Monstress (11 page)

Later, when PE is over, Luc and I dress quickly, taking positions by our lockers. We keep an eye out for The Gas, who has just emerged from the showers. He comes closer and closer but pays us no mind. In regular street clothes we are anonymous, merely mortal men.

The Gas dries himself off and reaches into his locker for his deodorant. He shakes the can once, twice, and removes the cap. He raises his arm above his head, positioning the Right Guard at his armpit. Before he can spray, Luc and I vanish.

The Gas has no idea of the power that's about to befall him; no one ever does. First my enemies underestimate me; then I smash them.

“D
o you think it'll heal?” On this team Luc is the conscience.

“No one has ever died from a scorched armpit,” I tell him, stashing another swiped teacher's edition in my locker. He knows I speak the truth. I don't say things just to be reassuring.

The final bell rings. By tomorrow morning we'll hear snippets of talk here and there about the incident. Campus security will circulate in homerooms and PE classes, spouting the same refrain: if we work together, we can prevent this from happening again.

Feeble heroism from the crooked authorities. This is what they said last time and the time before that, and no one suspected our true identities then. “We ought to celebrate,” I decide. “Meet me at Kingpin Donuts before school tomorrow.”

Luc stares into my eyes as if he means to challenge me. “You said you would change the deodorant into spray paint, not a blowtorch,” he whispers. “You said you wouldn't do this anymore.”

“Silence.” I slam my locker shut. “We're done for today. Go home.”

A
fter school I check on my mother at the restaurant. I take my station on an adjacent rooftop, over what was once a tropical fish store. Four months ago the store was bombed—newspapers suspected a Filipino gang—and the next day I walked by to find half the storefront missing. I entered and walked among the ruins, the crunch of aquarium shards beneath my feet. Ruby- and sapphire- and emerald-colored fish lay lifeless on the ground, but still reflected the brilliant sun in each tiny scale. I stuffed as many as I could into the front pocket of my backpack and took them home, tucked them in the freezer behind the ice trays and TV dinners. Late at night I'd take them out and hold each one to the light; they were like life-giving stones, alien and cold. When Mom found them, their color had finally faded, and she flushed them down the toilet.

From up here I can see down into the restaurant, beyond the yellow-lettered window, which reads
CLARK'S PLACE
though the owners are a Vietnamese couple by the name of Ngoc-Tran. “They probably needed something catchier, for business purposes,” Luc said, explaining why they used the name. “Koreans do it all the time.”

So do superheroes.

The last of the afternoon regulars finally leaves, and my mother takes a cigarette break at a corner booth. She stares out at the street, taking greedy drags of a Marlboro. She exhales smoke against the window, and it dances before her face like some sort of phantom lover. I often catch my mother in these moments, a sad woman in pink, looking into nothing, waiting. “That's how I met your father,” she once confessed in a stupor. She was one of Manila Rosie's Beauties, the best dancing girls the Navy boys could find in the city. “And I was your daddy's favorite,” she said. After a two-week courtship he proposed to my mother, promising her citizenship in the USA. “United Stars of America” is what she called it. I have had longing dreams about this incarnation of my mother, seeing her asleep and afloat in outer space, the constellations re-forming themselves around her. I try to locate this part of her in myself, to isolate it from all the other stuff.

Then suddenly, from nowhere, a man in a uniform invades the picture. He sits down at her booth, lights my mother another cigarette, lights his own. They begin to talk. I don't need to hear what they're saying; I can read the words, frame by frame. My mother laughs, her hand over her breast, as if she is gasping for air. She is weakening.

Oh, stop! You're too much, do you know that?
she says.

He tosses his head back, his shoulders bouncing up and down, up and down, laughing at his own jokes with a villain's arrogance. Then he grabs my mother's hand and brings it close to his face. He is acquainting himself with my mother's biology, remembering the texture of her skin, her scent.
My little tropical gardenia,
he says to her. But I can read the thought bubbles above his head.
So easy
.
This bitch will be so easy.

I'm too far and high up above. There's no way to warn her in time, no hope for a last-minute rescue.

