“Blow out the candles!” somebody shouts, and I realize the room has gone silent. I lean in and blow, and the forty flames flicker out, then they reignite, and everyone laughs.
“What the ...?” the waiter says, and Clyde turns to my wife, who is both a level-two telekinetic and a fire-starter. Our fearless leader assumes his principal voice. “Deborah.”
The candles stay extinguished after my second attempt, and people crowd around, pat my back, and rattle off wisecracks. “How’s it feel to officially be old?” asks the Jersey Devil, one of Clyde’s prized Deputies. With thin, dark-skinned fingers, J.D. pinches at his satanic goatee and grins. The Devil, who used to run with a team of ethnically diverse heroes called the Spectrum. Among his powers is the rather nasty ability to cause others to experience waking nightmares. Part of me thinks I’m in one of his hallucinations now.
“Ain’t it past your bedtime?” asks Robert “Bigfoot” Pembroke III, cracking a smile at J.D.’s side. Though he’s a rich kid from Oregon, he insists on going by Bubba, part of his country-hick shtick. At will, he can make his body grow, and his strength increases proportionally, so at fifty feet he can yank a pine tree up by its roots. Unfortunately, as his muscle mass increases, his intellect declines. He elbows J.D. and says something about my eligibility for Medicaid.
While the thin waiter starts passing out pieces of cake, Debbie leads me by the elbow, away from the others. She hugs me again and says, “Clyde swore me to secrecy.”
“This party was his idea?”
She nods. “I think he’s trying to patch things up.”
He and I had another throwdown a few weeks back after an unauthorized action I took in Biloxi. There was a hurricane, and people were in danger. I wasn’t about to wait for a governor’s signature on an Interstate Intervention Form. I say to Debbie, “Did you see Magus is here? I haven’t seen him in five years.” Her hand slides along my bicep, and I pause.
She says, “This isn’t a big deal. And I don’t want to spoil your party. But we promised each other ...”
I turn to my wife and block her from the others. “Go ahead,” I say. “I’m eager to hear what you have to tell me.” This is the exact line Dr. Janet told me to use. My wife and I rehearsed this very scene in our therapist’s office to enhance our flawed communication style.
“Maybe I’m still a little raw from our fight before, but when I heard you ask where Nate was, I felt like you were questioning me as a mother. In front of all these people.”
“That’s crazy,” I snap. “I just was curious, and it came out. Can’t I even ask where my own son—”
My wife’s softening eyes tell me I am failing her, invalidating her essential emotional response, and I stop to recall Dr. Janet’s script. I breathe in and out and practice my active listening. “I’m glad you’re telling me this. I understand how you feel. I don’t want you to feel bad. I am sorry. I cherish you and love you.” Some of these statements have the added attraction of actually being true.
“Thanks,” she says. She steps into me and presses her cheek into my chest, and her arms wrap around me and squeeze. My wife feels good in my arms. This is the kind of hug that once suggested a preamble to lovemaking. It’s been five months since the night of white wine and tears, the last time we made a real attempt. The hairs on my arm begin to tingle as the air around us heats up. The two of us, still embracing, lift off the ground just an inch or so. My young wife’s abilities are sometimes triggered by strong emotional states. “Deb,” I whisper. When she opens her eyes, we come back to earth, and the air around us cools.
She lets go of me and wrings her hands together. “I should go call Ecklar. I don’t want Nate staying up late watching westerns.”
“Right,” I say. Last week, Deb reprimanded me for letting Nate sit through half of Guardians United II, an old R-rated film version of the original team’s battle with a race of rock people.
My wife is flustered now, perhaps by the emotions she’s feeling, perhaps by their effect on her powers, but she scoots around the corner and is gone. The moment Deb disappears, Vivian zips to my side. As the Scarlet Speedstress, she’s been clocked at over one hundred miles an hour. She runs one hand through my hair and another along my hip. “How about a kiss from the birthday boy?”
“Don’t,” I say. Her breath smells of gin. When she snakes her hand around to my ass, I step back. “Enough.” We’re off to the side of the party but in plain view of anyone who wants to look.
