Authors: Deborah Eisenberg

Twilight of the Superheroes (3 page)

BOOK: Twilight of the Superheroes

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Blip!
Charlie scatters again as Lucien’s attention wavers from her and the empty space belonging to her is seized by Miss Mueller.

Huh, but what do you know—death
suits
Miss Mueller! In life she was drab, but now she absolutely throbs with ghoulishness.
You there
,
Lucien
—the shriek echoes around the gallery—
What are the world’s three great religions?

Zen Buddhism, Jainism, and Sufism, he responds sulkily.

Naughty boy!
She cackles flirtatiously.
Bang bang, you’re dead!

THE HALF-LIFE OF PASSIVITY

Passivityman is taking a snooze, his standard response to stress, when the alarm rings. “I’ll check it out later, boss,” he murmurs.

“You’ll check it out
now,
please,” his girlfriend and superior, the beautiful Princess Prudence, tells him. “Just put on those grubby corduroys and get out there.”

“Aw, is it really
urgent
?” he asks.

“Don’t you get it?” she says. “I’ve been warning you, episode after episode! And now, from his appliance-rich house on the Moon, Captain Corporation has tightened his Net of Evil around the planet Earth, and he’s dragging it out of orbit! The U.S. Congress is selected by pharmaceutical companies, the state of Israel is run by Christian fundamentalists, the folks that haul toxic sludge manufacture cattle feed and process burgers, your sources of news and information are edited by a giant mouse, New York City and Christian fundamentalism are holdings of a family in Kuwait—
and all of it’s owned by Captain Corporation
!”

Passivityman rubs his eyes and yawns. “Well gosh, Pru, sure—but, like, what am I supposed to do about it?”

“I
don’t know,” Princess Prudence says. “It’s hardly my job to figure that out, is it? I mean,
you’re
the superhero. Just—Just—just go out and do something conspicuously lacking in monetary value! Invent some stinky, profit-proof gloop to pour on stuff. Or, I don’t know, whatever. But you’d better do
something
, before it’s too late.”

“Sounds like it’s totally too late already,” says Passivityman, reaching for a cigarette.

It was quite a while ago now that Passivityman seemed to throw in the towel. Nathaniel’s friends looked at the strip with him and scratched their heads.

“Hm, I don’t know, Nathaniel,” Amity said. “This episode is awfully complicated. I mean, Passivityman’s seeming kind of passive-
aggressive
, actually.”

“Can Passivityman not be bothered any longer to protect the abject with his greed-repelling Shield of Sloth?” Lyle asked.

“It’s not going to be revealed that Passivityman is a double agent, is it?” Madison said. “I mean, what about his undying struggle against corporate-model efficiency?”

“The truth is, I don’t really know what’s going on with him,” Nathaniel said. “I was thinking that maybe, unbeknownst to himself, he’s come under the thrall of his morally neutral, transgendering twin, Ambiguityperson.”

“Yeah,” Madison said. “But I mean, the problem here is that he’s just not dealing with the paradox of his own being—he seems kind of
intellectually
passive …”

Oh, dear. Poor Passivityman. He was a
tired
old crime fighter. Nathaniel sighed; it was hard to live the way his superhero lived—constantly vigilant against the premature conclusion, scrupulously rejecting the vulgar ambition, rigorously deferring judgment and action … and all for the greater good.

“Huh, well, I guess he’s sort of losing his superpowers,” Nathaniel said.

The others looked away uncomfortably.

“Oh, it’s probably just one of those slumps,” Amity said. “I’m sure he’ll be back to normal, soon.”

But by now, Nathaniel realizes, he’s all but stopped trying to work on
Passivityman.

ALL THIS

Thanks for pointing that out, Miss Mueller. Yes, humanity seems to have reverted by a millennium or so. Goon squads, purporting to represent each of the
world’s three great religions
—as they used to be called to fifth-graders, and perhaps still so misleadingly are—have deployed themselves all over the map, apparently in hopes of annihilating not only each other, but absolutely everyone, themselves excepted.

Just a few weeks earlier, Lucien was on a plane heading home from Los Angeles, and over the loudspeaker, the pilot requested that all Christians on board raise their hands. The next sickening instants provided more than enough time for conjecture as to who, exactly, was about to be killed—Christians or non-Christians. And then the pilot went on to ask those who had raised their hands to talk about their “faith” with the others.

Well, better him than Rose and Isaac; that would have been two sure heart attacks, right there. And anyhow, why should he be so snooty about religious fanaticism? Stalin managed to kill off over thirty million people in the name of no god at all, and not so very long ago.

At the moment when
all this
—as Lucien thinks of it—began, the moment when a few ordinary-looking men carrying box cutters sped past the limits of international negotiation and the frontiers of technology, turning his miraculous city into a nightmare and hurling the future into a void, Lucien was having his croissant and coffee.

