Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  He lay awake thinking of all the things he’d ever done wrong, the money he’d stolen, the men he’d beaten up. He thought of his mother and what she’d say if she could see him now. He wished he had a drink. Just one tumbler of Happy Regan’s phony whiskey or Micky McCabe’s poteen would’ve turned the world right side up. He should never have left the suitcase in the phone booth. The Skyguard would never have done anything that stupid. And he would never have seen the inside of a poor house, probably lived in one of those mansions facing Central Park. If only Big still had Roosevelt’s card. He imagined Missy LeHand waiting for him in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, and the more he thought about her the more glamorous and beautiful and distant she became. She would be wearing an evening dress. It would be silvery and show her shoulders. She’d be sipping champagne. A nobody like him would be crazy to chase a girl like her.

  Except she had chased him.

  He left right after breakfast because he had a lot of ground to cover. It was almost ten miles to Washington Heights. They had found him a pair of brown wingtip shoes that were almost the right size. He wore his costume under his clothes. On the way uptown, he stole a copy of the Times from a newsstand and found a Daily Mirror in the trash at a bus stop. He was disappointed to see that the Times didn’t have photographs; at least they spelled his name right on page two. He made the front page of the Mirror under a caption “Stiltman Dumps Ape.”

  It took him most of the morning to hike to the new bridge and as he climbed the ramp he discovered that half of Manhattan had turned out for the dedication. He threaded through several marching bands that were forming up into a parade on the entrance ramp. Big strode down the center lane, scanning the temporary bleachers on either side of the bridge for Missy or Roosevelt. He hadn’t worked out much of a plan besides showing up. They must have read about him in the papers; that would give him something to talk about. Maybe he could have his picture taken with the Governor, meet some of the other swells. At the least he could ask Roosevelt for another card. And Missy for another chance.

  Evergreen garlands and American flags draped the dignitaries’ podium. Roosevelt wore a formal three piece suit and a top hat. A white carnation glowed on his lapel; his smile was even brighter. Big paused and started to unbutton the stolen shirt. He was planning on getting tall before he made his final approach as The Stilt, but Missy came out of nowhere and caught his arm.

  “Button yourself right now, Mr. Van Loon.”

  “Missy, I can explain.”

  “Walk with me.” She threw all of her weight into marching him past the podium toward New Jersey.

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  She seemed not to hear.

  “Did you see I made the papers?”

  She picked up the pace.

  Finally, when they were past the bleachers and onto the central span, she stopped. “You went to see the monkey instead of me.” She was cool as a cloudy Saturday in October. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “It wasn’t that way at all.”

  “No?”

  He told her everything, more than he intended to. He told her about McCabe and picking up the monster and the smell and the missing suitcase and the stolen clothes and iron bed at the Municipal Lodging House. He said he’d spent most of the night thinking about her waiting for him.

  “I didn’t wait,” she said. “I was back in my room by 9:35.”

  “That’s good,” he said, although he knew it wasn’t. “But you asked me to come and I wanted to be there. That’s why I’m here now. I thought that maybe you and I … ”

  “There is no you and I.”

  “But you wrote on the card … ”

  “We read the papers this morning. I had to remind Franklin that we’d just met you. He has a lot on his mind. Real problems, not your foolishness.” She looked back at the podium. “He’s going to run for president, you know. I’m his secretary and his wife doesn’t live with him. There’s nothing between us romantically … ” the word seemed to stick in her throat, “ … but people talk. It helps if I’m seen in public with other men.”

  Big felt as empty as he’d ever been. He thought if he didn’t get tall soon he might blow away. “Do you think,” he said, “he might give me another card?”

