Superpowers (11 page)

WEDNESDAY

If there had just been something to bail with. A pail, a cup, an empty beer can. Then he could have rowed while Dinah bailed. Then he wouldn't have panicked like he had, and they wouldn't have flipped the canoe.

"I'm sorry, Dinah." There were a lot of things to be sorry for; sorry for having drunk so much tequila, sorry for convincing her to come out on the lake with him, sorry for not checking the canoe for leaks first. "I'm sorry," he said again.

"How far out do you think we are?" she asked. Her hair was plastered to her head, and her teeth were chattering. She clung fiercely to the sinking canoe, looking wildly about. "Help!" she called. "Please help us!"

Oliver didn't tell her to save her breath. What would she be saving it for? They were both exhausted. Neither of them could swim all the way to shore.

Oliver didn't think of himself as a quitter. That guy in the movies, the guy who never ran out of ideas, the one who always saved the day in desperate situations—that was the guy he wanted to be. But he had nothing to work with, no tools, no materials. Just a sinking canoe, a pair of Dockers shorts, a blood alcohol level above .10, and a girl whose last thought would probably be hate for him.

He didn't hear the angel at first. It wasn't until Dinah slapped him on the shoulder that he looked up and saw the angel floating above the canoe, her hair blowing around her face, the moon casting a halo around her head.

"It's sinking," Dinah said, and Oliver realized the angel had asked about the canoe.

"I guess you'll have to ride with me, then," said the angel.

Oliver had heard that drowning was the most peaceful way to die, and now he believed it. He wasn't afraid. He would go with the angel wherever she wanted to take him.

"I'll come back for you," the angel told him. Then she swept down and lifted Dinah out of the water by her arms. "Just a little longer," said the angel as the two of them flew out of sight.

Oliver didn't go to church. He thought God was probably out there somewhere, but he'd always figured there would be time later to clean up his act. Not that he'd ever done anything really bad. Minor vandalism, the occasional cow tipping, a little too much beer now and then. The angel, though, that must mean God forgave him. There was nothing to worry about anymore.

The canoe was almost completely submerged. He let go, treading water at first. Then he just spread his arms and lay his head back to let the water wash over him. He looked up at the stars. Maybe once they were in heaven Dinah would forgive him. She had to, didn't she?

He swallowed water, then took it into his lungs, and for a moment he panicked. He coughed, but there was no air to replace the water. He reached up, touched air, slipped down again. He breathed the water, calmer this time. Even if the angel wasn't real, there was nothing he could do. He just wanted to rest.

The water was agitated suddenly, and he told himself not to struggle, then realized he wasn't. The water was rejecting him, spitting him out. No. It was the angel, pulling him up and out of the water. She was swearing.

"Fifteen fucking seconds, you can't hold on? Jesus Christ Almighty."

She had her arms wrapped around his chest, and he coughed continuously as they sped over the water. He had never heard of an angel talking like this.

"It's all right. You're going to be fine," said the angel. "I'm sorry for yelling. I thought I'd lost you."

Oliver looked up at her. She wore white gloves. Why did angels need gloves? Would they be soiled by the touch of mortal flesh?

She set him on the shore in James Madison Park. Dinah sat a few feet away, hunched beneath a blanket.

"Nearly lost this guy," said the angel. "He's got some water in his lungs." She sat him up with his head between his legs and massaged his back. He renewed his coughing with vigor.

"The ambulance is on its way," said a voice in front of him. Oliver looked up but saw nothing. Was God talking to the angel? Had God called an ambulance for him?

"It was just the two of you, right?" the angel asked. "There's no one else out there?"

Oliver shook his head and heard Dinah tell the angel it was just the two of them. So the angel hadn't come to take them to heaven. She had come to save their lives.

"You'd better get out of sight," God said. God had a woman's voice. Oliver wondered if he should tell his dad about that. Oliver's dad was always complaining about Hillary Clinton and Tammy Baldwin and Oprah. He hated feminists. He hated church, too, come to think of it. Maybe he wouldn't tell him after all.

"See you at home," said the angel, and took off into the sky. For the first time Oliver noticed she didn't have any wings.

"You're going to be fine," God said. "They're on their way." Oliver didn't hear the sirens until the ambulances had driven all the way across the grassy park to the beach.

"Tell the angel thanks," he said, but God didn't answer.

SUNDAY

It was one thing to make the decision. It wasn't as though he hadn't weighed the alternatives over the past months. Every other path led to misery and humiliation, and he'd had enough of that, his entire life long. For a while it seemed like he was getting used to it, like he had accepted that his role was always to be the loser, the butt of the joke. But he had just been swallowing all the shame and anger. Now it was all going to come out in one blast.

He hadn't bought the gun intending to do this. Two apartments in his building had been burglarized in the same month, and he had just wanted to feel safe. That was what he'd told himself. He had no roommates to ask him about it, no children to find it and get into trouble. It had collected dust in the drawer of his bedside table until tonight.