The Scarlet Speedstress’s eyes flicker, and I know she’s remembering our encounter at a conference a few months back. We were riding the elevator up to our adjoining rooms. She was loopy on margaritas, and I was feeling pretty loose thanks to a double dose of the Xonopexal Dr. Hippocrates prescribed after my back surgery. She was unsteady on her feet, leaning into the faux-wood grain paneling of the elevator wall, one hand on the rail, one touching the ruby pendant just above her ample cleavage. Maybe Vivian noticed where my eyes had wandered and let herself slump into me. And yes, I put an arm around her slim hips, and yes, her red lips looked beautiful, and yes, I smiled when our eyes came together. But five seconds later, after she’d hit the emergency stop and stripped off all her clothes and mine too, I looked away from her naked body and said, “Get dressed. This isn’t going to happen.”
She reached an open hand for that part of me, and I’m only a man, so the natural thing happened. She said something about her hyper-metabolism and the depth of her needs. “C’mon,” she whispered as she pressed up against me. “Say the word, and I guarantee you the best seven seconds of your life.”
I pushed her away and reached for the pile of my clothes. “The word is no,” I said. When I stepped off, she stayed on the elevator, I guess to go back to the bar and tend to her hyper-metabolism. But when I got to my room, I checked our adjoining door and found it unlocked. To my shame, I left it that way.
In the party room at Chili’s, Clyde appears behind Vivian. “No fair hogging the guest of honor,” he says. Lowering his voice, he says, “And Viv, lay off the booze. I need you sharp for the morning.” Clyde has scheduled some kind of major war game for 9 a.m. “Most importantly,” he says, “no powers in public, OK?” She rolls her eyes and walks away, deliberately dragging her feet in slow motion. She heads for Ice Queen, who is watching all this while sipping on a frozen daiquiri.
Clyde offers me a piece of cake and a mug of beer, something else that surprises me. He discourages any drinking, let alone while on duty. I accept both suspiciously, and he leads me to a long table, where my place of honor is waiting.
The party gathers its own momentum, fueled by alcohol and strained camaraderie. A couple of the old-timers, Vanguard 7 and Silver Centurion (whose name now seems to apply to his hair, not the armor he once wore), start trading stories about the Glory Days—the atomic shark-beast that crawled up on the Jersey Shore, the time the Guardians were tricked into fighting the American Champions. The younger generation feigns interest and pretends to show some respect, laughing when appropriate, showing genuine envy at the kind of real threats we once faced. The Deputies are taking their cues from Clyde, sucking up like they always do, and something about all this feels wrong. In the pauses between stories, I feel the weight of memory’s balance. Nostalgia, in its essence, is a pleasant way to deal with the fact that the present sucks.
I glance over to see what my wife thinks of these stories of the days when I was young and strong. At the end of the table, she’s chatting with Bubba, who had his thumbs hitched inside the straps of his denim overalls. The way he’s eyeing up my wife, I’m thinking of challenging him to an arm wrestling contest.
The last time Debbie and I tried to make love, things fell apart when I paused and reached for the nightstand drawer. As I fumbled with the condom, her fingers found my hand in the darkness, and she said, “We don’t need that, do we?”
The walls of this restaurant are decorated with memorabilia—reproduced movie posters, retouched black-and-white photos, a w
agon wheel—the kind of stuff you’d shove in your garage if you had one. Somehow putting this crap on the wall makes it art, and no one minds it’s all fake. It’s supposed to be old but shines bright with its newness. The older something gets, the less it shines. This is a thing I’m learning.
The Pixie Princess, whose tightened forehead suggests a recent round of Botox, eases through the crowd pushing a high-tech wheelchair holding Boss Thunder. Not long after retiring, Thunder had some kind of seizure on the thirteenth green at Augusta. Pixie, nearly three decades his junior, quit the Fairy Force to “help tend to his needs.” Rumors about her interests in his fortunes abound. Ecklar and Brainbuster helped design the chair, which has a computer equipped with a voice synthesizer. Pixie guides the chair alongside me and leans in. “Ned’s had a great time, but we have to be heading home. All the excitement, it’s a little too much for him.”