  She never got the chance to answer. Big didn’t see the flash but the thunderclap made him jump. He looked up at the tower of exposed steel on the New York side and saw a figure in white bounce and land on one of the two downstream suspension cables. He could hear an ugly sizzling. The fluffy clouds above them twisted and darkened, as if stained by sin. The sky turned green. What was the kid trying to do? Land in front of Roosevelt’s podium and introduce himself? Too much steel for that. Had the kid even seen the bridge before? There was a lightning strike on the tower that seemed to skitter down the cable to the writhing figure of Billy Bolt. His helmet flew off and he caught fire. The next flash cut a suspender cable directly beneath him; it tipped over the edge of the bridge. People poured out of the stands, shouting and screaming. One last lightning bolt skewered the burning boy, knocking him off the bridge and severing one of the two main cables. Big could feel the deck of the bridge shudder.

  They were doomed unless The Stilt did something amazing.

  He climbed onto a support truss at the edge of the bridge. The river was impossibly far beneath him. He’d have to get as tall as he’d ever been.

  “What are you doing?” Missy was behind me.

  “I’ll try to jump, but if I can’t, you’ll have to push me.” It was hard to imagine the stuff with her there. “I think I can hold the bridge up.”

  “What? No.”

  “You want him to be president?” His feet burst out of the wingtips and the overalls split at the crotch.

  “No, I mean you’re already too big. How am I supposed to push you?”

  The Stilt was twenty feet tall and growing. “Get help then.”

  He concentrated on his legs. He thought if he was bottom heavy, he would sink upright to the bottom of the river.

  He never knew how he came off the bridge. Maybe he stepped off, even though his legs were stone. He fell forever, all the while losing stuff. He thought he saw the top of the Empire State Building. Were there really roller coasters all along the Palisades? Then came a giant slap as he hit the water, followed by nightmare of darkness, cold, silence and no air. The bottom was the cruelest shock of all because he believed he was already dead. Then his head broke the surface of the river.

  In a panic The Stilt got very tall, very fast. Faster than he had ever grown, taller than was possible. Still he had to raise his arms over his head to reach the bottom of the bridge.

  But he did it.

  And then he was naked in front of all of New York and New Jersey and Missy LeHand and maybe the future President of the United States but The Stilt was beyond embarrassment. The stuff filled his head, squeezing his imagination flat, turning his brain to stone.

  His last thought was that his mother had been wrong. He … was … amazing.

  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Filbrick Van Loon (1898-1931) also known as “Stiltman” was an American superhero who had the ability to grow to enormous heights. Scientists at the Carson Institute theorize that he was able to accomplish this by manipulating his molecular structure.

  Born in Utica, New York, little is known of his life before his arrival in New York City in October 1931. In one twenty-four hour period he managed to remove the body of the King Kong from where it had fallen from the Empire State Building and to attempt to hold up the George Washington Bridge after it was damaged in a freak electrical storm. Othmar Ammann, chief engineer of the bridge, has stated that its structure was never compromised, and that Van Loon’s sacrifice, while well-intentioned, was unnecessary. For undetermined reasons, Van Loon was unable to recover from his final transformation. His solidified body stands today, two hundred and forty-seven feet from the bed of the Hudson River to the bottom deck of the bridge.

  Th
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  DR. DEATH VS. THE VAMPIRE

  AARON SCHUTZ

  The Unwashed Masses The steady knocking of my head against the metal frame of the bus window woke me from a troubled sleep. Pushing back against the bulk of my seatmate, I struggled to find a more comfortable position. For a moment I didn’t know where I was, gazing blearily out at the desolate landscape. The sun hung low in the sky like the end of a smoldering brazing rod. Even through tinted glass, in the rattle of our air-conditioned box, I sensed the heat. Rolling hills of hard-packed earth and gray-green sage swept by, broken here and there by the upthrust of red sandstone cliffs. Lonely junipers hunched above the sage like hags. I had left the lush Columbia River forests behind as I slept and descended into the starkly beautiful hell of the Eastern Oregon desert.

  What a mess.

