Superpowers (27 page)

SATURDAY

Harriet didn't hang out at Cafe Maximillian, as a rule. It was too expensive, for one thing. Caroline was fascinated with the Cafe because she'd read that Butch Vig liked to drink there when Garbage recorded in town, but Harriet had "forgotten" to tell her about the show tonight, because she wanted to enjoy it on her own.

Arts editor was a job with many unpleasant duties, but handing out the assignments was not one of them. She'd assigned herself this show, a benefit for the Wil-Mar Community Food Pantry, with three bands on the bill, but Harriet was only interested in one of them. Boba Fettish was a sometime side project of the Ultramaroons, one of her two favorite local bands; the other being the now-defunct Junior High, which had broken up when half its members had moved to Chicago to start the Returnables.

Sometimes Harriet thought that she took more pleasure in knowing the pedigrees of all the local musicians than she did in the music itself. This was not one of those times. She was in front of the stage, grooving along as Boba Fettish covered "Saturday's Child" and forgetting entirely to take pictures for her review, when she saw Xavier Tyler.

He was talking to some girls at a table beside the stage. He wore long black shorts and a red T-shirt that clung to his overdeveloped physique. He wasn't looking at her.

Harriet retreated into the crowd. The music was no longer a welcome diversion from crime fighting and her dad and Jack dying—it was too much, too loud. She weaved among the dancers toward the door and ran directly into him.

He didn't know her. He caught her arms and gently steadied her on her feet. "Sorry," he said, and although the music was loud she heard him perfectly. "I wasn't watching where I was going."

She flinched, and he let go.

"Do you like this band?" He was smiling at her, turning on the charm. Harriet felt sick, and she realized what was wrong. He could see her. It wasn't like the other times. She wasn't invisible.

She tried to brush past him, but it was too late.

"Harriet? Harriet Bishop? Is that you?" His smile widened. "Harriet. It's X. Xavier, Xavier Tyler. From high school?"

Did he really think she didn't know who he was? She wanted a different power, a better one. She wanted Mary Beth's strength. She wanted to beat him so badly that he would never carry a football again. She wanted to knock him off the course he was on, the one that led to money and fame and never having to pay for what he had done.

She couldn't tell anyone now. No one would believe her. "Why did you wait three years?" they would ask. "Why now?" There was no good answer.

Shaking, she turned and walked out of the Cafe.

SUNDAY

He was reaching for the Glock when the phone rang. He picked it up and was about to say "Tech Support, this is Bruce" when he remembered he wasn't at work. He should just hang up and get on with what he was doing.

"Will you do something for me, Bruce?" The voice on the phone was familiar. "Will you take the bullets out of that gun?"

"What gun?"

"Bruce, you bought a .357 Glock Thirty-three at that gun show in Green Bay. It's sitting loaded on your bedside table. Should I tell you what else is on that table?"

Bruce looked at the guilty stack of porn magazines. "Are you watching me?"

"Let's not play this game. You know who I am."

"You're that Yellow Star."

"Gold
Star. But yes. We talked about this once before."

"We
talked?
Your friend tore my gun—my legally purchased and licensed handgun—out of my grasp. The police came and I spent the night in jail. My employers found out, and my seventy-four-year-old mother was questioned by the police. She has Alzheimer's. Six days out of seven she doesn't even remember who I am."

"And you didn't learn a thing."

"I learned not to kill myself in a public place. I was asking to be caught."

"Why do you think that was?"

"You tell me. You're supposed to be able to read my mind."

"I can. And I can tell you this much—there are still things that make you feel like living."

"Like rainbows and puppy dogs, I suppose."

"You're angry."

"Nice observation, Counselor Troi. Next you'll be telling me I'm sarcastic."

"You're angry, but you're enjoying this conversation."

"That's because it's going to be my last." Bruce hung up. His hands were shaking. He listened to his heart beat ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM while he waited for the phone to ring again.

"Leave me alone. I'm not hurting anyone else."

"Not true. There are people who care about you."

"My mother won't even know I'm gone."

"Perhaps. But there are others."

"Name three."

"I don't think I should. I think you should get over yourself and find out on your own."

"I'm over myself," Bruce said. "Believe me." The phone rang an instant after he hung it up.

"Don't die angry."

"What?"

"The first time we talked you had no anger left. There was hardly a spark. You're more alive now. I think you want to kill yourself just to show everyone that you can, to prove you can accomplish something. But you're not thinking straight."

"Don't tell me why I'm doing this."

"But I
know,
Bruce. Better than you do."

"You have no right!"

