The man’s hair was long, tied back in a ponytail that was jet black on the top, but as he walked I could see that its underside was gray like the temples of his dense, tight head of hair. The full ragged beard was nearly white. His face was weathered somehow, but not with the sort of weathering that comes with age. Those lines come only from life. Certainly he was vigorous and strong in a way I had not seen before in a man whose eyes were so knowing. I envied this man the grace with which he carried his years.
“Do you know this person?” the Spectre asked in a voice only I could hear as he appeared silently behind me.
“The farmer looks familiar,” I whispered, “but no. Should I know him?”
“There is no need to lower your voice. Even he can neither see nor hear us. You have never met, but yes, you should know him.”
I watched him produce handsful of oats from the pockets of his overall to feed the horses and goats. He gave long bone-shaped biscuits to the pig and the dog, who stood diligently by his heel unmindful of the horses’ hooves.
“So who is he?” I asked the Spectre.
My companion did not answer. In fact, he seemed as unaware of my presence as did this man.
The man looked out across his wheatfield as he patted the little dog. Then he went into the barn and came back out carrying the tractor balanced on one hand over his head. He set the machine down facing the edge of the wheatfield and went inside again for the thresher attachment.
“He came to Earth,” my guide told me, “with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.”
“Oh my dear Lord,” I said. “It’s Superman.”
“Yes,” the Spectre answered finally, “a name he has not used since he began his self-imposed exile ten years ago.”
*
After some moments it occurred to me to wonder: Where was the sun? The air was bright, the sky was a uniform deep azure that faded to a lighter shade of blue only around the extremes of the horizon. Shadows did not cast, but fell in puddles around the bases of objects, as if light came from all directions at once. Yet light seemed to come from nowhere, just the air. There was no light source in the sky.
“We’re not on Earth, are we?” I quizzed this dour angel. “He left, I remember. There was a trial, a sense of inevitability. Everyone says he felt driven from the planet, that he’s off saving worlds somewhere else. That is where we are now, right?”
The Spectre resumed his silent impassivity. Superman rode the saddle of the tractor as he cut and threshed the acres of grain behind him. One would think he could do it faster, and that the only reason he might do it this way was personal enjoyment. He did not look like a man who enjoyed much, however. He looked like the farmers of my rural southern Illinois youth: content but not particularly happy.
“So what planet are we on? Have I ever heard of this place?”
“Earth,” the Spectre said.
“Some terraformed world he’s renamed Earth.”
“Earth,” the Spectre said. “The world of your birth.”
“Why did this part of the Heartland not get destroyed in the Holocaust?”
The Spectre looked at me, then looked at Superman on his tractor, threshing away. I wondered which of us confused the spirit more. “Where is everybody?” I asked him. “He’s so alone.”
“Not always.”
“Is that what he wants? Is that what any man wants? To live with anvils and animals?”
“There are others sometimes,” the Spectre said, looking up into the distance.
His raised head prompted me to look in that direction, beyond the barn where Superman rode and threshed. There, walking through the waving grain, was a tall woman, a tiara holding her hair and wearing a tunic of red, blue, and gold.
“Hello, Clark—” she said when she was closer, then corrected herself. “Kal.”
“Diana, welcome. What brings you to the farm?”
“The vain hope that you’re not still here,” she told him.
“What happened to him?” I asked the Spectre. “Is that Wonder Woman? Why hasn’t she aged at all? What are they to each other? Where is this place?” I just kept asking the same questions over and over and added one or two when they occurred to me, in the hope that occasionally I would get an answer to something. “Why is it that even in a noncorporeal state I still feel like a man in his seventies?”
“You are a man in his seventies,” the Spectre finally allowed.
“I was hoping…” I said. Somewhere in a corner of my heart I suppose I had hoped coming with this dour spirit might leave me younger. Now I dismissed that, another discarded fantasy of an old man.
“It’s been months, Kal. But haven’t you heard?” the Amazon asked him incredulously. Evidently I had been the second-to-last person on the planet to notice the latest sign of the Apocalypse.
“What do you mean, Diana?” The big man climbed down from his tractor, stepping back when she offered him a kiss on his mouth. Then he straightened up and kissed her cheek, and she ran a hand along his waist. She was strange to him, and he felt like a teenager for a moment, discovering the eyes of a girl for the first time.
Then the moment broke.
“You’re needed, Kal.”
“Right. The harvest is almost in.”
“Back in the world, I mean. You’re needed.”
“Um-hm.”
“Kal-El,” she said. “Kansas is gone.”
“What are you talking about?” He looked back at her, expressionless. “My Kansas?”
“Your Kansas, Clark.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I mean Kal. Gone.”
“Who’s Kal?” I asked the Spectre, who did not answer. “Who’s Clark?”
“I’ve got more important things to do,” the farmer told the Amazon and climbed back up to the saddle of his tractor.
“I said Kansas. Listen to me, dammit!” she hollered at him, losing her composure. “This is bad news, Kal. It’s shaken the world. It ought to rattle you just a little. Didn’t you pick up the seismic disturbance here?”
