Homo Superiors

by L. A. Fields

  But his oddest study, his secret study, was the one he had taken up on the subject of Raymond Klein. He’d found Ray a curiosity since that Halloween when the boy charmed his mother, but Ray’s behavior during this happy, hopeful summer was captivating. First of all, Noah wasn’t so drunk the night of his birthday that he didn’t remember that hooligan habit of Ray’s the next day, how he worked at trying to smash into cars like some slum kid. Moreover, Noah knew the majority of everything Ray said was a lie (not out of disrespect, but out of a distasteful habit) . . . except for his tall tales of crime. They were still fictions—Noah never believed Ray had ever mugged or assaulted anyone (not yet anyway), and besides: whose birding gun had he used to fire a hole through an old jacket so he could tell idiotic people he’d been shot at by thugs? Who could get swept up in a play when they’d helped build the set and seen the rehearsal? No, Noah knew none of that talk was true, but . . .

  Noah had seen that Ray could pretend to be enchanting, that’s what made Faye like him so much, that any young man would bother to impress her when she was slumped and frumpy at home. But Ray’s eyes became glassy doll eyes for that act; it wasn’t his true sentiment. However, when Ray told lies about crime, his eyes ignited—that glassy sheen became molten and he stopped using body language to communicate and started gesticulating with his hands. They blossomed into explosions of action, they pointed as guns, they shaped around his face to describe the emotions he never felt, but imagined intensely.

  No, the desire Ray had for those particular fantasies was not a lie, and his occasionless ‘gift’ to Faye confirmed it.

  Noah had been taking a break to mull his latest section of Nietzsche anyway, so he’d started investigating Ray’s behavior in psychology texts: compulsive lying, surface charm coupled with good looks, criminal tendencies . . . if Ray were more interested in sex he’d be a new Ted Bundy, but any time Ray slung lies about sex, he was cold, external, outside of his body in the way he talked about motions instead of emotions. He certainly found theft much more arousing than girls, and besides that: Noah always recognized another virgin when they tried to fib about sex. The initiated always admitted to awkwardness, uncomfortable fits, ripe smells, bad timing . . . apparently the sex left them prouder than all of that indignity; virgins never had anything embarrassing to say—their humiliation was already too great to compound.

  The habitual lying led Noah into all sorts of mental subgenres, to addicts, narcissists, Munchausen hosts, schizophrenics . . . all of it too severe to apply to Ray. Ray lied for a simple reason: because he’d been brought up by a strict, know-it-all nanny. And, just when he was about to outgrow her, he made a strict, know-it-all friend in Noah. He was a bit of a self-saboteur, but he lied like a future politician or lawyer, no worse than that. Noah was even envious sometimes—Ray could be a jury lawyer if he wanted to be, Noah never even considered it. He lacked the raw talent it takes to lie to most people so convincingly.

  “That’s new,” he said of his mother’s deep-chained locket when he noticed it after Ray left the house that day. Faye had left it on all afternoon over her body-dampened pajama top, probably to feel a little smartened up and pretty.

  “Ray gave me this, isn’t that sweet? He said he saw this and thought of me, but look at the birds,” she said, holding the locket out towards Noah but not removing it from her neck. “He obviously thought of you when he saw it, but you’re too dour to wear jewelry.” She was joking. She was happy.

  Noah smiled at her, but it wasn’t a real smile. He was a touch jealous, but also suspicious of more lies. Was that something of Ray’s mother’s? His grandmother’s? Some stuffy aunt’s who liked Victorian-looking knickknacks?

  “Look, the clock runs and everything,” Faye said, snapping the cover open and showing Noah a very new and modern little watch. So it wasn’t an heirloom or overly valuable; would anyone in his wealthy family keep something so common, fake, and cheap in their house? Was this some junk re-gift that Ray appropriated because birds always brought the name Kaplan to his mind these days?

  Noah told Faye that the necklace highlighted her elegance, then he brooded until he next saw Ray, wondering just what the introduction of a clock locket was all about.

  “Did you steal a necklace from your mom and give it to mine?” he asked Ray bluntly the very next time his friend waltzed unannounced into Noah’s room.

