Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  “Can’t you do something?”

  “He’s DNR.”

  Still fighting to awaken fully, she tried to pull those letters out of the alphabet soup in her memory. Then she remembered … it was what he had wanted. She had thought it was what she had wanted. “I don’t care. I’m the one who signed it. Do something!”

  The nurses, or whatever they all were, looked around at one another uncomfortably. Even as she spoke, she knew why: order or no order, there was nothing they could do. Paddles would hardly shock a heart that had withstood lightning bolts, and as for chest compressions—who was strong enough for that? One of his own people, if there were any left in the universe.

  “It’s all right,” she said, calling up the voice she’d used all those years ago to convince her editor—and convince him—that she wasn’t afraid to cover the hurricane, or get the interview with the terrorist leader. That she wasn’t afraid. “You’ve done all you—”

  Before she could finish, the heart monitor started beeping again, haltingly at first and then with a regular rhythm. Even under the fluorescent lights she could see the color returning to his cheeks.

  “I’ll call Doctor Weller,” the red-haired nurse said, then turned to her. “It could be pretty noisy around here for awhile. Would you like to sleep in the lounge?”

  She shook her head, realized with a start she was still wearing her reading glasses. “I’ll wait here,” she said, fumbling to find the other pair in her purse.

  It happened once more before the doctor came, his heart stopping and restarting itself. A motherly nurse in pink scrubs trailed Doctor Weller as he came into the room—sleepy-eyed himself—filling him in on what had happened.

  “Are the results from the stool and urine samples back yet?” Weller asked.

  “I’ll go see, Doctor,” the nurse said, and went back out into the dimly lit hallway.

  Finally, the doctor seemed to notice his patient’s visitor. “You should sleep,” he told her.

  “What’s wrong with him? Why is this happening?”

  He shrugged wearily. “We still don’t know. It could be—” The nurse reappeared at the door, handed him a clipboard; he looked it over, nodded to himself. “Well. Liver, kidneys … . It looks like, basically, his organs are shutting down.”

  “So he’s dying,” she said. She bit the tip of her tongue. “How many more times will this happen? Before he—”

  “I don’t know,” the doctor said. “The thing is, the organs—we think they’re healing themselves. I’ve been tracking what functions we can, and it looks like whatever organ fails one day has healed itself by the next one.”

  “You mean he’ll get better? Will he—”

  He shook his head. “No. He’s too far gone. He can’t heal fully, and it—it looks like he can’t fully die, either.”

  She looked down at her husband. He was resting, now, the heart monitor beeping a reassuring rhythm. Pale as he was, it was hard to believe he would never rise from this bed. Even in the darkest times, she had never really feared for him; he had always been strong, so strong. “So. There’s nothing—nothing you can do for him.”

  “No. We’ll keep him comfortable, keep monitoring him. I could still be wrong. But … ” He scratched at the side of his head. “In light of this development, I think you need to consider your own health now. Being here is a lot of stress on you, at your age … ”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll think about it. Thank you, doctor.”

  “Can I get the nurses to bring you anything?”

  “No. Thank you. Switch the light out when you go.”

  “Sure.”

  She sat for a while, in the dark, not moving: watching him, watching his chest rise and fall, listening to the monitor’s soft song. “What am I going to do with you?” she asked.

  To her surprise he stirred, his body stiffening like a still photo of a seizure. “I could see them,” he murmured.

  His eyes were closed; she couldn’t tell if he knew where he was. “Who?”

  “Like in the dream.” He had told her, a few nights before she left for the conference, about a dream he’d had: finally seeing the place he had come from, all its lost people. “They … they’re waiting for me.” His breathing quickened, then returned to its sleeping rhythm, and his muscles relaxed.

  There was no use trying to sleep. She turned the light on, tilting the shade away so he was left in darkness, and picked up her book.

  Doctor Weller was pleased when, the next day, she decided to take his advice. “No sense making yourself sick,” he had said. “Keep your cell phone on you. We’ll let you know if—if anything changes.”

  In fact it had made her sick to leave her husband there, alone, but what she needed lay outside the hospital’s walls. It would not be easy to find, but she was unworried. She had always had a nose for trouble.