“Day before yesterday?”
“Yes. Day before yesterday.”
“I felt something. Figured it for about a seven point six somewhere in the Badlands. Don’t get inside much to check things out this time of year.”
“Well, you were a few states off. And several orders of magnitude. Kal, it was Magog.”
“What do you mean it was Magog? Is he shooting nukes out of that joystick of his now?”
“No, it was his gang. They call themselves the Justice Battalion these days. Or did. We think, except for Magog himself, they’re gone now.”
“Justice Battalion,” the big man said almost under his breath, with enough disdain to tar a regiment. “Look, I don’t want to have anything to do with these people anymore. These are my roots. Here.”
“You can’t live in solitude forever.”
“I’m Superman. I can do anything.”
“Except, apparently, face your fear.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” the man snapped.
“I didn’t mean Magog. I meant…” and she paused, wondering what she meant, or how to tell him. “Kal,” she began again, “you’ve lost so much since I first met you. But you’ve gained so much, too.”
“Gained? Earthlings die. You know that.”
“They were your parents, Kal. And she was your wife. Don’t call them ‘Earthlings.’ ”
“I have work to do, Diana.” And he turned away from her. “Here things grow.”
“Kal, Magog’s out of control.”
“I tried to tell them that ten years ago.”
“And they didn’t listen, I know. Stop punishing them.”
“I’m not interested.”
“That’s not really Superman, is it?” I turned to the Spectre, who nodded. “What happened to him?”
“What happened to you, Kal?” the woman asked him just as I had done. “I’ve known you most of your life, and I still don�
��t understand what happened to you. What happened to your code, Kal? What did you used to call it? Your torah?”
“Gone. Like a childhood fantasy.”
“Truth, justice, and the American way, right? We all repeated that like a mantra under our breaths when we were up against it, do you know that? Even those of us who weren’t Americans.”
“I don’t care about—”
“What’s the last thing you did care about?”
“Lois.”
She closed her eyes, turned her back on him as if she were counting to ten, and turned to face him again.
And I asked the Spectre, “Who’s Lois?” but he did not answer.
The tractor began to move slowly, but she darted in front of it and stood with her hands on her waist. “At least come inside and take a look at what’s happened.”
He stopped the machine before its grille would certainly have flattened against his lady friend, and he said, “I’ve got animals and crops, Diana.”
“This to your animals and crops,” and she emitted a shrill whistle on a clear steady tone, and suddenly half the wheatfield vanished and the sky blackened, and there was a neighing and a barking and a bleating.
We were under an enormous dome, and now the illusion of bucolic fields as far as the eye could see was gone. It was winter on the Tundra.
“You spooked the livestock.”
“I remembered the frequency code. At least I provoked a reaction in something.”
“Last time I share my secrets with a girl.”
“A girl?” And her face went dark like that of a barbarian warrior. She scrambled to the foothold aside the tractor and delivered an open-handed slap to the face of the man. He laughed and rolled over backward from his saddle, tumbling through the air parallel to the darkened ground and landing softly on his feet. She comforted her reddened slapping hand in the crook between her chest and her opposite arm.
This was Antarctica. He’d come to live in the last place on the only world he’d known, where humankind did not scatter cities like grass seed or impose foibles like dogma. Now that Diana had retracted the illusion, the starry sky hung revealed with only the barest hint of sunlight below a fringe of the northern horizon—and from this place every direction was north. The wheat and corn crops that stretched for a fair distance were real, but, beyond the acreage under the solar-radiated dome where this man took his succor, the great glacier rose in steps on all sides. He walked over to what was now clearly the wall of the dome. Rather than whistling, he pressed a panel that a moment ago was a reflection of waving wheatfields, and the illusion returned along with the composure of his livestock.
“Truth, justice, and the American way, Kal,” she said again. “You always had a way with words.”
“Comes of writing for a living.”
“Nice turn of phrase, but you can’t have forgotten completely what it meant to us. There’s no one else to lead us.”
“Who do you think I am? George Washington? I’m done.”
“For how long? Another ten years? Until the radiation cloud reaches down here?”
“Come on, Diana.”
“Come on, Clark.”
He shot her a look through narrowed eyes.
“Kal. I’ll help you with the baling. Or chaffing. Or whatever it is you do. It’ll be great. Just like back on the farm. But first come inside and look at the news. Look what Magog has let happen to the world, that’s all I ask. And steel yourself.”
“Don’t humor me. I don’t need humoring.”
“It’s all I can think of to do.” She stared at him soulfully, and, through the laconic detachment of a man too long alone, he smiled.
He walked to her and nudged her gently with his shoulder, then walked toward a spot where there was a door in the side of the dome. She followed and took his hand like a schoolgirl.
“Men lose themselves in women,” I told the Spectre.
“Clarify that, please,” the apparition demanded, and I was gratified that he did.
“This is a brave and mature man,” I said, “an accomplished man. But this woman is not the one who was to be his life’s companion. There was another one, wasn’t there?”
“Yes,” the Spectre told me, “but how could you know that?”