  “No, I stole it from a fake boutique in the hipster part of town,” and that brought Noah back from the brink of suspicion—it was Ray’s urge for crime again, and he was developing. Noah had the scientist’s sweetest opportunity: to watch a specimen evolve.

  “Really?” Noah asked, channeling all the psychiatrist characters he had seen in movies, probably badly acting inaccurate vanity-driven storytelling, but it worked. “Go on,” he said, and Ray did, as if he had been waiting for Noah to pop that question all summer.

  Though Noah had been irreligious since he realized how his own birth had made his mother sick, he puffed a small sigh of gratitude—a faithful sort of thanks aimed high in the sky—that he had finally said the right thing.

  3

  RAY TOLD NOAH ALL ABOUT his thieving, but mostly the way someone comfortably confesses all their college mistakes in an end-of-life autobiography—he was done stealing. At least, he was done with the lifting of silly jewelry, and he didn’t sense the glimmer of glamour when he imagined big time thefts anymore. When he first started lifting bracelets, he didn’t see them as glittered plastic, he saw them as tennis diamonds, and when he walked to the train station from the store with something up his sleeve, he pretended he was shopping for which car he’d hotwire for a ride home. His inner critic (whose voice had begun sounding like Noah that summer) was hardly heard at the beginning; that’s when theft was fun.

  But once he got away with it over a dozen times, and the girls he knew started to be unimpressed by his ‘gifts,’ the inner critic was loud and relentless. This is no real jewelry, but stealing it could still ruin your life if you’re caught, and for what? Where’s the gain? You can’t hotwire cars anymore, not the new ones anyway—you’d have to hack the computers in them and you’re useless with computers. Go home, Ray. So he knocked it off. Maybe he’d return to stealing someday if a better opportunity presented itself, maybe he’d only gain a bit of light-handedness, no matter. Ray immediately moved on.

  When he was disappointed and purposeless, Ray had a tendency to sink into a mire of dejection—he knew this about himself, though very few others did, not since he’d started keeping stashes of alcohol on hand to boost his cheer in emergencies. His family thought it was a childhood trait he’d outgrown. Ray just treated himself in secret.

  With stealing suddenly commonplace and boring, Ray went back to the roots of his passion: his old detective novels. He tried getting Noah into these treasures, but it was like trying to force jazz on someone who didn’t even like music, there was no entry port in his brain for the books Ray loved as a kid. Noah would read every one of them, but he analyzed them too much. He missed the point every time, but never for lack of trying. It was sad.

  The last day Ray stole some mall stand crap, Ray came home to his novels and started tearing through them again, using an embroidered hair ribbon from the theft box as a bookmark. He got into crime because it gained the attention of manly, world-wise detectives like the ones he grew up reading, but . . . he started to ask himself when skimming lightly through his old Sherlock Holmes books again—why had he skipped over the idea of detecting? Holmes and Watson compare it to the thrill of committing crime all the time, except they have every right to do it! Holmes was congratulated, rewarded, awed, and all for understanding the warped mind of criminals way too well. It takes one to know one, doesn’t it? That’s how Ray got into his next hobby.

  Sure, you can’t just call yourself a PI and start following people—they’ll still call you a stalker if you’re caught at it—that’s why Ray started following the bottom rungs of the city first. They had no power to
snitch on him and much more interesting days than regular citizens. There was a beggar woman who frequented the train station near the University of Chicago, Ray’s admissions counselor mentioned her. She was always digging through garbage and picking up things for her heaping shopping cart with the rickety wheel. Ray spent two days waiting for the last train just hoping she’d wander by, and when she finally did, he followed her on the rest of her day’s journey.

  He saw this hag through a strange route of alleys, watched her pull soda cans and clothes out of dumpsters and bins, and pile them into her cart. He wondered if there wasn’t anything criminal she was up to—she’d make the perfect drug dealer or pick-up person; she was never hassled by cops unless she left the alleys or went for trash locked up on private property instead of free out on the street. He followed her for five days over a two-week period. She had a schedule and a regular route and he thought for sure when someone walked outside and put a heavy kid’s backpack next to their trashcan that it was happening: the drug drop-off, the money pick-up: what was it? The thrill that raced through Ray as he struggled to keep his nonchalant about-to-light-a-smoke stance against the corner building was what he had wanted to find again, so it was already mission accomplished for him. But wouldn’t it be great to be right in his suspicions too? Noah loved being right so damn much, there must be some extra joy in that.