  The house looked like any other in the suburban Minneapolis neighborhood: a half-bungalow with aluminum siding in a tasteful shade of gray. A haphazardly shoveled trail led through the snow to the door, and a soggy newspaper sat rolled up on the porch. Smacking her lips—chapstick, not lipstick; her days of vanity were gone, and besides, it was so dry here—she rang the doorbell, heard slippered feet shuffling within.

  She had to stop herself from laughing when she saw him. It was still the face she knew from a dozen kidnappings, a hundred hostage-takings: the owlish eyebrows, the fiercely intelligent eyes were still there—but he was wearing a crocheted cap in a rainbow of yarn. “I’m sorry,” she said, when his eyes flashed with anger. “You never seemed to care about being bald before.”

  “It’s for warmth, not vanity,” he said, scowling. “What do you want?”

  “Can I come in?”

  He stared at her for a long moment, shrugged, turned to go inside. “I had hair,” he said. “You know that stuff the yuppies use to fill in their bald spots? I invented it.”

  She closed the door behind her, tapping the toes of her boots against the floor to knock the snow off. “So what happened?”

  “Well, I used the good stuff; what the doctors can prescribe is just a taste, to hook people on the real thing. That’s where the money is. Anyway, I had the healthiest head of red hair you’ve ever seen.”

  “And then?”

  He tapped the crocheted cap. “Cancer. Chemo.”

  “I’m sorry.” She summoned an expression of concern. “How’s it going?”

  “Ehh.” He went on into the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee. “I’m alive. You want?”

  She shook her head. “No, thanks. Is that why they let you out of jail, the cancer?”

  “Nah, I’m a parolee. It was always attempted whatever, thanks to him, and they couldn’t charge me with trying to kill him without admitting the existence of you-know-what on public record.” The bald man took a sip of his coffee, frowned, put down the cup. “So, you’ve tracked me down, and it wasn’t just to catch up on old times. What do you want?”

  “You know what.”

  He tilted his head curiously. “I don’t, really.”

  She took a breath. “What you called it. You-know-what.”

  “Ah,” he said, understanding dawning on his face. “Trouble in paradise?”

  Her face felt hot. “None of your business,” she said.

  His eyebrows rose in amusement. “Too bad. You know I’m always at your service … all you have to do is ask.”

  “He’s—he’s very sick,” she said, swallowing bile. “And his body, it—he’s too strong. It won’t let him die.”

  He gave a barking laugh, which broke into a cough. “Why … even if I had some—which I don’t—why should I give it to you?” He picked up his coffee, took a long sip and swallowed. “I spent half my life trying to make him miserable. Why should I put him out of his misery now?”

  “I can pay you,” she said, her knuckles whitening as she gripped her purse strap. She took a step closer to him, made a motion toward her wallet.

  “Pay m
e? Anyway, I told you, I don’t have any.”

  She smiled inwardly. An old interviewing trick, move the conversation along the path of least resistance: not whether he would but whether he could. “I don’t believe it. You’d never go without at least one piece, just in case.”

  He shrugged, smiling broadly. “Sorry. It’s a condition of my parole: no owning any radioactive materials of any kind.”

  “Uh huh.” She took a step closer, nodded sadly, and reached for the lump in his right pocket. His hand shot out, quicker than she expected, seized her wrist; she grabbed his other arm and they froze, each unwilling to back down but neither able to risk a struggle and the fall that might follow. She locked eyes with him, felt a blast of pure hate. She fought to hold his gaze, forcing herself to remember everything he had ever done to her, to him.

  After a long moment his eyes dimmed; deflated, he looked away, released her arm and reached into his right pocket. There it was, in a nest of tissues and rubber bands: a rough crystal, about an inch around.

  “If you want this,” he said, “you have to do something for me.”

  She nodded; there would be a price, of course. There had to be. “What do you want?”

  His shoulders slumped, his body curling protectively around the glowing stone. “It should have been me,” he said. “Not just … time. When it—happens—” She felt a moment’s absurd pity for him: he had, she realized, been as bound to her husband as she was. “Tell them it was me.”