He hung up the phone and listened to it ring. He was angry, but he was also powerless. He always fell back into the same patterns. He was a failure.

He unplugged the phone.

MONDAY

Caroline looked to the alley below. Newspaper pages chased back and forth, hiding behind Dumpsters, flattening themselves against brick.

"You aren't planning to jump, are you?" Joe's white shirt looked transparent in the moonlight, like he was turning invisible. At work he almost was. Caroline had seen him there a few times, but he never looked at her. Not like he was embarrassed, but like he didn't even know her when she wasn't in costume.

"It wouldn't matter if I did," she said. "Survival instinct would kick in before I hit."

"True." Joe looked over the street side. "A man jumped from our town hall when I was a small boy. No one was sure who he was, because his face was a mess. They couldn't figure out how he got up there."

"Maybe he flew."

"What about his survival instinct?"

"I don't know."

"Some of the older women in town were worried his ghost would haunt the square."

"Did it?"

"Not that I ever saw."

Caroline was cold. Lycra wouldn't handle winter in Wisconsin, not alone. She would have to come up with other ideas soon, if costumes were something they would still need.

"I never wanted to be a superhero," she said.

"I did," said Joe. "I used to read American comics. I liked the Punisher because he had guns. I outgrew that, though. Batman is better."

Caroline wondered how old Joe was, exactly. About her age, she thought. Maybe a little older.

"You're thinking about giving it up," he said.

"I guess."

"Is it too hard?"

"No. It is hard, but if that was why, I would have quit in the beginning. It's more ... do you think we're doing any good?"

"Why would you ask me? Do you think you're doing any good?"

"Some."

"Not enough?"

"We're causing problems, too. People have gotten hurt. And— it's changing things."

"Things always change."

"Yeah, but I don't think people are ready for superheroes. To see movies about them is one thing. But to actually have them living in your town, I think that's too much of an adjustment."

Joe took out his last two cigarettes and threw the pack off the roof to land among the newspapers. He lit both cigarettes and handed one to Caroline.

"It's too late," he said. "You're here, and you have to make the best of it. People will get used to it one way or another. Things always change. Things changed today, and tomorrow they'll change again. But people don't change very much. People die and people lose their jobs and people move, but they stay pretty much the same."

A gust of wind cut through Caroline's costume. She shivered. "Is that a good thing?"

TUESDAY

Ray heard the ringing long before he understood that it was coming from the phone. He rolled over on the couch and picked up the receiver, blinking at the TV Something on ESPN was burning.

"Ray?" It was Ed. "Jesus, were you asleep?"

"I worked the four-to-twelve last night."

"Yeah, well, you better turn on the TV"

"It's on." Ray sat up and squinted at the clock. It was about a quarter to nine. He flipped the channel, but the same cloud of smoke was on every channel.

"You see it? Ray, the chief wants everyone here. The FAA just shut down all the airports, and there are more planes missing."

"Planes?"

"Ray, wake up. Are you looking at the TV?" The building on fire looked like the World Trade Center, and there were things falling from it that looked like people.

"What the fuck is going on?"

Ed didn't answer right away; it sounded like he was talking to someone else. "Jesus Christ," Ray heard him say.

"Ed?"

"Ray, get down here, buddy. A plane just hit the Pentagon."

Ed hung up.

_______

Off in a corner of Caroline's brain that was still rational she thought she should have put on her costume before leaving. But mostly she was thinking about the quiet. She was used to the hum of aircraft around her when she flew. Even when there were no planes near, it was there, like the hum of a refrigerator— you didn't notice it until the power went off. Or when the world went crazy.

It hadn't been even nine o'clock eastern daylight time. Her mom was always late ... at least, she used to be. Caroline was sure there had been mornings when the two of them weren't getting dressed while eating, searching for keys or homework, snapping at each other for making both of them late. There must have been mornings that weren't like that, but she didn't remember them.

She wouldn't have been there, Caroline was sure of it. She fished the cell phone out of her pocket again. This time she'd answer. Someone would answer.

She'd just crossed the lake, so she knew she was in Michigan. It was almost eight hundred miles from Madison to Manhattan. Sooner or later she'd have to land and get her bearings, but she was afraid to. Up here, with no radio and no TV, she could pretend she was just flying to New York to visit, like a millionaire on a private jet with a craving for deli pastrami on rye.

Voice mail, again. She left another message and tried the apartment again. No answer, just Arturo's voice on the machine. She'd left four messages there already.

Please,
she prayed.
Please let her be late.