  But it turned out the backpack, which his hag lady certainly inspected, was full of puke residue and a tied baggy of bathroom trash—some kid in that house must have gotten sick of their homework, nothing special about that. Then the bag lady parked her cart, waddled into the narrow gap between two brick buildings, and squatted to pee just near where someone’s central air intake tube stuck out. Ray watched her do it, but by the end of her stream he was thoroughly disenchanted with her. She was as dull as anyone else.

  After that it was days before Ray saw someone new to tail—this guy was one of the crazy ranting types usually on Chicago transit, but today he was outside in the bright, happy summer day, wandering a busy street of theater and restaurant goers, with a runny stream of diarrhea streaked down one pant leg and leaking out over his shoe as he hobble-walked along. That condition probably chafes, Ray thought, circling upwind of him and pretending to check his phone so he could snap a picture and take notes of the guy’s crazy spiel.

  He almost texted the picture to Noah, but he knew what would happen if Noah found out he was shadowing vagrants: Well, I bet a guy dripping in shit smells good, followed by, He might really be crazy as a jaybird—if he figures out you’re following him around you might get knifed, and eventually, If you want to find criminals to follow, go page for some politician, this dude is just homeless and crazy, maybe on drugs or off meds, either one.

  And then Ray’s interest was suddenly gone: just thinking through a Noah-style lecture had the same effect of hearing it; his project suddenly felt pointless again. He’d have argued with the real Noah for a little longer, tried to quote some of his favorite fictional detectives in support of the philosophy and dignity behind the profession, but he would have butchered the quotes, and Noah would have corrected him, and he’d have felt just as deflated as he did alone, except there’d be a witness to his defeat.

  “Never leave a witness,” Ray muttered, walking away from the poo-pants man in the direction of home and a daytime secret drink. He wanted to return to his life of crime already, but in what branch of it did he belong?

  4

  NOAH WAS EXPLAINING HIS VIEWS on Nietzsche’s views on the fourth of July when the boys finally joined forces.

  “Isn’t that Superman philosophy the one Hitler used?”

  Noah scoffed and rolled his eyes. “When Nietzsche spoke about a superior race, he meant the evolution of the whole human race, not the Aryans.”

  “If you say so, but you wouldn’t be the first self-hating Jew in the world.”

  “I’m more Jewish than you are, your mother’s a Catholic, so excuse me if I say your authority on Jewishness isn’t exactly rabbinical, okay?”

  “There, see, you just accused me of having inferior blood because of my racial lineage, that must be the Nietzsche talking.”

  Noah snorted and Ray laughed, and their giggles trailed off slowly; they were enjoying the twilight ending of an excellent repartee.

  “No, the thing with Nietzsche is that he’s speaking cerebrally about evolution, the kind of evolution that makes human attempts at religion void because we’d be reaching a state of actual spiritual being. We’d be seeing colors we don’t even know are around us, understanding time the way it really is, and not this day/night/harvest season animalistic calculating we’ve been doing so far. But when you talk about the Übermensch, naturally the master-race idiots will try to glom onto your philosophy, thinking it props up a future of pasty blond people instead of a future of humans who are no longer locked into base, bodily concerns because they’re finally beings of higher thought.”

  Ray had picked up one of Noah’s Nietzsche books during this discourse. Noah had brought all his Nietzsche material downstairs to transcribe the quotes he needed and check their original German in case he disagreed with the translations he was using for an English-language essay he wanted to write—he was prepping a subject-specific paper draft for the law school applications in his near future.

  Ray must have stopped listening the second he opened Human, All Too Human, because he started chortling the second he found a quote he wanted to read out loud to Noah.