The television was saying something. Lucien wheeled around and stared at it, then turned to look out the window; downtown, black smoke was already beginning to pollute the perfect, silken September morning. On the screen, the ruptured, flaming colossus was shedding veils of tiny black specks.

All circuits were busy, of course; the phone might as well have been a toy. Lucien was trembling as he shut the door of the apartment behind him. His face was wet. Outside, he saw that the sky in the north was still insanely blue.

THE AGE OF DROSS

Well, superpowers are probably a feature of youth, like Wendy’s ability to fly around with that creepy Peter Pan. Or maybe they belonged to a loftier period of history. It seems that Captain Corporation, his swaggering lieutenants and massed armies have actually neutralized Passivityman’s superpower. Passivityman’s astonishing reserves of resistance have vanished in the quicksand of Captain Corporation’s invisible account books. His rallying cry, No way, which once rang out over the land, demobilizing millions, has been altered by Captain Corporation’s co-optophone into, Whatever. And the superpowers of Nathaniel’s friends have been seriously challenged, too. Challenged, or … outgrown.

Amity’s superpower, her gift for exploiting systemic weaknesses,
had taken a terrible beating several years ago when the gold she spun out on the trading floor turned—just like everyone else’s—into straw. And subsequently, she plummeted from job to job, through layers of prestige, ending up behind a counter in a fancy department store where she sold overpriced skin-care products.

Now, of course, the sale of
Inner Beauty Secrets
—her humorous, lightly fictionalized account of her experiences there with her clients—indicates that perhaps her powers are regenerating. But time will tell.

Madison’s superpower, an obtuse, patrician equanimity in the face of damning fact, was violently and irremediably terminated one day when a girl arrived at the door asking for him.

“I’m your sister,” she told him. “Sorry,” Madison said, “I’ve never seen you before in my life.” “Hang on,” the girl said. “I’m just getting to that.”

For months afterward, Madison kept everyone awake late into the night repudiating all his former beliefs, his beautiful blue eyes whirling around and his hair standing on end as if he’d stuck his hand into a socket. He quit his lucrative PR job and denounced the firm’s practices in open letters to media watchdog groups (copies to his former boss). The many women who’d been running after him did a fast about-face.

Amity called him a “bitter skeptic”; he called Amity a “dupe.” The heated quarrel that followed has tapered off into an uneasy truce, at best.

Lyle’s superpower back in school was his spectacular level of aggrievedness and his ability to get anyone at all to feel sorry for him. But later, doing sound with a Paris-based dance group, Lyle met Jahan, who was doing the troupe’s lighting.

Jahan is (a) as handsome as a prince, (b) as charming, as
intelligent, as noble in his thoughts, feelings, and actions as a prince, and (c) a prince, at least of some attenuated sort. So no one feels sorry for Lyle at all any longer, and Lyle has apparently left the pleasures of even
self-
pity behind him without a second thought.

Awhile ago, though, Jahan was mistakenly arrested in some sort of sweep near Times Square, and when he was finally released from custody, he moved to London, and Lyle does nothing but pine, when he can’t be in London himself.

“Well, look on the bright side,” Nathaniel said. “At least you might get your superpower back.”

“You know, Nathaniel …” Lyle said. He looked at Nathaniel for a moment, and then an unfamiliar kindness modified his expression. He patted Nathaniel on the shoulder and went on his way.

Yikes. So much for Lyle’s superpower, obviously.

“It’s great that you got to live here for so long, though,” Russell is saying.

Nathaniel has the sudden sensation of his whole four years in New York twisting themselves into an arrow, speeding through the air and twanging into the dead center of this evening. All so hard to believe. “This is not happening,” he says.

“I think it might really
be
happening, though,” Lyle says.

“Fifty percent of respondents say that the event taking place is not occurring,” Madison says. “The other fifty percent remain undecided. Clearly, the truth lies somewhere in between.”

Soon it might be as if he and Lyle and Madison and Amity had never even lived here. Because this moment is joined to
all the other moments they’ve spent together here, and all of those moments are Right Now. But soon this moment and all the others will be cut off—in the past, not part of Right Now at all. Yeah, he and his three friends might all be going their separate ways, come to think of it, once they move out.

CONTINUITY

While the sirens screamed, Lucien had walked against the tide of dazed, smoke-smeared people, down into the fuming cauldron, and when he finally reached the police cordon, his feet aching, he wandered along it for hours, searching for Charlie’s nephew, among all the other people who were searching for family, friends, lovers.

Oh, that day! One kept waiting—as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real—the intended—future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month, waiting for that day to not have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened.

Most likely on the very mornings that first Rose and then Isaac had disembarked at Ellis Island, each clutching some remnant of the world they were never to see again, Lucien was being wheeled in his pram through the genteel world, a few miles uptown, of brownstones.