  He snuffled loudly, turned away, wiped his nose with his sleeve.

  “Tell them I won … ”

  When she returned to the hospital she was told her husband had moved to a different room, in the isolation wing; the woman at the desk couldn’t tell her why. An orderly stopped her as she got off the elevator, directed her to a room where white quarantine suits hung in a row from hooks on the wall. A sign opposite said SUIT UP BEFORE ENTERING! She looked around, went back out into the hall and to the nurse’s station.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  The nurse, a woman she hadn’t seen before, shrugged. “Which patient are you here to see?” She told the nurse, who flipped through a pile of charts. “Your husband’s in quarantine. You can visit, but you need to put on one of those suits and follow procedure.”

  “I know that,” she said, her voice raspy from the cold dry air she’d been breathing. “Why is he in quarantine?”

  “You’ll have to ask Doctor Weller.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I’ll page him for you.”

  She pretended to read a magazine for twenty minutes before the doctor arrived. “What’s the matter?” he asked the nurse.

  “Your patient’s wife is here,” the nurse said.

  “Ah. How are you?” Doctor Weller asked, stepping over to her.

  “What’s going on? Why is he isolated?”

  “It’s his immune system. We had some outbreaks on the floor he was on—we think bacteria in his system may have been mutating for a long time. Adapting to match him—they evolve so much more quickly than we do. So long as he was healthy, his immune system would have kept them from getting out into the population, but … ”

  “I thought you were going to call me if anything changed.”

  “Ah. Well.” He looked away. “Nothing has changed. My prognosis is still the same.”

  “So he’s still … ”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded to herself. “Can I see him?”

  “Sure. Just put a suit on—there’s instructions—”

  “I saw them.”

  “Okay. You might need a little help getting into the suit.”

  She had thought, when she saw them hanging on the wall, that they looked like spacesuits, but they were actually very thin. She stepped into the legs, glad to be wearing pants rather than a skirt, and Doctor Weller helped her with the arms and hood. He led her to the room; the first door led into a little antechamber, with a garbage can and a sign over it saying DISPOSE OF SUITS HERE BEFORE LEAVING. The first door closed behind her and she shouldered the next open, went into the room.

  The room was dark and nearly empty, with even the few comforts of a regular hospital room gone: no bedside table, no chairs. Just the bed where he lay, breathing shallowly, and the heart monitor. Round adhesive ghosts on his forehead showed he’d had an EEG put on and then removed. She could see why: he was twitching in his sleep, tiny seizures passing over him every few seconds. Loose restraints over his chest and legs kept him from floating more than a few inches from the bed.

  “It’s okay,” she said, stroking his forehead with gloved fingers. “I’m here.”

  Another twitch went through him, then he seemed to calm. His eyelids fluttered.

  She felt her resolve weakening. “I’m sorry I had to leave you. I won’t go again.”

  His lips, dry and cracked, opened slightly; she held her breath. “Luh … ” He spoke just over a whisper, so quiet she wondered if she had really heard him. His head pitched to the side, as though fighting a nightmare. “Let me go.”

  “I can’t,” she said, her voice breaking. “I still need you here.”

  Another tremor went through him, and his hands clawed convulsively.

  “I’m sorry … I’m sorry … ” she said. He said nothing.

  This wasn’t fair. Why should she be the one to have to do this?

  Because she could. Because she would.

  Opening her left hand, she took out the tissue she had palmed while putting on the suit, and unwrapped it. She looked quickly over her shoulder, through the windows of the two doors: no-one was paying attention, as usual. The rock in her hand felt heavier now that she could see it. She waited for one of his spasmed hands to open, fitted the rock into his palm. Its glow peered through his fingers, casting shadows across the room that quivered as the seizures took him.

  She sat with him for a long time, until he was still.