  “Nietzsche himself says that apparently his books ‘contain snares and nets for short-sighted birds,’ guess he’s talking about you there, isn’t he?”

  Noah smiled without any happiness (he did not consider this facial expression a grimace, but everyone else did). “Actually he’s talking about the contemporaries who say his books are dangerous to the impressionable. Nietzsche, of course, disagreed with what those people said. They couldn’t grasp the concepts of metaphor or irony, they thought Nietzsche meant every word they saw in his books.”

  “If you say so,” Ray told him. He’d come by Noah’s house unannounced on this national independence holiday in blue shoes, red shorts, and a white polo shirt. Half Jewish or not, he looked like an American dream come to life.

  Noah finished talking, mostly because he enjoyed the sound of his own voice, since Ray went to the window and gazed out at the bright, warm day.

  “In that book’s intro, Nietzsche also hopes that his philosophy would someday be understood by an evolved man: ‘He looks gratefully back—grateful for his wandering, his self-exile and severity, his lookings afar and his bird flights in the heights.’” Noah liked that quote quite a bit, not just for the bird imagery, but because he himself was an ascetic, disciplined, lonely young man, and maybe someday he would look back on his current years with the knowledge that they were worthwhile, and in fact the only true path to his own happiness.

  “It’s too dry out,” Ray speculated, squinting at the grass and trees on Noah’s street. “Do you think the city will try to ban neighborhood fireworks tonight?”

  “They can try,” Noah said, “but morons are always going to want to light explosives.”

  Ray snorted. “There’s that optimism everyone loves about you.”

  “Admit it, tonight would be a great night for an arsonist, the cops will be writing off every fire as some patriotic accident.”

  “Will they?” Ray came back with, first as a tease, but then he got quiet as he perched back on the couch. He was still looking outside. Noah sat with his back to the sunny day on purpose—a warm, cheery day is frivolous, distracting, and he had work to do.

  “I bet setting a fire feels really powerful,” Ray said. He bit his bottom lip. He was thinking hard.

  “Don’t want to be a thief anymore?” Noah asked him, this time without that attitude tone. He actually wanted to know the answer to this question, to get Ray talking on the couch again.

  “I stopped stealing before I even told you about it,” R
ay said quietly, glancing about in case there were any eavesdroppers in a house that was empty of everyone except an upstairs, napping Faye. “Until last week I was stalking homeless people in case they were criminals, but outside of vagrancy and filth, I saw nothing very criminal about them. Now I’m thinking I should try something else. Do you think I’d like setting fires?”

  “Hmm,” Noah considered. “You like attention. Giving what you stole as gifts got it for you, and if you’d found a criminal you’d have gotten to report them, that was the fantasy, wasn’t it? You can’t take credit for setting fires.”

  “True.” Ray cocked his head sharply, looking from window to window as if looking for targets. “Maybe it isn’t attention I want, maybe it’s just a big thing, like drama.”

  “A spectacle?”

  “Yes! I want to set a fire tonight, you were right, this is the perfect night for it.” His eyes had their own fire back, the boy was on the verge of an internal ecstasy suddenly. It reminded Noah of another tenet of Nietzsche’s philosophy, the goal to ‘become what one is.’ Ray throws himself into his pursuit with a recklessness Noah would never dare for himself, despite how hard and relentlessly he works to make himself the man he will become.

  “Hmm,” Noah said again, this time with a weak voice, a reflection of an insecurity or jealousy that he’d just found in comparing himself to Ray’s purity of passion.

  “You should come with me tonight,” Ray said out of mercy.

  And though an hour ago Noah would never have predicted this outcome, he said, “Okay.”

  5

  RAY’S INDEPENDENCE DAY WAS COMING along swimmingly. He thought that morning that he’d be in for another day of lemonade with old people on the back patio, expensive hot dogs that tasted just as slurry-meaty as the cheap ones, and listening to his mother complain: if the fireworks were cancelled she’d whine about how un-American that was; if the fireworks happened, she’d complain about the noise; if they were too far away to make noise, she’d say they were disappointing duds . . . she’d whine about something until every man in her life wanted to strangle her, and then they’d all take their rage to bed.