

  The Penado-Yanez Band of Ontiveros Indians existed mostly on a computer, naming the chief a man of ambiguous ethnicity named Floyd Gama. Floyd Gama had spent thirty years being ambiguous, forging backgrounds and identities. Some of them were underwater; Hurricane Katrina had made him at least 90K. 9/11 was a gold mine that still turned up the color, so far at two million. Floyd Gama had been at it so long, he had identities that were lost in the system, one of them doing ten years in Folsom.

  Floyd Gama groomed his son Floyd Jr. to assume the chiefdom of the tribe. Floyd Jr. had been halfway to an MBA when he was sidetracked by the porn industry. He switched to a film major. Then dropped out. He started an adult film production company. He began to style himself as some kind of hip-hop gangsta porn king, now went by “Floyd G” He surrounded himself with thugs. He bought a strip club in L.A.

  Floyd Gama blamed too many gangster movies, too many rap videos, wanted him in a suit helping run the casino. Floyd G said Larry Flynt did both the skin and the casino business. This was synergy. Floyd Gama went along, put millions into Floyd G’s adult empire. Floyd G convinced his father that this was the way to diversify.

  Vincent Gama had spent 20 years inside taking the rap for a murder his brother Floyd had committed, the whole time Floyd promising him to make good on his blood loyalty. Then his brother Floyd got rich in Palm Springs as a fake Indian.

  The Gama brothers had the same Lebanese face that could fake Indian. Vincent was younger but looked older, had snow-white hair oiled heavily and combed back.

  More than once Floyd said: “I don’t see how you did what you did for me.”

  Vincent Gama answered, “Blood.”

  “Even for blood.”

  “Fuck it. I did the time, you made the money. If you did the time, we wouldn’t have made the money.”

  “True.”

  “So here we are.”

  The real reason Vincent Gama had been willing to take a 20- year rap for his brother was his own private realization that he was better off in prison for much of his adult life. He was possessed by a 4000 year old spirit named Ra. Ra told him to murder prostitutes. Ra wanted blood sacrifice requiring him to saw off their heads, drink their blood and bathe in their blood.

  The drive was uncontrollable. In the 1970s, the serial killer was hot and he was the hottest. In the Bicentennial L.A. summer of ‘76, he was knocking off a hooker every three weeks. The dragnet was out for him. The fear twisted his guts day and night, the paranoia made him insane. By the time he was up to ten dead, he knew he was one hooker away from the gas chamber. Then in 1980 Floyd offered him the deal to take the rap for the murders of two of Floyd’s rivals. Even doing 20 years, he was still ahead. It wasn’t that big a change anyway: first his father had ruled him, then Floyd, then Ra, now it was The System. In prison Ra went away. The need for blood subsided and he cooled to a homicidal numbness. There was peace.

  The discovery of the next ultimate realization of his life came just two years into his sentence. Two years of zero Ra. Then he started having dreams of being back in L.A. In those dreams, he again felt the stirring of Ra. Vincent Gama realized that it wasn’t prison that made Ra go away. It was not being in L.A. Ra only possessed him when he was in L.A. It was the fucking city itself. He was in prison for nothing. He could’ve just fucking left town instead. He’d be a free man today and Floyd would be the one doing time. And now he had the next eighteen years to live with that fact.

  Getting out of prison after 20 years was like having a surgeon finally remove the anus from his forehead so he could go back to shitting from his ass. Now his brother was a fake Indian and he summoned Vincent. Lunch, he said, but there was a job behind it.

  Floyd said, “I found Little Floyd ENRON-ing the tribe through systematic accounting fraud for about two million.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah. That little prick. He diversified me out of two million.”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “What else am I gonna do? I’m not going to prison. Do you want to go back to prison?”

  “No.”

  “What else am I gonna do?”

  “You do what you gotta do.”

  Floyd had the will to drop the hammer on his own son. Business was business. Floyd would have his brother hit too if it ever came to that. Vincent Gama respected that. He could never drop the hammer on Floyd only because it would have made his stretch go to waste. He would’ve taken a nuclear warhead for Floyd rather than let those twenty years go to waste.

  He drove up to L.A. Twenty years later, it looked like even more like being in the joint with Mexicans everywhere, nothing but fucking cholos, even the chicks covered with tattoos. But Ra was still there tingling in the homicidal part of his brain stem.

  In a black track suit he walked into Floyd G’s strip club on La Cienega.