  Shifting uncomfortably again, I let my head fall back on the headrest. First class, that’s what I like—not that I can ever afford it. I can’t ever quite get used to the stink of the bus: cheap beer, greasy chips, and generic cigarettes overlaid with a spicy tang of body odor. Every bump in the road shook my queasy stomach and set aluminum seat posts chittering.

  My ears recoiled against the diesel rumble of the engine, the low mumble of conversations, and the tinny thump of deafness-inducing teenage music seeping around plastic ear buds. A woman in the seat behind me was arguing with someone on a cell phone in an acrid streak of Spanish expletives, but I controlled the urge to tell her to shut her face. At least the fat kid in the seat next to me had finally fallen asleep, snoring quietly.

  Buses are the last refuge of the lost and the downtrodden. Long-haul bus riders are the excrement on the boots of society. Army grunts on leave press in with polite migrant workers in dirty shoes and too-clean cheap shirts; single mothers with snotty griping kids annoy old ladies on a last trip to visit their dying brothers; criminals on the lam try to pick up cute college kids; all interspersed with a smattering of almost normal folks who’d waited too long to take the plane. You probably wouldn’t pay much attention. But I’m a sensitive guy, you see. This time, the fat kid cut the edge a bit, but it was still horrible.

  I stay away from drugs mostly, although an occasional toke or pink tab of Klonopin can be nice. Addiction for someone like me always lurks just ahead in the fog. In any case, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d made a clean break from trouble in Portland, and I couldn’t afford to be less than one hundred percent.

  But I was prepared, as always. Painfully, I managed to force my arm down to the battered leather valise between my legs. Rummaging around in the carefully ordered velcroed pill bottles and vials and assorted tools of my trade, I located a strip of Bonine tablets and a little bottle of ibuprofen. Dry-swallowing the pills, I took a risk, stripping the surgical gloves from my clammy hands for a while. Then I flopped back to try to get a little more sleep.

  But I had woken the fat kid. “Hey, mister,” he said loudly, making me cringe. I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to encourage him. “Wow,” he said, pressing down on me as he leaned over and looked through the window. “That’s really hot out there, huh, Mister?” Then, thankfully, he went back to his Dean Koontz book. But since he had apparently never learned to read silently, I was treated yet again to a mumbling rendition of the latest chapter with the occasional laugh or belch or liquid chomping on his apparently endless supply of red ropes. Every once in a while he’d look up to say, “This is really a good part,” or “Boy, this is good, ain’t it?”

  The trick to having a seat to yourself, usually, is to pile your stuff into the seat next to you and then pretend you are asleep. It also helps to look a little scruffy, and I’d rubbed some dirt into my face and mussed up my hair before I got on. So when the driver hissed the door closed after the final boarder, I figured I was home free. I wasn’t paying attention, eyes closed, letting the complex sensations of the other riders around me wash through my body as the kid—he couldn’t have been more than fifteen—lumbered down the aisle toward me.

  “Mister?” he had asked, “Mister, can I have that seat?” When I didn’t respond, he just picked up my valise and dropped it into my lap. “Thanks, Mister,” he said, wedging himself in, managing to thump me in the face with one of his balloon-man arms before I could do more than yelp.

  “Hey!” I complained.

  But he just came back with a friendly, “Hi, Mister.” Digging into the stained nylon knapsack now perched on his stomach, he pulled out a thick battered paperback, and waved it in front of my face.

  “D’ya like Dean Koontz, Mister?” he asked, and then yanked the book back, ignoring my angry look. “Dean Koontz is the best, I think. Do you think? This is my favorite. You see, there’s this neato dog and he can almost talk and stuff and the doctors, they did somethin’ with his head and these bad people are chasing him and this guy finds the dog and then … ” Reaching into his knapsack, he pulled out a red licorice rope. “Want some?” he asked, and dropped one into my lap. Then, without any transition, he opened the book seemingly at random and began to read, occasionally stopping to bite a piece off one of the red ropes flaring like anemone tentacles from his right hand.