In 1976 the Green Lantern returns to the stars. This is a difficult time for him. Realizing that he is unable to wipe out evil on Earth and the societal ills of the era, he falters in his ability to wield the power ring. He is summoned to Oa, where the Guardians put him on trial and consider finding a replacement. The following dialogue is an excerpt from that trial:

“Perhaps Abin Sur was mistaken in selecting you, Hal Jordan.”

“Please, Guardians. Allow me to prove myself worthy of the ring. Allow me to
be your champion once more.”

The world jerks to a stop, and my pencil slips from my hands. I pick it up from the littered bus floor. “Brake more gently next time!” I shout to the bus driver. Baldie shoots me a look from his extended rearview mirror.

He does it again at the next stop. “Hey!” I rise from my seat. “I said brake more gently next time!” I walk toward the front. “Did you hear me?” Baldie ignores me and slams on the brakes at the light. I keep him in my eye as I fight gravity, but I lose my footing; I fall. But just as quickly I'm up again, and I almost manage to dig the point of my pencil into his arm, but two of his henchmen passengers force me off before I can make contact with his skin. I walk the rest of the way home against traffic so loud that it smothers the battle cries in my head.

W
hen I call, Luc's grandmother picks up the phone. I don't bother identifying myself; she always drops the receiver at the sound of my voice, and I have to wait two or three minutes until Luc finds out it's for him. To his grandmother, I'm The Filipino, the mutant friend who is too different for her to speak with, too weird to be allowed to come over.

Luc finally picks up, and I tell him what happened. “Just breathe for a sec,” he says, competing with loud kitchen noises in the background. “It'll be fine.”

“He had to be stopped,” I explain. “He's putting other lives at risk. Better the driver die than a busload of innocents.” If I have to be the one to do it, then I'll do it.

Luc understands the good of my intentions and says so. “But it's over now. You kept all those passengers safe.”

“Let's hope.”

Then Luc says he's sorry but he has to go, his mother needs to call his aunt about a Korean variety show on cable.

“No problemo,” I say, “and thanks again. Old chum.”

W
ith my mother at the restaurant, I have time to work in my lab. I can construct bombs and explosives, but these require the proper chemicals and materials, and I can use the bathroom for only so many hours in a day before my mother becomes suspicious. When she pounds on the door, asking what I am doing, I tell her nothing, to please give me five or ten minutes. She guesses that I am masturbating and tells me to stop. I tell her okay.

My favorite weapon is my slingshot. I stole it from a high-quality sporting goods store six months back: lightweight, aerodynamic, potential of elasticity twenty times as great as the average sling. How enraging, to think that a lesser comic like
Dennis the Menace
has reduced the slingshot to a mischief-making toy kept in a child's back pocket! People forget that David killed Goliath with a slingshot. With the proper ammunition, I could kill too.

But I am at work on what I hope will be the greatest addition to my arsenal.

Centuries ago Filipino warriors created the yo-yo as a weapon, emitting from their hands stone-heavy objects at the ends of twenty-foot-long ropes. They learned to hunt with it, to kill. Eventually the yo-yo immigrated to America. The story goes that a traveling salesman named Duncan saw one and introduced it to the country as a new hobby, a toy to pass the time.

I intend to get it back.

I will fuse together my native ingenuity with modern technology to create a weapon of the deadliest force. My yo-yo will be of marble, attached to string at least fifty feet long, so that even from rooftops I can stun my enemies far, far below. My father too had weapons. In the framed photo my mother keeps on her bureau, he holds a rifle in one hand, my mother in the other.

Suddenly I hear movement in the apartment. “Come out here!” my mother shouts, pounding on the bathroom door. “Come out and meet my new friend!”

“You're early! Hold on a sec!” I stash everything behind the toilet paper under the sink, hiding it next to the Windex and Lysol.

I open the door and find my mother standing before me, her head resting dreamily on a man's arm. “Honey,” she says, smiling at me, “this is Alex. He's our mailman. We met today at the restaurant.”