_______

The clock radio woke Mary Beth at 10:00. Neal Conan's voice on the NPR station cut through her grogginess. He was saying that the World Trade Center was no longer standing, that a plane had struck the Pentagon. He was saying that all air traffic had been grounded, that more planes were unaccounted for, that the president was on his way to an air force base somewhere.

She wondered if it was April. Last April Fool's Day she had been totally fooled by an NPR report of a new fad of navel removal among California teenagers. This didn't seem like a very funny April Fool's joke, though, and besides, she remembered now that it was September.

She was shaking as she slipped on a robe and eased her bedroom door open. No one else was home. She picked up the television remote and pressed the power button.

Messages scrolled across the bottom of the screen under videotaped images on a loop. People covered in dust running out of a rolling cloud. Crowds of pedestrians crossing a bridge, a tower of smoke standing in the skyline behind them. A firefighter standing on a street corner, the camera whirling and focusing on the World Trade Center in time to see a plane strike the building and dissolve into flame and smoke, glass exploding outward. Smoke flanking the high antenna atop one of the towers, then vertigo as the antenna wobbled and the tower crumpled while people screamed.

Mary Beth delicately set her finger over the power button and pressed it. The TV went black. She walked quickly to her bedroom and slid the switch on the radio to off.

She shook her head. Her breathing was ragged, shallow. She went back to the living room, to sit down. The answering machine blinked at her, and she pressed play.

The first voice was Harriet's mom, asking her to call her. The second was Harriet's dad, asking the same thing. The third was Mary Beth's mom. She sounded like she was crying. The fourth message was Caroline, saying she was on her way to New York, that she wanted someone to call her if her mother called. There was a lot of noise on the line, maybe wind. There were no more messages.

Mary Beth turned on the TV again. There was a graphic showing the projected paths of two planes from Logan Airport in Boston. They traveled west for a short distance, then turned sharply southeast and disappeared.

She shut her eyes and lowered her head. It didn't look real, anyway. It looked like something out of some cheesy disaster flick, something with great effects and no plot.

She didn't realize she was clenching her fists until she heard the remote in her hand crunch and felt the pieces slipping between her fingers.

_______

"I just spoke to the dean's office," said Jake. "They have no plans to cancel classes."

The entire staff of
The Campus Voice
was in the offices, but no one made a move to run off to their 12:05 lectures. Most of them stared at the looping gallery of horrors on the TV

"Listen up, people," said Darren. "We've still got a paper to put out. We need a front page, and we need local pictures. The campus Red Cross chapter is jammed with people lined up to give blood, and there's going to be a prayer vigil tonight. Harriet, can you cover the vigil? Where's Harriet?"

The TV showed black smoke, white dust, and the malevolent bright blue of the sky. Fire bloomed from the screen in waves of manic orange.
I'm not here,
Harriet thought.

"She was here a little while ago."

"Maybe she's in the bathroom."

"Someone find her, please," said Jake. "Editors' meeting, ten minutes. We need to figure this out."

Harriet sat at her desk and wished she could disappear for real—break up into molecules and drift away. She didn't want this flood of sadness and fear to engulf her. She wanted it all to go away, but she knew it wasn't going to work. Even if she never turned on a television again, the images would stay with her forever.

She didn't like being this kind of reporter. She wanted to write about things that people made, not things that people destroyed. But she wanted to help somehow. Her superpower certainly wouldn't help anyone.

She left the office and walked through the damp eggshell-colored corridor until she found a quiet corner. She willed herself visible and started to walk back toward the office.

Except the colors were still crayon-bold and segregated. She stepped in front of a window and looked for her reflection. Nothing.

She shut her eyes but saw right through her eyelids. She couldn't see her hands. If she couldn't see her hands, did anything she did with them matter? If nothing she did mattered, did she?

She locked her jaw against the terror. She'd turned this on, and she could turn it off. She'd done it hundreds of times. There was nothing to it.

Except it didn't work, and there was nothing to her.

_______

Caroline's phone said it was 12:24, and she was somewhere over Lake Erie, as near as she could figure. She was calling every half hour now, once to her mom's cell, once to her apartment. There was no answer at the apartment, and the cell number kept coming back with a recording saying that the customer was unavailable.

She had never flown for this long before. Cold had gotten into her joints and dried out her eyes. She was thirsty.

At twelve-thirty she dialed her mom's cell phone again, and again she got a recording. She dialed the apartment, and someone picked up the phone.

"Hello? Is calling?
Bella?"

Caroline's throat hurt when she spoke. "Arturo? Where's my mom?"

"Is you,
Bella?
You are safe?"

"Arturo, it's Caroline. From Madison. Where's my mom?"