  Floyd G said, “Yo, Uncle G? Wzzzup, Tonto?”

  Uncle G’s hands raised twin .45s, blasted Floyd G in the face. The guns sounded like thunder, the thunder blowing away the bouncers like blood-spattered leaves. Then three strippers. The last was an escaping customer halfway through the door.

  That night he fled east on Brutalia Air.

  There he found his city.

  The city vibrated up his feet. It flickered with a billion myths, cave drawings and magic. He stopped to hear the voices. They weren’t the same voices. It wasn’t his brain doing it outside his brain, it was from way outside his brain. It was like the city was in his head. The inexpressible vibrated under the city. But a man still had to eat.

  In Brutalia the OSD and AXIS ran the town. He got meetings with OSD people, worked his up to Xoir, then to the man at the top, the leader, Dr. Playground. They interviewed him, quizzed him, tested him. He was accepted for recruitment. He joined the OSD.

  One night he had dreams of himself as a Kinner & Membert lab monkey put inside a test tunnel. They exposed him to flashing green rays that transformed him into a self-cloning freak.

  The next day he woke up in a lab.

  He was thirty years younger.

  He could change his face.

  He could clone himself.

  He got it. Reality had ceased to be real. But it was working for him.

  For the first year he only had sex with his clones. It didn’t seem homosexual. If there was such a thing as good homosexuality, this was it.

  He only left Brutalia again to fly to Palm Springs to shoot Floyd Gama dead then collect his ashes. That began the collection that made him a walking cemetery.

  This time he left Brutalia to fly to Quebec. The superpowers stayed in Brutalia. They flew aboard an OSD Gulfstream 6, him and Dr. Playground. Outside Brutalia, Vincent Gama was a white-haired old fuck again. Outside the Limit, Dr. Playground was Simon Stranko, an ordinary looking middle-aged guy in a dark suit. He wore glasses. His hair was thinning from a high forehead. He stayed on top of his laptop taking in the data Xoir sent from the OSD satellite hacking stream. The stream could only be worked inside the Brutalia Limit but you could send, transmit, text it outside using the non-super technology that worked outside the Limit. But outside The Limit, without exoframes, they were just two guys subject to real world rules, capable of being outnumbered or outgunned.

  At one point Stranko looked at him.

  He said, “I always wanted to find a way to use the mafia motif.”

  “I like gangster movies. I’m a Godfather fan. First saw it in a movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard in 1972. I saw it then got a hooker on Sunset. I went to movies more back then. I’d go to a movie late then get a hooker afterward.”

  “You’re really old, aren’t you?”

  “Old as fuck.”

  “Even now we don’t know that much about the real you.”

  “I change details.
That’s not something that’s new for me. I’m from a family of people who change details. So I change details. The way I see it, it’s like Whitey Bulger hiding in Santa Monica, California, there’s a time to not-be the same guy. Even if I still was the same guy there’s no point in being the same guy now.”

  “Is that what you are, in hiding?”

  “I’ve been in hiding since reform school.”

  “Your history is longer than I know, is that it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So is mine.”

  “Longer than I know?”

  “Longer than I know.”

  “Okay. Your history.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay.”

  Silence.

  “How does the cloning thing work again?”

  “KM was working on a science for soldiers to clone themselves on the war front. Like everything else, the science never made it to the military. We tested it on you. You’re the first person the test didn’t kill.”

  “So that’s when I became Man Mafia.”

  “When you survived I said ‘That’s our Hitler.’”

  “It wasn’t my decades of experience.”

  “No.”

  “Been thinking, Simon.”

  “You’re calling me ‘Simon’ and you’ve been thinking. Should I be nervous?”

  “Not at all, Simon. I’ve been thinking. Want to know what?”

  “Tell me, Vincent.”

  “Been wondering if you ever killed someone without an exoframe.”

  “Are you saying I don’t look dangerous?”

  “To be honest…you don’t.”

  Stranko said, “Tell you what you’re thinking.”

  “I just told you.”

  “I’ll tell you your next thought then.”

  “Fucking tell me my next fucking thought, Simon.”

  “You’re thinking outside The Limit we’re just two guys. And if we’re just two guys it would be possible to take me out. And you’re thinking how and where and when to do it.”

  The two men held the same stare for seconds, a look that bypassed guile. They were just two guys on a plane.

  Gama said, “Maybe I am thinking that a little. But what would that get me? Everything I need is inside The Limit.”