“I’m a minister,” I told him.
“Your presence here, Norman McCay, is necessary for your insight.”
“Then share yours. Tell me about Lois.”
“You know of her,” he said. “She was called Lois Lane.”
“Lois Lane? The journalist? Wasn’t she a married woman? To … to the last editor of the Daily Planet, right?”
“Clark Kent.”
“Right. Clark.” And in my slow, plodding fatbag of a human brain a peg fell into place. “He’s Clark. The writer. Weren’t both killed by the one whom Magog killed?”
“Only one of them was really killed. Longer than he was Superman, he was Clark.”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake.”
*
For decades, there had been legends of the Fortress of Solitude, the apocryphal home of Superman. Some of the stories held that it was in the Amazon Rain Forest or in a grotto deep in a Pacific trench or below the sewers of Metropolis. Some said that it was in a “pocket universe” tucked away in the big globe that rotated atop the old Daily Planet building, or that its entrance was through a crater on the far side of the Moon. A disoriented dogsledder competing in the Iditarod once had reported seeing a huge golden key north of the Arctic Circle that might fit into an enormous door camouflaged in the side of a glacial mountain, but the “key” had turned out to be a directional marker for pilots traveling the great circle routes among the northern continents. I had always thought it made more sense for Superman to live on an isolated farm in the Midwest or in one of the anonymous beehive cubicles of apartments in Metropolis, rather than in some hidden imperial citadel far from mortal perceptions. What I saw here with the Spectre beneath the Antarctic Tundra reminded me of my conviction that every fable of humankind’s collective consciousness is, in some sense, true.
The interior of the Fortress was decorated like the den of a giant packrat, with an occasional piece of shiny booty hanging in a corner or from a wall. It was the least luxurious and most unlived-in domicile I have ever seen a sentient being occupy. What most struck me was the matter of scale. But instead of the occasional agate marble or tinfoil gum wrapper or dismembered doll’s head that one might find in the packrat’s hole, here was a metal-jacketed book twelve feet high with several hundred pages of etched galvanized steel, casually leaning against the dirt-and-stone wall of a narrow room with a forty-foot ceiling. A pair of statues, in some sort of enamel over granite, of a stern-looking man and woman in alien dress and headgear. A fully grown tyrannosaurus, unearthed perhaps in the course of building this nest from its frozen preserve. Down an unlit hall was a clear chamber of some sort, like a bottle on a small stand, stuck with a Post-it Note full of scrawlings in a language I did not recognize. While I was looking at the chamber, an open box with a kind of flower—an extraterrestrial thing, maybe—materialized on a small stand beside it. And in the room where Superman walked with Wonder Woman was a crazy-quilt collection of monitors and receivers, piled on top of one another and scattered over the floor. The rock-and-permafrost ceiling here was higher even than the one in the room with the book. The screens upon screens and numerous projection devices reached to the ceiling.
“On,” he said, and crossed his arms over his chest. He casually floated up halfway to the distant ceiling to get a better view of everything.
And the flood of light and sound suddenly flew through my senses and then shut me down like a shot of 120-proof whiskey. A hundred screens lit a hundred images, and two hundred speakers spoke in as many sounds and voices, and the only clear message that rode the chill air was Kansas.
Magog was at fault, all right. Satellite monitors caught the whole thing. Every broadcast facility in every corner of the Earth, it seemed, ev
en the specialized subscription services that normally put over the airwaves only old films or documentaries on fishing or contemporary musical performances, spread this word. Humanity and its superhuman “protectors” over the years had leveraged Earth’s life support systems out to the edge, and now someone had pushed all of us over it.
Here were images of the Justice Battalion: Captain Atom, who could loose the nuclear energy of his own body; Judomaster, who was lethal at using her opponents’ weight and inertia to her own advantage; Thunderbolt, who ran as fast as the old Flash in his youth—when he’d been a bit slower, after all—and ran these days with Magog; Peacemaker, the misnamed weapons-smith who went after purported lawbreakers with nervous-system homogenizers and brainwave scramblers; Nightshade, the otherworldly maniac who could summon a liquid darkness to the brightest of days; and Alloy, the sentient biomechanical organism who was the faceless amalgam of an old sophisticated club of robots called the Metal Men.
And in the center of it all was a little old man named Maxwell Jensen whom a reporter once had named the Parasite, and the name had stuck. His skin was disfigured; his manner was one that reflected only terror and panic.
Jensen was a kind of idiot savant, a timid little cipher among the brotherhood of supervillainy. He could duplicate the abilities of people with whom he came in physical contact, and he’d thought at one time to put this talent to work to make himself rich. The Parasite could touch a philosopher and explain Kant; touch a dog and bark; touch Superman and fly. Years ago he’d tried out his capacities on a few banks and a jewelry store or two. His problem was that when he got up in the morning, he was not very bright, and with every ability and power he added, his plan changed. His might have been an effective power in the hands of someone with a little foresight or genuine ambition. All Jensen started out with, however, was envy. All he finished up with was regret, but, mercifully, it probably lasted only a moment.
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