The city, more than his body, contained his life. His
life! The schools he had gone to as a child, the market where his mother had bought the groceries, the park where he had played with his classmates, the restaurants where he had courted Charlie, the various apartments they’d lived in, the apartments of their friends, the gallery, the newsstand on the corner, the dry cleaner’s … The things he did in the course of the day, year after year, the people he encountered.

A sticky layer of crematorium ash settled over the whole of Matsumoto’s neighborhood, even inside, behind closed windows, as thick in places as turf, and water was unavailable for a time. Nathaniel and his friends all stayed elsewhere, of course, for a few weeks. When it became possible, Lucien sent crews down to Matsumoto’s loft to scour the place and restore the art.

FAREWELL

A memorandum hangs in Mr. Matsumoto’s lobby, that appeared several months ago when freakish blackouts were rolling over the city.

Emergency Tips from the Management urges residents to assemble a Go Bag, in the event of an evacuation, as well as an In-Home Survival Kit. Among items to include: a large amount of cash in small denominations, water and nonperishable foods such as granola bars, a wind-up radio, warm clothing and sturdy walking shoes, unscented bleach and an eyedropper for purifying water, plastic sheeting and duct tape, a whistle, a box cutter.

Also recommended is a Household Disaster Plan and the practicing of emergency drills.

A hand-lettered sign next to the elevator says THINK TWICE.

Twenty-eight years old, no superhero, a job that just
might
lead down to a career in underground architecture, a vanishing apartment, a menacing elevator … Maybe he should view Mr. Matsumoto’s return as an opportunity, and regroup. Maybe he should
do
something—take matters in hand. Maybe he should go try to find Delphine, for example.

But how? He hasn’t heard from her, and she could be anywhere now; she’d mentioned Bucharest, she’d mentioned Havana, she’d mentioned Shanghai, she’d mentioned Istanbul …

He’d met her at one of his uncle’s parties. There was the usual huge roomful of people wearing strangely pleated black clothes, like the garments of a somber devotional sect, and there she was in electric-blue taffeta, amazingly tall and narrow, lazy and nervous, like an electric bluebell.

She favored men nearly twice Nathaniel’s age and millions of times richer, but for a while she let Nathaniel come over to her apartment and play her his favorite CDs. They drank perfumey infusions from chipped porcelain cups, or vodka. Delphine could become thrillingly drunk, and she smoked, letting long columns of ash form on her tarry, unfiltered cigarettes. One night, when he lost his keys, she let him come over and sleep in her bed while she went out, and when the sky fell, she actually let him sleep on her floor for a week.

Her apartment was filled with puffy, silky little sofas, and old, damaged mirrors and tarnished candlesticks, and tall vases filled with slightly wilting flowers. It smelled like powder and tea and cigarettes and her Abyssinian cats, which prowled the savannas of the white, long-haired rugs or posed on the marble mantelpiece.

Delphine’s father was Armenian and he lived in Paris, which according to Delphine was a bore. Her mother was Chilean. Delphine’s English had been acquired at a boarding school in Kent for dull-witted rich girls and castaways, like herself, from everywhere.

She spoke many languages, she was self-possessed and beautiful and fascinating. She could have gone to live anywhere. And she had come, like Nathaniel, to New York.

“But look at it now,” she’d raged. Washington was dropping bombs on Afghanistan and then Iraq, and every few weeks there was a flurry of alerts in kindergarten colors indicating the likelihood of terrorist attacks: yellow, orange, red,
duck
!

“Do you know how I get the news here?” Delphine said. “From your newspapers? Please! From your newspapers I learn what restaurant has opened. News I learn in taxis, from the drivers. And how do they get it? From their friends and relatives back home, in Pakistan or Uzbekistan or Somalia. The drivers sit around at the airport, swapping information, and they can tell you
anything
. But do you ask? Or sometimes I talk to my friends in Europe. Do you know what they’re saying about you over there?”

“Please don’t say ‘you,’ Delphine,” he had said faintly.

“Oh, yes, here it’s not like stuffy old Europe, where everything is stifled by tradition and trauma. Here you’re able to speak freely, within reason, of course, and isn’t it wonderful that you all happen to want to say exactly what they want you to say? Do you know how many people you’re killing over there? No, how would you? Good, just keep your eyes closed, panic, don’t ask any questions, and you can speak freely about whatever you like. And if you have any suspicious-looking neighbors, be sure to tell the police. You had everything here, everything, and you threw it all away in one second.”

She was so beautiful; he’d gazed at her as if he were already remembering her. “Please don’t say ‘you,’” he murmured again.

“Poor Nathaniel,” she said. “This place is nothing now but a small-minded, mean-spirited provincial town.”

BOOK: Twilight of the Superheroes

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