She pats his sweatered shoulder. His eyes show no recognition, no awareness he’s at a party. His right hand, strapped to a touchpad on the wheelchair’s arm, twitches as he scrolls through letters. From a speaker mounted on the headrest comes a voice I can only think of as robotic. “Fight the good fight!”
Everyone at the table falls silent out of respect, and a few folks lift their glasses. Thunder taps his pad, and the refrain repeats. “Fight the good fight!” Once, this man could clap his hands and reduce buildings to dust. He’s nodding now, spastically, and Pixie wipes a bit of drool from the corner of his mouth. He jerks his head away and slaps the pad with his hand. “Fight the good fight!”
Somewhere inside this shell, his soul is intact. This strikes me as marvelous and bitterly sad. Pixie wheels him away, almost against his will. And I wonder what the second half of my life will bring.
On Earth 1.3, I died at twenty-five in battle with Maelstrom. Apparently, his Apocalypse Machine was parked over Kingdom Town, destabilizing molecules and threatening the very fabric of reality. That Vincent Shepherd flew into the radiation storm, and even as it shredded his skin, he flew on, making his body a living missile driven into the heart of Maelstrom’s reactor. In that reality’s Center Circle, a grateful city erected a marble statue of me with my hands on my hips. Carved in the base were the words “Gone but Undefeated.”
At the party, rumors spread about the trouble in Washington Park. Some say it’s a turf war between rival drug gangs. Others speculate it could be a troop of homegrown terrorists, ready to wave the flag and strike down immigrant invasion. All matters the cops can deal with, unfortunately. Debbie starts working the crowd, chatting here and there with everybody, it seems. Now and then she moves behind me, and her fingertips drift across the back of my neck, something that feels so good it gives me chills. I just stay in my chair, nodding at the small talk around me. Every now and then I check out that wall Billy walked through, just to be sure he hasn’t returned.
At one point, when there are no civilians present, Clyde stands and clanks on his glass. He offers a toast I can tell someone wrote for him—probably Ecklar, who’s got a way with words despite his ESL. In the middle of the toast, with his glass raised, he says, “Vincent has fought the forces of evil for two decades, and his career will be remembered as one of the most impressive, certainly the longest. Everybody here knows we’re sitting with a future Hall of Famer.” The Deputies clap with unexpected enthusiasm, but they keep their eyes on Clyde, like they’re applauding his speech more than my accomplishments. Standing behind me, Debbie rubs my shoulders, leans over and pecks my cheek. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps she’ll want to try again tonight.
With dramatic flair, Clyde pulls an envelope from his back pocket and starts reading a telegram from Arthur—“Good to be reminded I’m not the only old hero. If you think forty’s rough, try fifty! Sorry I couldn’t make it, but evil never sleeps.” Titan’s famous tagline draws great applause. Even these heroes are impressed that the most popular superhuman of the previous generation would spend his valuable time composing a message for me, a guy who started off as his teen sidekick. Once upon a time, Titan was the one we all wanted to be. But unlike most of the folks in the room, I actually had the chance.
Bigfoot pulls a karaoke machine out from under a table, and things start getting messy. He and the Jersey Devil end up arguing about the opening lyrics of “Ebony and Ivory,” and when they finally get going, their attempts at harmonizing are painful. For an encore, they shift to “Walk This Way,” and Ice Queen and Scarlett Speedstress start close dancing. Vivian slides a hand down Rose’s back, stops just short of her ass, and of course catches me watching. Debbie finally sits next to me but gets pulled into a conversation with Typhoon Man about the new rules of engagement being drafted by the union. Along with being second-in-command of the Guardians, Deb’s our local rep. Not wanting to get dragged down into politics, I excuse myself and head for the john. The beer tasted good going down, and sure, it took some of the edge off that spike in my head, but now I’ve got some low-grade heartburn kicking in. I can’t even get drunk anymore.
Halfway to the bathroom, I see Magus sitting alone in his booth, elbows planted on the table, palms facing each other. A single sugar packet floats in the air between them. He’s wearing his top hat and tux, though it hangs loose on his aging frame.