He had means and motive, but he wasn't sure he had the balls to pull the trigger.

He sat on a bench looking over Lake Mendota. It was a warm night, and he was sweating. The gun sat in his lap. At first the cold of it had seeped through his shorts, but by now the metal had absorbed his body heat. It lay hot against his legs, lumpish and angry. He put his hand over it, squeezed the handle.

It wasn't just that she didn't love him. Low as he was, he couldn't have justified dying for that. It was that she didn't care one way or the other. No one did. Even being hated would have given him incentive to keep going a little while longer.

It wasn't even about her, really. It was about the things that loving her did to him. He made a fool out of himself over her. She made him stupid. Maybe he hated her a little bit, for making him feel so out of control, so impotent. He could admit that. But the flaw was in him somewhere, and he couldn't fix it. He lifted the gun, cradled it in his arms. Caressed the trigger with his middle finger, looked out over the lake, up at the stars. A good night for it.

A man in a yellow bodysuit sat down beside him, and he flinched. He hadn't heard anyone approach. He clutched the gun to his chest.

"Bruce, don't do this," said the man in the yellow bodysuit. He had a white star on his chest, like the superheroes he'd read about in the newspaper. "You think things are never going to get better, but you're just depressed. You need to see a doctor."

He'd seen a doctor. He'd given him pills that made him sleep all the time and nearly lost him his job. There wasn't a pill to stop him from loving her.

"You don't love her, Bruce," said the man in the yellow bodysuit. A boy, really. He was thin and his voice was too smooth for him to be more than twenty-five. Bruce considered pointing the gun at the boy, but he didn't want to kill him, as stupid and rude as he was. He just wanted to stop hurting.

He did love her. He loved her and he hated her. She wouldn't understand how right they could have been. She never gave him a chance. It wasn't anything new. He'd get so nervous when he had to speak in class or talk to a girl. He stuttered and blushed and made an ass out of himself. They called him Babbling Bruce.

"That was years ago that they called you that," the boy said. "You should let it go."

But he couldn't. He still stuttered sometimes. He managed to give presentations, provided he snuck a drink or two before, but he couldn't talk to her at all. He couldn't talk to any women. He brought the gun up under his chin, quickly so the boy in yellow couldn't stop him.

"Bruce, don't do this," said the boy. "You're upset because you think she has all this control over you. But killing yourself means giving her all the control you have left."

But it wasn't about her now, if it ever had been. Now that he looked at it clearly, it was about him. It was him that wasn't fit to live, him that wasn't worth it. He slid the gun off his chin and put the barrel into his mouth.

"Bruce, no—"

He pulled the trigger. He shut his eyes and thought of every person he'd ever known, trying to find one who would tell him he was worth something, but he knew already that he wasn't. He didn't feel anything, and he didn't hear anything. He opened his eyes.

The gun hadn't fired. A man in red stood, holding the gun, his finger caught in the hammer. Red, with a white star. More super-heroes. Goddamn them.

"I thought I could talk to him," said the man in yellow to the man in red. Not men, boys. They were just boys. They had no idea.

"You tried," said the boy in red. He took off a glove and sucked on his finger. "Man, that hurt. What do you want to do now? We can't leave him here."

Bruce pulled his legs up toward his chest and lay down on the bench. He still hurt. He was still here.

WEDNESDAY

She'd left her mother bleeding at the crossroads, and she was going on to Thebes to marry her father. Except that one of her mother's springer spaniel guards was chasing her with a tommy gun and a physics textbook. She could hear the dog several miles back, explaining in barked Morse code how Newton and Einstein and her high school gym teacher didn't believe she could lift a bowling ball, let alone a city bus.

She was drooling on her arm. Mary Beth sat up and blinked around the classroom, hoping no one had noticed her sleeping. She wiped her mouth with her hand and looked down at her notes. She had written "Disintegration of the Self-Fulfilling Croissant" under the heading "Paper Topics?" Her stomach growled loudly, and Professor Smith looked up at her.

Professor Smith taught graduate seminars in English during the regular school year, he had told them all on the first day of class. He had also told them that the reason he lowered himself to teach an introductory course in English literature over the summer was to give himself an annual lesson in humility. If that was the case, he didn't seem to be learning anything. He dressed like an Oxford don, or at least he dressed as Mary Beth imagined an Oxford don would dress, unless Oxford dons still wore black robes or some such thing, in which case the comparison meant nothing and she needed a long nap. He wore bow ties and white shirts with suspenders holding up dark pants that were either wool or tweed and in either case were totally inappropriate for a Madison summer. And yet Professor Smith never seemed to sweat. His glasses never slid down his nose, his bow tie never needed to be straightened, and the cuffs of his pants legs never rose above the tops of his socks.