At least six feet tall, Lex towers over my mother and over me. He is well-postured, undoubtedly strong and agile. His uniform shows a badge of a bald eagle, and another badge tells me that he has proudly delivered U.S. mail for five years. “Hey, champ,” he says. He fixes his eyes, as blue and sharp as lasers, on me. Five milky-white fingers reach out.

Armed with addresses and ZIP codes, Lex can track down anyone, anywhere. If my mother and I were to escape, he could follow the trail of our forwarding address to find us. It's the extra sense, the instinct, of a hunter.

Villain.

But I accept his challenge and take his hand. I tilt my head down just a bit, so that my glasses slide down the bridge of my nose. “Nice to meet you,” I say. Lex does a double take at my nonmatching eyes. Already I have the upper hand.

M
y mother and Lex want privacy, so tonight I'm a bedroom shut-in. But I can still hear them laughing, dancing clumsily around the front room to old Motown love songs. Luckily, I have the ability to phase out any and all distractions, to teleport my thoughts, even my senses, elsewhere. I believe this is another of my mutant abilities, the active residue of my father's genetic imprint. It's the power he used on Mom and me.

I use that power now. I have homework to do.

I'm at that difficult point in my research where Hal Jordan's status as a hero comes into question. In
Green Lantern
#50, Volume 3, he stands before a jury of Guardians, on trial for attempting to alter history in order to save his destroyed city and its murdered inhabitants. “Surrender the ring!” they say in unison. “We command you!”

And then: Hal Jordan's face. His mask. His eyes. Then nothing. Only a frightening flash of green.

I turn the page slowly, knowing what comes next: an exploding sky, fallen emerald towers, the lifeless bodies of Guardians long thought to be immortal scattered among the debris. Hal Jordan takes their rings, all of them, and explodes into space, his eyes blank with madness and power. It's the face of a villain, the kind I've seen a million times before.

But consider what Hal Jordan has seen! Consider the burden he bears!
He got there too late
. He arrived just in time to witness his city's destruction by an enemy he couldn't defeat. You don't recover from that; you fix it. If I could rewrite the world, I'd do the same.

The following pages are panels of green: he wipes out a building in the background, KRAZAAKK!, one in the foreground, BLAZAAAM! He destroys another, and another. Then—CRASH!—something made of glass falls to the floor in the living room. I hear my mother and Lex whirling around to the music, bumping into bookshelves and walls, causing fragile things to fall. They laugh through loud kisses.

“Could you please be quiet out there?” They don't answer. “Would you be quiet, please?”

A
t 2:43 A.M. I wake from weird dreams. Dehydrated and dizzy, I get a glass of milk. On the way back to my room I peek through my mother's half-closed door. She's curled up in Lex's arms. Tangled sheets bind them together.

I walk toward them, silent in bare feet, invisible in the blue glow of the digital clock. I stand at the foot of the bed, watching their bodies rise and fall with every breath. If I wanted to, I could crawl in between them, slip my head into the circle of my mother's arms, and ram my knee into Lex's balls.

My mother mumbles something in her sleep, and slowly she turns away from Lex. I go to her. I can feel her pupils shift side to side beneath the skin of her eyelids, and I press down on them just enough until the panic in her head subsides. I move a strand of black hair away from her face, looping it slowly around my finger.

I float to the other side of the bed, over to Lex. In the moonlight he is even paler, and the stubble on his chin is like metallic bristles against my knuckles. I kneel next to him and set my head down beside his. I can see my mother's lipstick smeared along his neck, trailing down to the center of his chest. I imagine my mother kissing him, just inches above where the heart should be. I lay my palm there, just barely touching skin. I can feel the life beating inside him.

“What do you want from us?” I whisper to him. “Who sent you here?” But like my mother, he is drowned in sleep or just passed out.

So I test him. I tip my almost-empty glass, letting a tiny drop of milk fall onto his ear. The white dot slides from the outer edge and vanishes into the black hole of his ear canal. His neck and shoulders jerk, lightning-quick. Then he is still again.

“Assassin,” I say. I return to the kitchen to wash my glass.