When he sees me coming, the packet drops and he starts to rise. I hold up a hand to stop him and stand tableside, like a waiter. He smiles up at me, a knowing look, and says, “So good to see you, Vincent. You look well.”
“I’m getting by,” I say. “How are you?”
He shrugs and smiles. “I’m blessed.”
Magus found Jesus during a fifteen-year stint upstate. From behind bars, he reached out to me, wrote a letter asking my forgiveness and seeing if I could contribute something to a charity auction benefiting inmate literacy. Long before I became a hero, Magus was a small-time illusionist hood with a few above-average sleight-of-hand tricks. Midway through his career, on a museum heist in London, he stumbled across a wand rumored to be Merlin’s. Oddly enough, this magical talisman capable of warping reality looks like any old stick. These days, we’ve got it under lock and key inside the HALO’s Vault, gathering dust with a ton of other nefarious accessories. But decades ago, when Magus began wielding it, his powers and aspirations grew. In my earliest days behind the mask, before the formation of the Guardians, Titan and I foiled his zany plot to blackmail the city by turning the mayor and the chief of police into toads. Once he cast a spell that made everyone speak in rhyming couplets. His crimes seemed more charming than evil. Though always a criminal, he never struck me as a bad guy. I slip in across from him. “Keeping out of trouble?” I ask.
“I’m doing a lot of charity these days.” He pauses to pick something out of his teeth, which I’m pretty sure are dentures. “Hospitals. Shelters. The churches that don’t take issue working with someone with a checkered past. It’s important to feel useful.”
I try to think of something encouraging. “You’re lucky to be doing the Lord’s work,” I come up with.
“Everyone is doing the Lord’s work, Vincent. Some people just aren’t aware of it. You know, I could use you anytime. You’d be a big draw. Maybe we could raffle off a flight around town with you or something.”
My eyes roll to my wife, who is resting one hand on Typhoon Man’s forearm. She’s making a point, of course, and I know the physical contact doesn’t mean anything. I’m just thinking of our courtship, how once she loved our nighttime flights. “I’d be happy to help,” I tell Magus.
Magus rolls his wrist, and a business card appears in his gnarled fingers. He hands it to me. Magus: Christian Magician, it reads. A Sinner Reformed. At the bottom are his phone number and his real name, Martin van Alkemade. I tuck the card in the flannel shirt’s pocket. Martin sips at his black coffee, holds the cup with two hands. On the table is a plate with crumbs from my birthday cake. In the room’s far corner, Bubba begins to belt out “Ring of Fire.” I see Clyde staring our way, suspiciously. I say, “I can’t beli
eve All-Star had the class to invite you. Must’ve been Debbie’s doing.”
Martin’s fingertips rest on the rim of the cup. “Oh, I wasn’t invited.”
“You crashed my surprise birthday party?”
He nods. “In a manner of speaking.” He waves one hand over his open hat, then reaches inside. He pulls out a bottle of beer and offers it to me. When I shake it off, he shrugs and sets it on the table anyway.
“So what are you doing here?”
“I’m not altogether sure,” he says. “Most nights, when everyone is settled and asleep at the center, I go for strolls, just to stretch my old legs. I’ll end up on the subway or in a taxi, then I walk again, just following the Lord’s voice. Usually when I stop walking, I find somebody who needs help.”
“World’s full of lost souls,” I say. I scan the room. “So who’s in crisis tonight?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I kind of thought it might be you.”
I shake my head. “Sorry,” I tell him. “My life’s pretty peachy.”
Magus seems disappointed, slightly embarrassed, and worried that I don’t believe him. Mostly to fill the silence, he asks, “How’s the little one?”
Thinking of Nate brings up an image from last week: 3 a.m., me on the couch, him standing before me sleepy-eyed, asking, Why did you call Mom ridiculous? I smile at Magus and say, “Nate’s the best. The other day he asked me if I knew the difference between inertia and friction.”
“Quite a curiosity for a five-year-old.”
Nate’s just four and a half, but I don’t correct him. Thanks to Ecklar, he’s reading at a third-grade level.
“What about Thomas?”
The Midlife Crisis of Commander Invincible: A Novel (Yellow Shoe Fiction) Page 3