  THE BIGGEST

  JAMES PATRICK KELLY BIG, KNOWN TO HIS DEAR DEPARTED MOTHER AS FILBRICK VAN LOON, WAS STARTLED OUT OF HIS REVERIE WHEN A HEAVY IN A CHEAP GABARDINE SUIT DROPPED INTO THE SEAT IN FRONT OF HIM LIKE A PIANO FALLING OUT OF A SKYSCRAPER. IN HIS DROWSY CONFUSION, BIG THOUGHT THE TRAIN ITSELF HAD DERAILED, BUT AS HE GATHERED HIS WITS HE REALIZED THAT THE EMPIRE STATE EXPRESS WAS PULLING OUT OF UNION STATION, FINALLY HEADED SOUTH TO NEW YORK CITY.

  “Guess who I just seen?” said the heavy.

  “Can’t.” A woman’s voice oozed boredom. “Jimmy Cagney?”

  The seatback shuddered as the heavy thrashed disagreement. “What would Cagney be doing in Albany?”

  “Babe Ruth?” said his companion.

  “Nope.”

  “Rin Tin Tin? Judge Crater?”

  “The Governor.”

  “Roosevelt?”

  Big stopped feeling sorry for himself and leaned forward to eavesdrop, although the heavy had a voice they could probably hear in Buffalo.

  “How did you know it was him?”

  “Been in the newsreels, hasn’t he? Believe me, this is the guy. He could barely walk ’cause of the polio.”

  Big stood and pulled his suitcase off the overhead rack.

  “They say he got better.” The woman was still skeptical.

  “If that was better, I’d hate to see worse.”

  Big headed toward the rear of the train. He’d met the Governor a couple of months after his inauguration. Everything had seemed possible in the summer of ’29, before Black Friday had crashed the country. Now most folk were rubbing pennies together just to buy beans. Big was so broke that the whole of his sad life rattled around in a cardboard suitcase with a busted snap. But maybe this was a sign, Roosevelt being on the train. Maybe the Governor could make the sun shine again, at least on Big. It wouldn’t hurt to ask.

  The train’s last carriage was an observation car. As the door wheezed shut behind him, Big hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure where he was. He announced to no one in particular that he needed some air. W
here was the observation porch? A codger in an old-fashioned suit and a collar stiffer than Calvin Coolidge glanced up from the Albany Times-Union in annoyance. Nobody else seemed to notice him, although Big spotted his quarry in the parlor at the rear of the carriage. They sat in plush armchairs beneath tall windows that were bright with October sun. There appeared to be three in Roosevelt’s party besides the Governor: two men and a woman. The woman was in her thirties, frail, nervous, handsome maybe, but certainly no looker. She wore a checked dress to the ankles that gave away absolutely nothing. Probably the secretary. A florid man with bug eyes was listening to Roosevelt as if he were explaining the meaning of life or giving the winners from the sixth race at Saratoga. A pol. The other man was hard and square and way too alert. He had big hands and a cop’s sneer and looked like he would make trouble for anyone who asked.

  As Big picked his way toward them, balancing his suitcase and catching himself on seats against the swaying of the train, the cop rose.

  “Keep moving, pally. We’re busy here.”

  Big gave him a nod of understanding but then seemed to stumble over the suitcase. He caught himself on the cop’s shoulder and peered around.

  “Excuse me, Governor,” he said.

  The pol and the secretary looked up; Roosevelt kept talking. The cop bellied Big toward the front of the carriage. His hand clamped Big’s elbow and began to turn him away.

  “Filbrick Van Loon,” Big dropped the suitcase on the cop’s foot. “We met last summer in Utica, sir. You gave me the medal of honor.”

  Then Roosevelt noticed him. “Did I?” The cop’s grip eased and Big stepped around him and extended a hand. “Van Loon?” said Roosevelt. He wasn’t sure but accepted Big’s hand, gave it one emphatic shake and was done with it. “A fine Dutch name.”

  That’s what he’d said the first time they had met. Big remembered now how big Roosevelt’s head was, how his smile went off like a flashbulb, the way the dark pockets sagged under the eyes. “It meant a lot to me, sir. Being recognized by you, I mean. Especially because I voted for you when you ran for Vice President.” From the smirk on the secretary’s face, Big wondered if he’d overplayed his hand. “I never got the chance to tell you that.”