He was utterly bald, whether from genetics or grooming she couldn't tell, although the gray of his eyebrows suggested that at least some of his hair had fallen out on its own. His eyebrows stood straight out from his face in a manner that made Mary Beth think of porn stars and drag queens, although Professor Smith's eyebrows were possibly longer than any woman or wannabe woman's
eyelashes,
natural or enhanced.

And he was pompous. He never failed to ask questions that he obviously did not expect them to know, and he assigned extra work for those who gave particularly bad answers. Occasionally someone would have the translation to an obscure Latin phrase or know the date on which some minor European poet died of consumption, and on those occasions a little bit of joy faded from Professor Smith's eyes. He obviously knew much more about English literature than any of them could ever hope to know, but he lectured as if he didn't expect anyone to learn.

Now he was looking at Mary Beth. "Now that Sleeping Beauty has awakened, perhaps she could identify a quote for us."

Damn.

"Who said this:
'Oedipus Rex
is a so-called tragedy of fate; its tragic effect is supposed to reside in the opposition between the overpowering will of the gods and the vain striving of men who are threatened by disaster. Acquiescence in the will of the godhead, insight into one's own powerlessness, is what the deeply gripped spectator is supposed to learn from the sad spectacle.'"

Mary Beth cleared her throat. "Aristotle?"

"Quite wrong. Aristotle held very much the opposite view. The quote is from Freud, as you might know had you slept in your bed last night rather than here in my classroom. Do you agree with him?"

Mary Beth wondered what he would say if she told him she had been up late last night pulling people out of the bottom floor of a collapsed two-story motel off the Beltline. He'd probably tell her that physical exertion killed as many brain cells as alcohol.

"I do agree," she said.

"Please, expound upon your answer."

"The play is all about fate, and the impossibility of escaping from it. The prophecy the oracle gives Laius is self-fulfilling—if he hadn't sent Oedipus away, he wouldn't have taken him for a stranger and been killed by him. The same thing happens with the prophecy it gives to Oedipus—it sends him out from his foster home and toward Thebes, to kill his father and marry his mother. The oracle is the hand of fate, setting events into motion."

"What of the third prophecy, Tiresias's pronouncement? Does it set any events into motion?"

"Yes. It causes Oedipus to look for the murderer, whom he discovers to be himself."

"So we are all pawns of fate?"

"No."

"Is that not what you just said? That the play tells us we are helpless against the machinations of fate and the gods?"

"The play tells us Oedipus is the pawn of fate. But he's only a character in a play. His life has to suck in order for the play to work."

Professor Smith sneered. "Oedipus's life does indeed 'suck,' as you put it. So what you are saying is that although you agree that Sophocles was
saying
that fate rules our lives, you do not agree that this is the case."

"Right."

"Interesting, Miss—"

"Layton."

"Miss Layton. Write me a ten-page paper on the problem of fate versus free will in
Oedipus Rex
for Monday. This will be in addition to your previously assigned paper. Call it penance for your little nap."

Ten pages, on top of the thirty pages for a week from Monday, and her lab for biochem due next week. On top of fighting crime and saving lives and trying to make quick getaways in a green Lycra bodysuit.

"Nice work." Wanda Benson slouched in the seat next to her, twirling gum around one finger. "Wonder how they'll punish you when you fall asleep during surgery."

"Shut up," Mary Beth said.

Marcus Hatch was outside in the hall after class.

"Miss Layton!" He matched step with her down the hall. "I haven't seen you in a while. I knew there was something missing from my life."

"Don't bother me, Marcus. I'm not in the mood."

"Bother you? I certainly hope I'm not doing that."

Mary Beth stopped in the middle of the hall. "What do you want?"

Marcus stopped with her. "I want to take you to dinner."

"I'm not hungry."

"But you do eat, don't you? You'll be hungry later—say, seven-thirty?"

"Marcus, I don't want to go out with you."

He raised an eyebrow. "You're direct. I appreciate that. Let me be direct in turn. I think you know something."

"I know a lot of things, Marcus. One is that you are very annoying."

"That's my job. Let me clarify. I think you know something about these All-Stars."

"All-Stars?"

"Yes. You do read the papers, don't you? Even passed through the filter of corporate sponsorship, the local media has given them ample coverage in their mediocre way. The superheroes."

"I didn't know they were called the All-Stars."

"That's what the press is calling them now. They wear stars on their chests, that's why. But you know that already, don't you?"

"Yes."

"You admit it?"

"I saw it on the news, Marcus. Do you have a point?"

"I think you know my point. Let me make something clear. I don't want to turn you in. I just want to talk to you."

"Marcus, if you have some kind of spandex fetish, that's your business. I'm not interested."

"Then you deny it?"

"Deny what?" Mary Beth asked, and walked away before Marcus could answer.