  Truth was, it could have been worse. Somebody must have cleaned him up, because he didn’t smell that bad, which is surprising for a fat kid. All those folds and crannies tend to grow their own little ecologies of oily bacterial soup—believe me, I know all about it. And the kid’s Iron Maiden T-shirt had only collected a few stains, so far. There was even something oddly comforting about him. In fact, I soon realized that the kid was special.

  He was a superhero. Well, not really, of course. There isn’t any such thing as superheroes. Only almost-superheroes. That’s what he was, though. An almost-superhero. What was his special power? Contentment. He was just plain happy. I tried to probe deeper, but unlike most people, he didn’t have any layers to him. Everything was surface. With him, what you saw was what you got. Nowhere could I could find the slightest tinge of discomfort or anxiety or depression. You could have cut his foot off and it wouldn’t have bothered him that much, although he would have said “ouch.”

  His superpower was not particularly useful—most aren’t, to tell the truth. But it was the reason I didn’t move to another seat, as uncomfortable as I was.

  For me, he was like a blanket of calmness, filtering out some of the dejection of the unwashed masses around me. I even fantasized for a moment about kidnapping him and dragging him around with me like Linus’s blanket.

  Every superhero needs a moniker. At least most of the ones I know do. So I dubbed him “Teflon Boy.” Everything seemed to just slip off him without leaving any trace. Kind of like Ronald Reagan. But less dangerous.

  Termination Sleep was not an option as Teflon Boy droned on and the woman behind became increasingly hostile and loud. (How long would her battery last?) I thought about reading some more of the little book about the Oregon desert I’d bought at our last stop—key rule: always know your environment—but it just didn’t appeal. So I gave in to duty. I closed my eyes and cast my attention out through Teflon Boy’s filter into the bus. Methodically, as I had slowly learned at the Farm, I drifted from person to person, starting at the front of the bus and moving back.

  I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t have to kill anyone today.

  I am not a telepath. The closest descriptive term is probably “empath,” in that I feel the emotions of other people. But my experience is more physical than empath usually seems to imply. I don’t just feel emotions; I feel how others feel in their bodies. I feel their sensations, and through them I understand their emotions. So as I shifted from person to person I became, for a moment, those people. I felt headaches building up, tension in badly postured backs, the heaviness of the overweight, the pasty feeling of bodies fed on white bread and bologna, the taut muscles of a soldier.

  And I also delved into the pains and horrors they carried around with them as physical mani
festations of their pasts. While I couldn’t link these to specific events or memories, still they gave me a powerful sense of who a particular individual really was on the inside, beneath those layers of resistance that often prevent us from understanding ourselves. (I have those as well—I can travel others but I cannot travel myself. Thus, I understand those around me better than I can ever understand myself.) Most of the way through the bus, I didn’t encounter much that troubled me. The usual fears and pains, the wheeze of asthma, the inner rumble of diverticulitis, the straining beat of an enlarged and failing heart. And layered amongst the mundane, often ignored sufferings of life, painful articulations of lives of regret, architectures of embodied desires and lost hopes, and touches of calm acceptance and rest alongside the resentment. Sexual abuse has a common sensation, as does alcoholism, meth addiction, etc., etc. If I were a diagnostician—of the mental or the physical—I would be the best. But that isn’t my path.

  Then, about three rows behind me, I was sucked into a black hole. Even with my training, I struggled to extract myself from the event horizon of an old woman’s soul. Back in myself, I shuddered, and then reached out again more tentatively, lightly exploring the woman’s body and skirting around the areas of most intense hopelessness. But it was not history. No. This was no accretion of memories and regrets. Instead, down at the base of her skull, I felt an odd off-centered pressure: a tumor? I became certain of it. I traced its thin tentacles, probing into it. The brain’s a hard one, since there aren’t any sensory neurons in there, but somehow I can still feel something if I try hard enough. And this lady had some big uglies in there.

  I sighed. One more complication for a totally messed-up week.

  The poor old bitch clearly had to die.