"Caroline? No,
mia cara.
No." He was crying.

"Arturo." She wanted to scream at him, but if she started she wouldn't be able to stop. "Do you know where my mother is?"

"I don't know. I don't know." He said something in Italian, sounding angry. "I have to go, if she call. Call later, OK?"

"I'm on my way, OK? Everything's going to be fine, OK?"

"OK, yes. Call later." He hung up.

She tucked the phone away

From the start flying had been effortless. A thought, and she was airborne. She'd tried to go fast before, but never pushed herself. It was just fun.

Go faster,
she thought. She squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her fists and tensed until she shook, but when she opened her eyes she couldn't see any difference in her speed.

Go faster. Dammit.

_______

"Inebriated," said Charles. He leaned in toward Charlie, a mirror image with perfect hair. "You can't stay here," he said. "Wake up."

"Harsh." Chuck brushed Charles aside. "Listen," he said to Charlie. "You need to maintain, hear me? Deal with the noise in like, a healthy and proactive way. Cool?"

Charlie shook his head, sending his doubles spiraling out of sight. He opened his eyes but couldn't figure out where he was. The shadow patterns on the walls were unfamiliar, and he couldn't think of where he'd seen the tile before. He tried to turn his head to the left but couldn't, so he turned it the other way and realized he was lying under the toilet.

Something was knocking, and not his head, although he was sure he'd finished most of a bottle of Bacardi. It had dulled the torrent of raw emotions that had made his morning unbearable, but it hadn't blocked them out.

He took a deep breath and sat up, holding his ribs. The knocking was Mary Beth, at his door, and her mind opened to him unbidden. She wanted to come in and talk and share and maybe have sex. She knew they were broken up, but she was tense and horny and afraid.

Charlie didn't feel drunk until he dragged himself to his feet and tried to walk to the front door. He couldn't seem to point himself in any one direction, and as he passed through the hall and into the living room he walked into the doorjamb, hitting his ribs. He would have cried out, but the breath abandoned his lungs, and he just stood, waiting for the pain to subside.

The pounding continued, and Charlie wondered why Mary Beth didn't give up and go home. The answer was in her mind; she had called him about forty-five minutes ago. He had talked to her. He didn't remember it, but the conversation was all there. She had asked if she could come over, and he had told her it was fine. He took the deepest breath he could manage and lurched toward the door.

"Who is it?" he asked.

"Like you don't know? I've been knocking for ten minutes, where have you been?"

"Napping."

"Can I come in?"

Charlie laid his head on the door near the peephole, but didn't look through it for fear that the close focus would make him sick again. He could taste the remnants of his first visit to the toilet.

He reached for the dead bolt but dropped his hand again. "I don't think you should come in," he said.

"Why not?"

"I don't think it's a good idea right now."

"Are you drunk?"

Charlie nodded, his hair scrunching against the compressed wood of the door. "Yes I am."

"Charlie, let me help you."

"I don't need help," Charlie said. "I need a nap."

"Charlie, please. Is it the mindstream? People must be afraid. It has to be hard. Let me in so we can talk about it."

She was near tears. Charlie knew because she was thinking it, thinking she didn't want to cry outside his door, wondering if it would convince him to let her in if she did.

"Won't work," Charlie said.

"What won't work?"

"I want to be alone."

"We talked about this on the phone! I'm afraid too, Charlie. We need to talk about what we're going to do."

"We're not going to do nothing. I'm going to have a couple more drinks and sleep the rest of the week."

"Charlie, please! Caroline's gone, I don't know where Harriet is, and I don't want to be alone. Please."

"Go away."

"Charlie, I can break down this fucking door."

"I know how strong you are, Mary Beth."

"Oh, god. Not. . . Charlie, I don't want to hurt you."

He knew she was telling the truth. She was just afraid, in shock—like most of the country, and much of the world. He heard voices of fear, of rage, of crippling grief. Other voices echoed in his mind, the voices of those who had died, whose last moments he had lived with them, their terror jagged and crippling. Mary Beth was thinking about how many dead there might be. She was thinking about children who'd lost parents, and parents who'd lost children, and about her own parents and her brother, and war, and whether anyone she knew would be drafted and how glad she was that she couldn't be drafted and how guilty she felt about being glad. She could go over there. She could hurt them, and they couldn't hurt her. She was better than a bomb. She could find them and kill them, weed them out. Except she wouldn't know which ones were evil, not for sure, not without being able to read their minds. She never used to believe in evil. Now she wasn't sure. The word carried associations with it, supernatural, religious, political. Like love, it was applied to so many things that it hardly meant anything.